A Reader’s Manifesto
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

I am saying however that a novel’s first job is to tell a story. Its kind of like building a house. You need a good foundation first. You don’t want to live in the foundation, but without the foundation, no matter how good the rest of the house is, it will ultimately fail as a house.

Ultimately, a good story does not mean sacrificing the literary virtues that Ms. Chung and others wax poetic about. Indeed at the end of Ms. Chung’s article she gives a list of books that she believes provide both.

I want books that will both entertain and enlighten me… but if it doesn’t do the former, don’t expect me to stick around in case it might do the latter.

A novel exists purely to entertain. Ultimately it stands or falls by its entertainment value. Once the literati and their tame academics stop pretending that reading fiction makes them better people, and admit that they read it for fun, then this silly and fatuous debate will be over. People who _really_ want to ‘learn something’ read non-fiction, not novels.

Actually, I think authors who focus too much on story often write the most trivial kind of fiction. A good novel, literary or genre, requires a balance of plot, character, theme, language, ect. Some authors are deficient in some areas, e.g, Dreiser had an awful prose style, but was still wrote important novels; modern authors often make the mistake of dropping everything but the action. If the story were the only reason to read novels, then people should probably just watch movies instead, because a good book will do more.

LITerature on the other hand could very well explore interactivity, hypertext, and other aspects of ebooks that simply do not exist on p-books.

About the only thing that Ms. Chung said that was accurate about genre fiction is that there are genre conventions; though if she ever actually bothered to read any genre fiction, she might find that they are often not that strict. Certainly many science fiction novels have not had happy endings, or ignored the complexity of the world.

I think Ms. Chung might have had a point if she tried to make the division between escapist fiction and more serious fiction. But even there, it ignores the fact that sometimes people need escape, or even really serious literature and novels can be escapist for some (Ever hear a literature teacher wax poetically about the beauty of the language in a particular work, don’t doubt for a second that they are getting lost in the language as completely as others get lost in plot).

My particular belief is that part of the problem that “literary” fiction has had for a century now, is that some authors have forgotten that the primary reason people read novels is to be told stories. If a novel fails to tell a good story, I don’t care what other virtues it has, to me, it has failed as a novel.

It is hard to praise literary fiction over genre fiction because literary fiction is really a genre in itself with its own conventions and formulas. Bad literary fiction is just as bad as bad genre fiction, only in the first you’ll find a divorced middle-aged woman taking to her mother about the meaning of life and marriage, and in the second you’ll find a Kung-Fu expert/Weapons Master with a supermodel girlfriend taking on the Mob for a mystery, or space aliens for science fiction, or zombies for horror.

Good genre fiction like THE BIG SLEEP will better than bad genre fiction and good literary fiction like Faulkner or Hemingway will be better than bad genre fiction.

I saw that crybaby wail yesterday. Basically it all boils down to, “Why isn’t my treacly, wordy, and boring book not selling?”

Read the Classics. Read Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, et al. Do you snore? No! And I’d bet money if those books were published today, they’d be looked down on as “genre” fiction.

Chandler was ignored and disdained in his day. All the prizes and big money and recognition went to others. Yet all those others are today OUT OF PRINT. Chandler is recognized, too late for him, as genius.

All the boring wordy treacle of today will be forgotten too. They’ll be at the end of the Long Tail, their electrons gathering mold. Good riddance.