seriously . . .

There’s a good piece by Charles McGrath in today’s Times about genre fiction and quality. The call out quote – “Today’s novelists feel as if they have to choose either pedestal or plot.”

Referring to the Brady Affair, he says . . .

Thrillers by and large do much better than literary novels, and though the title “Bleedout” turns out to refer, disappointingly, to kosher butchery rather than human carnage, it has done pretty well, selling some 50,000 copies in Britain alone since it came out in 2005. An author seeking damages would do better, one would have thought, by claiming to have become so addled that she had decided to forsake a certain payday for the vain hope of literary success. In that case the Times headline might read: “Fumes Float Author’s Fantasy.”

And on the Banville doppelganger:

Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror-meister, have complained about a double standard — a conspiracy, in effect — among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously.

But if there is a conspiracy it’s one that authors — highbrow authors, anyway — are sometimes complicit in, frequently adopting pseudonyms when they want to dabble in, say, crime writing. The most curious case recently is that of John Banville, the Booker Prize winner who has published two highly regarded mysteries under the name Benjamin Black but hasn’t taken any pains to keep his true identity a secret. For a Web site, he has even interviewed his alter ego. Perhaps not so surprising is that what makes the two Black novels, “Christine Falls” and “The Silver Swan,” so good — their atmospheric descriptive writing — is precisely Mr. Banville’s great strength, while Benjamin Black, whose third novel is currently being serialized in The New York Times Magazine, is still learning some of the ropes when it comes to plot and suspense.

a load of old cobblers!

CORRECTION: the load of cobblers, according to the author involved, was hauled by a writer at The Times (London) who invented the fumes-make-you-lowbrow idea. According to Joan Brady:

“That’s the pure invention of the Times. They have decided that this effete literary woman has become so stupid that she can no longer write boring literary fiction and writes poorly selling thrillers instead. My mental faculties haven’t deteriorated. And anyway, what an insult it would be to thriller writers to suggest that you need to be stupid to write them. It seems to me so irritating that you would denigrate a remarkable genre where much of the best writing is done. I’m a great admirer of writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow.”

Now, when we were last here…

There’s an excellent essay in The Guardian by Mark Lawson riffing on the peculiar case of a writer who won a largish settlement when she claimed fumes from a neighboring shoe factory caused her to write crime fiction instead of serious literature. (I’d already seen this News of the Weird at Sarah Wienman’s blog – apparently the injured party is writing a sequel to the book that was entered in evidence of her degraded ability to concentrate; ah dear, she’s a the glue again.) Lawson makes the case that the distinctions between genres are specious – which, to my mind, is a more convincing argument than “crime fiction is way better than snobby littrachure, and it’s more popular, too, nanner nanner nanner.”

So, in the course of a compensation dispute, we have medical and legal support for the traditional libel against crime writing: that it is done by authors whose brains aren’t fully working. Perhaps, in the way that the dim in showbusiness became known as airheads, leading crime and thriller writers should in future be designated fumeheads.

And yet this is a strange time for the claim to be made, because the boundaries between the two sides of fiction – which we can loosely call literary and populist, although all of the terminology used in these debates tends to be pejorative – is visibly breaking down. . . .

So the reason for the survival of these prejudices can only be that whenever populist fiction makes an attempt to drag itself through the doors of the academy, it’s held back by the dead, reeking weight of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code manacled to the ankles. But it makes no sense to discredit the best of a genre by invoking the worst: no television reviewer argues that Newsnight is rubbish simply because America’s Next Top Model stinks.

The comments that follow are great fun, too.