Genre’s a funny thing. There are definitely genre books out there. If I pick up anything from Harlequin, I know what I’m getting (although, they do publish more than just romance). If I swing by Subterranean Press, it’s science fiction, fantasy, or horror.
But even there, in those genres, things are not always so easily defined.
Mention “Stephen King,” and most people say, “Horror writer.” But as a kid, picking up King’s Different Seasons didn’t seem much different than picking up John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Garp’s birth and the birth in “The Breathing Method” are both rather odd things. The similarities weren’t lost on me, even in junior high school.
Kurt Vonnegut
I always found it interesting how some people — including professors I had in college — claimed to dislike genre fiction…yet praised Kurt Vonnegut. Let’s see…Slaughterhouse Five: time travel, aliens…stuff like that. Cat’s Cradle gives us ice-nine, a substance that turns water at room temperature into ice — something that can potentially destroy the planet.
When I brought up these points, the defense was always, “Well, there are stories behind it. Vonnegut’s books deal with something more than just genre.”
Thing is, so do many genre stories if you read the right stuff.
Blurred Lines
The day Anne Ursu writes another adult novel is the day you might hear actually hear me shout “Yee Haw!” all the way down here in Texas.
The premise for Ursu’s first novel, Spilling Clarence, could have been devised by Vonnegut: a mishap with a break room microwave ends up causing a chain reaction that leads to an accident at a pharmaceutical company that leaves a town covered in the haze of a memory drug. Total recall of all inhabitants’ memories — even those best forgotten.
In her second novel, The Disapparation of James, the protagonists’ son disappears for real during a magic show performed by a clown. Seriously, that’s it — he just…POOF! Gone! Some have drawn parallels with another [genre] book dealing with the loss of a child, The Lovely Bones. (They really are totally different books.)
More Examples
I really like Jeffrey Ford. His novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, is one of my favorite books — ever! Ford often writes straight-up genre fiction, but many of his novels are as contemporary as anything.
Don’t think the lines of genre fiction have been blurred? Check out this list of genre novels that crossed over to the mainstream. Think of stories like The Time Traveler’s Wife; check out this entire category of genre novels that crossed over to the mainstream on Tor’s website. Oh, and I’m sure more than a couple people reading this have read a Harry Potter novel.
Genre fiction is everywhere these days.
So, Then…What Is Genre?
Okay, obviously, some books are straight-up genre. If I pick up a Scott Sigler book, I know I’m getting over-the-top violence, monsters, and a world on the brink of destruction (or aliens playing football).
And there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
But more and more, it seems, genre is not so easy to define. Sure, George R. R. Martin writes fantasy…but there are a myriad books that are not so easy to define. Whether it’s elements of genre creeping into mainstream and literary books (most novels by Jonathan Lethem come to mind), or full-blown genre novels being read by more than a little subculture, it’s becoming harder to pin down what “genre” is these days.
And that’s because what matters more than anything are good stories. I may get slammed for saying this, but we’re really long done with suburban contemporary fiction. If Franzen is the best we’ve got, let’s just call it over.
Tired of the Same Old
While everything’s been done before in some manner, it seems amplified when it’s John Irving writing another book about a boy who goes to a boarding school, discovers his sexuality at an early age, and struggles through a messed up adult life until he figures it out or dies. Read this blog enough and you know I love John Irving’s writing, but…certain things he does gets so old. I have no desire to pick up his latest book.
Maybe because we’ve had decades of the same thing in contemporary fiction, we’re seeing the lines of genre blurred — and with it, genre writers striving for that little bit of “something more” that literary fiction and contemporary fiction shoot for. And vice versa: literary writers are beginning to experiment with one of the most powerful things that genre fiction has been doing forever: asking, “What if…?” on a stranger scale.
Good Books
Genre’s a nice thing to consider when shelving books in a bookstore: “This kind of person likes a certain kind of story, so…we will create a romance section.” But I can think of so many books that aren’t romance with strong elements of romance in them. (The last book I finished has a romance line and a mystery line going through it, even though it’s not a romance or straight-up mystery novel.) There are piles of mainstream novels with genre elements in them, just as there are piles of genre novels with mainstream elements in them.
What matters to me when I pull a book off a shelf or load it to my e-reader isn’t how it’s grouped by a retailer, but rather, whether it’s a good book or not.
Sometimes that good book is literary; other times it’s mainstream or straight-up genre. More and more, however, the books that hook me are harder to define — other than, “It’s just a good book!”
This concept of genre crossing is what gives online bookseller’s like Amazon a leg up from a customer service perspective. Their recommendation system is a very powerful tool for finding stuff I’d like beyond the rather simple method of scanning the titles on the “Mystery” shelf.
Of course, this system is not perfect. Ideally, I’d like to see a database created similar to the one that drives Pandora radio. Then someone could “tune” the database to your taste. The resulting stream of reading suggestions would be much higher quality.
If more people discovered books in this way, the rigidly defined Genre categories in use in fiction today might melt away. This would free up writers to write the story they want, without having to think about which shelf it would sit on.
I loved SPILLING CLARENCE! It seemed like such an obscure book at the time that it was an exciting surprise to see you mention it. I think I only heard of the book because Anne Ursu and I were at college together, though I didn’t know her. Not sure why I never read her second novel — I think I just forgot.
Many of my favorite books fall into this (ever more crowded) space between mainstream and genre.
Larry: I totally agree. I buy books based on whether they sound interesting or not. As one on the writing side of things, I’ve had a tough time because what I write usually doesn’t fall clearly into such defined categories. That, and people instantly hear certain things and decide stories are a certain thing, even when they aren’t.
When submitting my first novel, I kept running into people who seemed to skip the description that Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors is “a humorous coming of age story about a family traveling cross country in a possessed stations wagon.” I spend a lot of time researching agents and focused on agents specializing in humor. But I can’t tell you how many rejections came back with, “I don’t represent horror.”
The last novel I wrote has a mystery and romance line through it. But it’s neither romance or mystery — it’s just about a recently-divorced celebrity chef who moves to the town of his boyhood dreams and finds out it’s not what he expected. There are some genre elements in it, though, and every rejection I’ve received has been, “Great writing, but I don’t know how I’d market this…”
Looking at my bookcase, it’s largely filled with mainstream, literary, and upmarket fiction. I’d say a good 70% of the books contain some aspect of genre, even if it’s just a main character who seems to have a certain view of the world that almost seems paranormal. (Jim Lynch’s, The Highest Tide comes to mind — and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, based on Hamlet, has ghosts in it.)
The other thing that gets me when people think, “Genre!” is how quickly certain kinds of books are overlooked. Sure, I don’t see my mom ever reading or listening to a Sigler story, but there are staight-up genre novels that are every bit as reflective and important as literary fiction deemed important by some.
Were Amazon or someone to develop a database more similar to Pandora that can be fine tuned, I’m guessing people who often overlook genre would end up reading genre fiction without really realizing it. I love the thought of books just free to be whatever it is they are, and agents and readers picking things up based on stories and not considering so many other factors that doom great titles to a smaller readership.
Lisa: Spilling Clarence was one of those browsing finds. I suppose one could argue that it looked a bit like a chick lit novel with a little something more, but I’ll read anything that sounds good. If I had approached my browsing habits as “This book is this kind of book, and I don’t read that kind of book…” I’d have missed out on finding an author I really like.
I’ve mentioned, here, my love for Robert Olmstead’s A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go. It’s quirky and literary and one of the books that influenced my own writing more than anything. It’s one of the only books that I felt strong enough to pay homage to in something I’ve written. Not that there are really genre elements in it, but…there are strange elements in it that often don’t make it into the kind of book it is. And, for me, that made all the difference.
Because I browse with no mind to genre, I’ve stumbled upon some great books. I would probably stumble upon more neat books if things were all shelved together. I get why booksellers shelve things a certain way, but I would not mind seeing straight-up genre novels beside classics.
Very cool that you ended up at the same college as Ursu. Her second book is also a great read. I won’t go into why I loved it so much for fear of spoiling things for you if you decide to read it, but I admire the hell out of Ursu and the things she gets away with as a writer. I’m glad she’s found success writing YA fiction, but I definitely look forward to another adult novel.