Defining Literary Fiction

I am simultaneously obsessed with categories and reluctant to categorize. In grad school, I studied several structuralist theorists and took great pleasure in their grand schemes of classification, even though I didn’t buy into any of them. When I moved on to post-structuralist theorists, I tried to understand their work by constructing the very sorts of typologies that they resisted in every line. Yes, I see the irony in that. Yes, my supervisor made fun of me. But I still think that my Foucault chart was a thing of beauty.

In the literary realm, this fascination most often manifests in my musings on genre, some of which you will find in the archives of this blog: What distinguishes a linked short story collection from a novel? What are the essential differences in form between short stories and novels? Is Christian Bök’s Eunoia a work of poetry or prose?

When it comes to genres defined not just by form but also by content (crime fiction, romance, chick-lit and so on) and their relationship to literary fiction things get very muddy for me. I’ve always resisted the idea that literary fiction is just another genre. If literary fiction is a genre in its own right, what are the formal conventions that unite the works that fall within it? It seems to me to be altogether too broad and amorphous a category to constitute a coherent genre. And, of course, if it’s just another genre, then questions arise about the boundaries between it and other genres. What makes a book fall into the literary fiction category rather than another genre? How can a book be both if we’re dealing with two different genres with distinct formal conventions associated with each?

Yet I continue to use the term “literary fiction,” usually just as a matter of convenience, but sometimes in ways that get me into trouble. For example, I recently praised Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories as a bona fide crossover hit, succeeding brilliantly as both literary fiction and as a mystery novel. A commenter asked me why I classed the book as “literary fiction.” Did I simply mean that it was a well-written mystery novel? Well, no, that’s not what I intended to say. You’ll note that I said nothing about “transcending the genre” as I’m well aware that there’s plenty of excellent writing within the genre and I don’t believe that transcendence is required. But then what did I mean? I found myself scrambling to describe which characteristics of the novel marked it as literary fiction. There I was, stuck in the very quagmire I describe above, trying to define “literary fiction” as if it’s a distinct genre when I don’t actually believe that it is one.

At the Litblog Co-op today, Ed Falco defines “literary fiction” in a way that gets around many of my concerns about the term. I’ve strung together a few excerpts from his post below:

I certainly aspire to being a writer of literary fiction. That answer was easy for me, because I think all good writers, all really good writers, are literary writers. In David Milofsky’s otherwise generous piece on the Litblog Coop, titled “Bloggers nudge literary fiction to the presses,” he defines literary fiction as “those books that champion style above content.” Since I’ve heard so many good and complimentary things about David Milofsky, I’m going to guess that was just a hurried definition tossed off for a newspaper piece––because it’s just not right. […] Purple writing emphasizes style over content. In good writing, in literary writing, style and content happen simultaneously. I’m comfortable calling any fiction that struggles to honestly explore its subjects literary. It goes without saying, doesn’t it, that a book can be a huge commercial success and still be literary? […] The opposite of literary fiction is not commercial fiction, but bad commercial fiction… […] I think we need to guard against literary writing being defined as esoteric or effete. Literary writing, for me, is just another way of saying serious writing, of saying good writing.

Click here to read the whole post.

I like it. I appreciate the way Falco dispenses with the idea that literary and commercial fiction are mutually exclusive categories. And I appreciate the way his definition steers clear of elitist distinctions between literary fiction and various categories of genre fiction. At the same time, I’m not entirely convinced. I can’t help but think that it’s a bit more complicated than this, that even if there isn’t a clear set of formal conventions associated with literary fiction, there are nevertheless certain expectations that readers bring to it that have to do with something other than the quality of the writing. I’d love to hear other views on this as I continue to mull it over.

Boosting Small Presses

In my New Year’s Resolutions post, I resolved to devote more blog space to discussion of Canadian small press books, and also to better acquaint myself with small presses outside of Canada and to search out and read more of their books. In the past month, I’ve assembled and begun working my way through a diverse and tantalizing array of small press books in furtherance of these goals. I’ll soon begin posting reviews.

In the meantime, I’ve been contemplating what it is that made a small press booster out of me. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1. I grew up in Saskatchewan where a couple of fine small presses were, and are, an integral part of the literary landscape. There, as everywhere else, big press titles dominated the shelves of the bookstores and libraries, and the book pages of the newspapers. But they were distant entities. The local small presses were part of the community. Indeed, they played a central role in the building of a literary community where I lived. Thanks to them, I’ve always believed that I could create a literary life wherever I am rather than having to escape to some glamorous place to find one. It was the local small presses that got me reading contemporary Canadian fiction and poetry early on.

2. I’m an avid reader and writer of short stories and short stories are primarily the preserve of small presses. There are a few notable exceptions of course. But, for the most part, I credit the small presses, together with the little magazines, for keeping short stories alive. Without them, my reading life would be much poorer, and my own stories might never have seen the light of day.

3. My reading tastes are eclectic. I can appreciate a well-wrought realist narrative, a clever mystery, a magical children’s adventure. All of these things I can get from the big presses. But when I’m after something new, something different, something daring, I look to the small presses. To be sure, sometimes the big presses venture into this territory, but usually with an author that a small press took a chance on first. And of course the small presses also expand the range of well-wrought realist narratives, clever mysteries, and magical children’s adventures available to me.

I’ve followed the example of That Girl Who Writes Stuff and added a list of some of my favourite small presses to my sidebar. Click on the links and check out their catalogues. It’s a mostly Canadian list at present as those are the ones that I know best. Please share your favourites as well. I want to know about more fabulous small presses whose catalogues I should be checking out, and individual small press titles that I should be seeking out to read and review.

Short Stories and Sound Bites

As an avid reader and writer of short stories, I have puzzled over and lamented the apparent decline in popularity of this literary form. Surely, I have often thought, short stories are a perfect match for the modern world. If we lack time and possess limited attention spans, if we’ve grown acclimatised to fast moving media and ever briefer sound bites, shouldn’t our literary tastes run to short stories rather than vast, sprawling novels? Apparently not. We’re told that short stories don’t sell, and bestselling novels grow ever longer. Perhaps, I think hopefully, it’s not that short stories don’t sell, but rather that publishers think they don’t sell and therefore don’t publish or promote them with the vigour that would enable them to rival novels in the marketplace. Then again, perhaps not.

In an article on short stories titled “Brief Encounters,” William Boyd takes a tack that upends my argument. He suggests that the short story is undergoing something of a revival, and not because it suits a sound bite culture but because it is antithetical to it:

However, I feel that there may be a different reason why readers of the short story have never really gone away. And this has nothing to do with its length. The well-written short story is not suited to the soundbite culture: it's too dense, its effects are too complex for easy digestion. If the zeitgeist is influencing this taste then it may be a sign that we are coming to prefer our art in highly concentrated form. Like a multivitamin pill, a good short story can provide a compressed blast of discerning, intellectual pleasure, one no less intense than that delivered by a novel, despite the shorter duration of its consumption. To read a short story like Joyce's "The Dead", Chekhov's "In the Ravine" or Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place", is to be confronted by a fully achieved, complex work of art, either profound or disturbing or darkly comic or moving. The fact that it takes 15 minutes to read is neither here nor there: the potency is manifest and emphatic. Perhaps that's what we are looking for, as readers, more and more these days - a sort of aesthetic daisycutter bomb of a reading experience that does its work with ruthless brevity and concentrated dispatch.

I have to concede that the argument I articulated above is grounded more in wistful hope than in sound analysis, and I find Boyd’s contrary view utterly convincing. Indeed, he has put his finger on exactly what it is that I love about good short stories: “a compressed blast of discerning, intellectual pleasure” that I can experience in the space of a subway ride on my way to work in the morning.

Boyd’s article was published more than a year ago in the Guardian, but I only just discovered it this morning thanks to a link provided on Catch & Release. At the centre of the piece is a typology of short stories that Boyd has created:

I decided it might be worth trying to categorise the short story in a bit more detail, to try to classify its multifarious forms. Looking at collections by other writers, I gradually came to the conclusion that there are seven types of short story, and that within these seven categories almost every kind of short story can be accounted for. Some of them will overlap, or one category will borrow from a seemingly unrelated type, but these denominations seem, by and large, to subsume all the species of the genus. In this diversity we may begin to see what short stories have in common.

Boyd’s seven categories of stories are unconventional and thought-provoking ones that, despite the count of seven, bear no relation to the seven basic plots that one so often hears discussed. They're well worth a look. You can find the article here, and the comments on Catch & Release that alerted me to its existence here.

Your World or Mine?

Arthur Krystal on the effect of the passage of years on the reading experience:

As children, we crossed wide-eyed and trusting into the writer’s world; as adults, we invite the writer into ours and hold him accountable for how he behaves there.

From Arthur Krystal, "Kid Roberts and Me: The Leather Pushers, by H.C. Witwer" in Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) at 68.

Some Baffling Inner Necessity

David Samuels on becoming a reader:

No one becomes a reader except in answer to some baffling inner necessity, of the kind that leads people to turn cartwheels outside the 7-Eleven, jump headlong through a plate-glass window, join the circus, or buy a low-end foreign car when the nearest appropriate auto-repair shop is fifty miles away. With these dramatic examples fresh in your mind, you’ll probably require only a small amount of additional convincing that my little theory -- based on years of painful experience -- is true. Reading requires a loner’s temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead.

From David Samuels, "Marginal Notes on the Inner Lives of People with Cluttered Apartments in the East Seventies: Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger" in Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) at 3.

Sidetracked into Literature

Shakin’ All Over, a documentary about the Canadian music scene of the mid-60s and early-70s, debuted on CBC television on Monday night. It’s based on Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of Canadian Sound, a book by Nicholas Jennings. Before the Gold Rush is an excellent book, but the documentary version adds a whole new dimension to the project. Shakin’ All Over features a lot of fabulous archival footage, much of which has never been broadcast before, interwoven with more than sixty contemporary interviews, some with figures from the time reflecting back on their experience, others with a new generation of Canadian musicians paying eloquent tribute to those that went before and to their enduring influence.

Shakin’ All Over features all of the Canadian legends that you would expect to find at its centre: Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Band, Leonard Cohen. But it also devotes considerable time to lesser known or at least more quickly forgotten musicians and bands. The interesting thing to me about the latter category was that even when I didn’t recognize the names and faces, I usually recognized the songs. For example, I didn’t recall the band name “Crowbar,” but their song “Oh What a Feeling” was immediately familiar.

I don’t know if or when Shakin’ All Over will be rebroadcast in Canada or broadcast anywhere else in the world. But apparently a DVD version is in the works, so it should be available to one and all eventually. It’s certainly worth seeking out. In the meantime, let me leave you with one of my favourite archival clips:

Leonard Cohen: “I always thought of myself as a singer and kind of got sidetracked into literature.”

Interviewer: “Can you sing?”

[Cohen smiles and looks down as if concealing a laugh.]

Cohen: “Well, I think that if the song is really good and it's your own, what comes out is music.”

Reading and Rereading

In the foreword to Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, Anne Fadiman reflects on the differences between reading and rereading:

And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were performing simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it…

This passage flows from Fadiman’s experience of reading a childhood favourite, C.S. Lewis’s A Horse and His Boy, to her eight-year-old son Henry, and the distinctions that she draws here don’t necessarily hold for rereading other sorts of books in other contexts. Nevertheless, the passage got me thinking about my own rereadings and wondering about those of others.

Are you a rereader? Which books do you reread? If you reread childhood favourites, which ones hold up in adulthood for you? Are there books that meant a lot to you once that you’re reluctant to revisit for fear of spoiling the magic?

Meeting Garbage Head at the Gladstone Hotel

The other night I went to a reading at the Gladstone Hotel. The place is looking very swish now that the renovations are complete. Lovely as it is, I can't help but miss the seediness of the old, run-down Gladstone. The two writers on the bill were Richard Truhlar and Christopher Willard.

I was there to see Truhlar. A couple of people have been talking him up to me lately, so when I saw his name in the events listing in the paper I decided to investigate. Alas, I arrived late and he read first. I only caught the tail end of his reading from The Hollow and other fictions (Mercury Press, 2005), and I couldn’t pick up the thread of it sufficiently to form an impression. So, I'll be checking out his work on the page without benefit of a live preview.

Happily, I did get to hear the whole of Christopher Willard’s reading. I didn’t know anything about his work beforehand, but I was immediately taken with his novel Garbage Head (Vehicule Press, 2005). Here’s an excerpt from the back cover that conveys the gist of it, insofar as that's possible:

As technology erases the lines between reality and virtual reality, a boy nicknamed Garbage Head develops the ability to say what those on TV and radio will say before they say it. An appearance on The Fabulous Gigi Fandone Show rockets him to fame, but his troubles begin when he uses his ability to predict the numbers of a multi-million dollar lotto. The FBI deems him to be a national threat and Garbage Head is arrested and taken to a president more consumed with watching reruns and learning street slang than in leading a nation.

It’s a full-length novel that is composed of mostly one-line paragraphs. These staccato paragraphs mirror the relentlessness of media sound bites and simultaneously lampoon the celebrity-obsessed culture that breeds them. In the passages that Willard read, the novel came off as bitingly funny and very smart. I snapped up a copy at the book table and I look forward to reading Garbage Head in its entirety.

Raising a Glass to Robert Burns

It’s Robert Burns day -- the Scottish bard’s 247th birthday to be precise, and Scots the world over will be dining on haggis, neeps, and tatties in his honour. I have no such meal planned, but I will raise a glass to him. After all, he was every bit as eloquent in praise of his favourite beverages as he was on the subject of haggis. See, for example, these excerpts from a poem titled "Scotch Drink:"

O thou, my muse! guid auld Scotch drink!
Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp an' wink,
To sing thy name!

[...]

O Whisky! soul o' plays and pranks!
Accept a bardie's gratfu' thanks!
When wanting thee, what tuneless cranks
Are my poor verses!
Thou comes-they rattle in their ranks,
At ither's a-s!

It goes on like that for twenty-one verses. Clearly, the man loved his whisky.

Here’s an excerpt from another of my favourites:

The gloomy night is gath'ring fast,
Loud roars the wild, inconstant blast,
Yon murky cloud is foul with rain,
I see it driving o'er the plain;
The hunter now has left the moor.
The scatt'red coveys meet secure;
While here I wander, prest with care,
Along the lonely banks of Ayr.

No one does wild Scottish weather better than Burns.

For a short biography, click here. To read his poems, click here. Finally, to listen in on a traditional Burns supper, click here.

Happy Robert Burns Day.

The Fictitious Reading Series

Literary types in the Toronto area, mark Sunday, January 29th on your calendar. That evening, the second instalment of The Fictitious Reading Series will take place at 7:30 pm in the gallery space above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library (483 Church Street). The featured writers are Jason Anderson and Alexandra Leggat. Both will read from recent work, and the evening will conclude with an informal onstage interview conducted by me.

Jason Anderson’s first novel, Showbiz, was recently published by ECW Press. Anderson was inspired by the true story of Vaughn Meader, a JFK impersonator whose career ended abruptly with the President’s assassination. In Showbiz, Anderson spins this tale into an alternate fictional universe, “a dark comedy about the cost of fame, the story of a man who became a walking punchline and a writer who’ll do anything to hear the rest of the joke.” In a review in Quill & Quire, Adair Brouwer described the novel as “nervy, funny … as flash as a pinkie ring and as sharp as a sharkskin suit.”

Alexandra Leggat is the author of two collections of spare, dark short stories, both published by Insomniac Press. The first, Pull Gently, Tear Here, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed First Fiction Award. The second, Meet Me in the Parking Lot, was praised by Wendy Banks in a Globe & Mail review as “a success, unified by its cars and bars and imploding marriages, and above all by the rich, spooky washes of mood it invokes.” Banks concluded: “You feel you're in good hands with Leggat in the driver's seat; she knows where to go.”

Come out to hear these writers read next Sunday night! And if that's geographically impossible, I heartily encourage you to seek out their books.