Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time and the author of “The Magicians”, a novel. In this great piece in the WSJ, he writes about the “plot against plot”–the abandonment of story in 20th century literary fiction–and the new trend in fiction to embrace story again.
I’m a huge lover of modern and postmodern fiction. But I do think we as novelists owe as much to our readers as we do to art. The current pendulum swing back towards hybridizing literary fiction with genre fiction to make the former readable is good for writers and good for readers. It only makes what we write that much more relevant, because what use is the most artfully written novel if it interests no one? Novelists have a lot to learn from the challenge of being entertaining.
n.b.: I had jumped on the bandwagon without even realizing it–my new novel is literary fiction inspired by graphic novels. ‘Cause I’m trendy like that I guess.
The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They’re forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in “Inherent Vice” he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.
This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.
via Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work – WSJ.com.
