"Genre kick" and Great Novels

On Friday night I attended a reading/Q&A at the NYU Creative Writers' house with Nathan Englander reading from The Ministry of Special Cases, then being interviewed by Darin Strauss.  In introducing Nathan, Mr. Strauss gave a short speech about contemporary fiction and "big ideas," talking about how writers like Updike and DeLillo ("back in the day") wrote novels of a certain gravity, dealing with big cultural issues, while much of contemporary fiction seems largely concerned with the mundane.  Now, it takes a bit of a stretch to agree entirely with a statement like that, but the idea does make a certain sense; aside from the plethora of strong 9/11 novels (Messud's The Emperor's Children, McInerney's The Good Life, even DeLillo's Falling Man, etc), and of course things like Denis Johnson's epic Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke, it does sometimes feel like contemporary novelists are working on a rather small canvas. 

Of course, this often does not include speculative fiction.  In my experience, genre fiction more often engages with larger concerns -- albeit typically veiled in metaphor; for example, the use of fantastic disappearances to illustrate the unmoored culture of Russia in the early 1990s in Ekaterina Sedia's recent The Secret History of Moscow -- than fiction's more "literary" examples (i.e. the famous stereotype of the professor-sleeping-with-his-students smart-people-midlife-crisis short story).  However, in concluding his introduction to Englander, Strauss gave a list of writers who he thinks may end up writing the big novels of their generation; including Englander, obviously, but also naming (among others) Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, if only the last one could "get off his genre kick."

I won't even talk about the idea of mentioning Lethem and Chabon and singling out the latter for his relationship with genre, as both have written wonderful science fiction novels.  Rather, the idea that Chabon could be excluded from a group of writers doing serious work simply because he wrote an alternate-history detective story (last year's The Yiddish Policeman's Union) is a very troubling one.  One could actually make the argument that Chabon's straight literary work, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, has been among his most minor writing, and only when he forges a relationship with genre in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and follows it up with The Final Solution and wonderful stuff like The Yiddish Policeman's Union and even Gentlemen of the Road is he actually working with the big boys, writing stuff that addresses Big Issues (World War II, the history and culture of America's Jewish population, etc) and solidly negotiates a place for himself in American letters.

I love Darin Strauss's writing, and he gives fantastic interviews (I've heard him speak with Peter Carey, Amy Hempel, and now Nathan Englander), but I just felt it necessary to address this particular comment that almost threw me out of the event, confused as I was by its implications.  Thankfully, an audience member who "reads a lot of science fiction" ended up confronting both writers (during the Q&A) about plot, the place of story in fiction, and the "contract of realism," a writer's tenuous relationship with "truth" and how much we are allowed to invent when constructing a fictional world, as in historical fiction, which both of Strauss's novels have been.  These are important issues, and they are issues that genre writers deal with just as much as the writers that Strauss admires.  It's important to remember that we're all working with the same tools, and we're all trying to find the best way to tell the stories that are important to us, but certain tools are not necessarily the best ones for everyone; just as I might be able to build a wonderful mud hut with just a garden shovel and a spatula, my neighbor might work better with a pitchfork and an empty wine bottle, and that's okay.  We both end up with awesome mud huts.

Comments

[Terry Finley]

Do you think most writers write intentionally for some genre?

[Richard]

Yes. But you provided the "most"; there are probably some who are entirely unaware of genre divides (or genre "territories," which sounds less restrictive), but the business of reading brings about a general understanding of what the various genres look like, and since most writers are also readers, I think there is always an awareness of the tradition to which one is attempting to contribute. I totally think that Chabon was consciously writing a genre novel with The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and I think his subsequent membership in SFWA (and his endless comment about the value of genre) confirms this as highly probable.