There is a thought-provoking
review of "The Surrendered" by Chang-Rae Lee in the New Yorker this week (although it could be last week's because I tend to be a week behind). The first half of the review is a discussion of the conventions of contemporary literary fiction. How there is so much unnecessary description and attention to realism. How the emotions of the characters are so spelled out and explained. How despite the attention to real life details, the plots are often overly contrived and not true to life.
It made me feel really depressed about literary fiction. Like all the "good books" out there are really only Lifetime movies and nothing more. I understand the writer's point. Sometimes literary fiction does seem to blend and is more or less predictable in its degree of "literary"-ness to complicated plot ratio. But you can apply this to all forms. Geez, how many pieces of fruit can Cezanne paint? And Edward Hopper, enough already with the barren urban landscapes. We get it. Life is empty and quiet!
But is the only literature out the worth reading, non-linear, avant garde and hyper-intellectual? Basically the unreadable stuff? I guess it comes down to what you want out of a novel. And that's probably a personal list of demands.
For me, the difference is often the emotional response. I read Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections and Jonathan Lethem's
Motherless Brooklyn. Both examples of literary fiction that were critically and commercially successful. Both were good, but honestly, unremarkable for me. I wouldn't re-read either. And trust me, I am not dissing either of these authors. Their achievement is not lost on me. I could not write what they wrote. What they wrote took dedication, talent and imagination. But I wouldn't reread what they wrote.
And yet I could reread
The Great Gatsby and
Lolita over and over again. Probably the book I have reread the most is
To Kill a Mockingbird. It's strange how there are those books you can reread again and again and get something new every time. These books are like old friends.
But there are plenty of esteemed writers I've never read like Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner (I've never read anything by William Faulkner!!!). I guess what I'm saying is there
is a lot of literary fiction that is unremarkable and kind of bland, but at the end of the day novels are just stories. They are not essays or meditations, they are stories. As much as Milan Kundera argues that there are no characters just ideas, it's not the "ideas" that make you weep at the end of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's the characters and their universal plight and the brevity of life and the salvation and consolation of love.
So--I think--even using plain language, conventional plots, characters who resemble real life people, you can still write a great novel. One that will be beloved and reread over and over again. But they are not a dime a dozen and you probably have to read a lot to find the true gems.
