Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Breaking: Contemporary Fiction is Awful

"Let’s face it: Literary fiction is fucking boring. It really is. It’s a genre as replete with clichés as any. And when you’re as deeply immersed in it as many of us are, it’s all too easy to stop noticing the clichés. They no longer stand out. They’re just What People Do. And so, we do them. If a writer of literary fiction wants to be great, she needs to poke her head up out of the echo chamber every now and then and absorb the genuine peculiarity of human striving. And that means reading stuff that is not literary fiction, and, sometimes, not reading at all." -- J. Robert Lennon for Salon 
I didn't know where to begin, so I went with this, the particularly inflammatory last paragraph of J. Robert Lennon's screed against modern fiction that's quickly becoming an internet meme among writerly types. I don't disagree that there's dreck in every genre, but given literary or contemporary fiction is so broadly defined, I wish he had provided some examples. Is Jodi Picoult lit fic? I think her books are fairly formulaic. What about Nick Hornby or Tom Perotta? Neither push any boundaries, but I have enjoyed both at various points in my life. I like Jonathan Franzen, too, much to the dismay of my feminist contemporaries (yes, he has massive lady issues). I think his work is important, even while "importance" is becoming increasingly meaningless. Whether any of these writers are considered literary enough is largely subjective.

What really bothers me is that I wasn't all that shocked by this recent rant. A disdain of literary fiction --however you define that -- can be worn as a badge of cool, a sort of "badassery." At the very least, it's a good way to convince genre fans -- and yourself -- you're not an elitist snob, and the comments bear that out. Question the canon, that's fine. Question the idea of even having a canon, but declaring that an entire swath of literature "sucks" without providing some sort of clarification is just bad form.

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