Reading Without Borders

About when I turned ten I began crafting my library checkouts, hoping I’d look smart. I’d balance my Nancy Drew with a biography of Abraham Lincoln, so the librarian thought well of me. (It seems my self-esteem problem enacted early.) Today, reading Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?, on The Millions, I felt that familiar shiver of what will the librarian think of me?

Commercial? Literary? Genre? Are genre books written by literary writers more acceptable than those written by genre writers, similar to men writing of domestic life being considered braver than women doing the same?

I’m revisiting material here that I wrote about last year—because the issue never dies, it only sheds skin and rebirths. In Sept 2010, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner stood up against the New York Times doubled coverage of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Picoult weighed in at the Guardian on mainstream newspapers overwhelming coverage of white male authors. It doesn’t change: men telling domestic stories are writing art; women covering similar ground are crafting women’s fiction. Jennifer Weiner agreed and twitterized the issue.

Weiner’s directness started a new frenzy and the issue veered from Picoult’s premise (overwhelming review coverage of men vs. women and white authors vs. nonwhite authors) to literary fiction being weighed against commercial fiction, often with writers bloodying their own. Weiner and Picoult got trashed for daring to stand up for equality of coverage.

Many writers and reviewers denied the claim that newspapers ignore women and non-white writers and unfairly categorize mainstream novels (a topic well examined by Roxanne Mt Joy and Michelle Dean) asserting that they’re simply reviewing superior fiction, which quickly becomes a construct of healthy peas and carrots books versus sinful bad-for-you ice cream reads.

Michelle Dean wrote far better than I could on the danger of, as eloquently put by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, “The Danger of A Single Story,” noting, “the silencing and devaluing of those voices has consequences, particularly when it tends to happen disproportionately to certain populations.

Some argue that commercial books find their audience without help, only literature needs reviewing—but how does that answer the male/white tipping of review scales? It seems a specious and power-retaining argument. Independent films survive even as movie reviewers include commercial films in their wheelhouse.

In a time when black writers are shunted to an African-American section, when men are deemed artists and women crafters, when science fiction and thrillers are better covered than woman-identified historical fiction, and romance is relegated to the deepest closet of shame reads, then the commercial-lit divide becomes nastily entwined within a gender and racial writing divide. Coloring this is the character versus plot battle, well described by author Chris Abouzied in his post, “The Decomposition of Language.”

In Kim Wright’s Million’s article, she worries: “Still, it’s hard to think of very many writers – save possibly Stephen King – who have moved from genre to literary. The floor seems to slope the other way, and Patriarche concedes that sometimes the difference isn’t so much in what the author has written as in how the publisher opts to describe it. “I’ve seen literary books blurbed as something like ‘the thinking woman’s beach read,’” she says. “And that’s a sign that the publisher is trying to appeal to consumers who are more mainstream. In this aspect the change is more industry-driven than author-driven.””

Please, let’s pray we don’t start having a stratification of literary genre vs. non literary genre.

Since I started reading at age four I’ve never been without books and I pray to have a TBR stack until the moment I die. On that heap I want it all: pounding plots, the wow of discovery, the comfort of recognition, and astounding characters. If I’m lucky, some will have all of the above. Whichever one I’m holding, I don’t want to be judged or lauded for it and I don’t want to shelve my books by race, class, or gender.

Tayari Jones, writing to fellow authors about the stratification of literature, said it very well: ‘other writers do not deserve your scorn.’ In the spirit of writer/reader heal thyself; I’m going to work on remembering those words. There’s room for all in the big tent of reading.

(first published in 2011)