Assignment for 11/9 - Guru Montaigne

On Genre in Fiction

There is a certain air of distaste among a segment of the reading population for genre fiction. Especially for those types which do their best to entertain while eschewing most turns of phrase that make high fiction so entertaining at times.

I am a malleable reader. I want to to be entertained and I want what I’m reading to be entertaining, hopefully at the same time. Is this such an impossible request? A scanning of recent titles in my local Barnes & Noble suggests that I am not going to have much luck. There are deaths in families, the search for love and meaning in everyday life after an ugly divorce, a missing journal of Virginia Woolf, a troubled child with access to guns, young women sold into indentured servitude, and a man trapped on a island with insane people, mind-altering chemicals and a chip on his shoulder. And that is just one shelf.

While some of these are going to be written better than others, there is a common thread that runs through them all: misery. The themes are misery, loss, and epiphany through an outside influence. Perhaps it will be in the form of a handsome man, a piece of paper, or a mental patient, perhaps there will be enough variation on the theme so that the book will have won a prize of some sort, or that it will be sporting the movie tie-in paperback cover. But this will not detract from how nonsensical it is that book after book is put out about how miserable fictional people are, when it is the books that spend their narrative time cashing in on happy endings that make the most money.

In a thriller, the kidnapper will be captured and the child found alive. In a romance novel, the guy will get the girl. In a teen fiction novel about a girl torn between her love of a vampire and her love of tanning on the beach, stakings will not be mentioned. The common theme in all of these is that though misery occurs, it does not need to be prescriptive. These are the novels that sell best, to the dismay of publishers and authors everywhere.

It is possible to meld these those types. How much better would it be if the books about vampires, the books about fictional terrorists, the books about relationships between consenting adults, were written well? Would they sell? Would they act as cross-overs? It is only a matter of time before some enterprising young author decides to try it, as so few have done in the age of “genre” fiction, and is given that most supreme of accolades: No one knowing where to shelve your book in Barnes & Noble. Dreams, idle dreams, I know not what they mean.