When it comes to politics I'm pretty much resigned to hearing lots of smart people say incredibly stupid things -- it is, after all, what many of them are paid to do. Not that it excuses Mark Penn.
But anyway....
Outside the realm of presidential politics, a blogger/writer I generally enjoy reading for his erudition and keen analysis, Matthew Yglesisas, took a brief political breather this morning to chime in on the latest scandals of non-fiction memoirs that turn out to be totally fiction. After referencing 19th and early-20th century novels that would set themselves up to be narrations of "the truth" -- I'm thinking Edgar Allen Poe off the top of my head, but plenty of examples from both the high and low brow apply -- Yglesias lets loose with this howler:
Meanwhile, contemporary fiction is pretty sharply bifurcated between crappy "genre" fiction and literary fiction that often seems very artsy-fartsy. For a well-crafted but basically straightforward story of people doing things and interacting with each other in a moderately realistic way, you need to turn to narrative non-fiction.
Now, this is the statement of someone who either hasn't read any fiction since wrapping up John Dos Passos back in college or has cast aside all evidence to the contrary in order to feed the blog beast by making a "point."
Let's start with the slam on "genre" fiction, which is all the more amusing coming from someone whose last name sounds like a Old One from an H.P. Lovecraft novel. As some others have pointed out in his comments, the argument that genre is automatically crappy is wrong because pretty much 75 to 90 percent of all creative endeavors -- novels, non-fiction, movies, television, magazines, political blogs -- are crap. That doesn't mean that everything is crap -- it actually is the reason to appreciate the truly artistic moments, particularly those that flourish within the sometimes overwrought rules of "genre" fiction. Just for a quick example, Yglesias might want to have a chat with Michael Dirda over at the Washington Post Book World about science-fiction/fantasy genre writer Gene Wolfe, of whom Dirda writes: "Gene Wolfe not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time."
And that's without even getting into Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, or any number of others who have proven that genre boundaries by no means exclude literary fiction. And the same can be said for just about any other genre, be it crime, thriller, western, horror -- in each you will find exemplary practitioners of their craft, just as you'll find the standard ranks of hacks and pretenders.
I don't fell like extending this for a full essay length -- unless, of course, the Atlantic might want to pick up, wadda ya say? -- but I also feel compelled to defend the honor of literary fiction. Sure, the same as genre, the same as non-fiction, the ranks of so-called literary fiction is swelled by the artsy-fartsy products of MFA programs. But there remains more quality out there than most of us will ever have time to read. Myself, I'm a near stalker-level fan of David Foster Wallace, whose Infinite Jest is one of the most difficult, intelligent, funny, sad and deeply human novels I have ever read. And he's not alone.
To believe that contemporary fiction is either crappy genre or artsy-fartsy is to show that you don't bother to look beyond the table placed at the entrance to Barnes and Noble or click beyond the Amazon home page that tries to sell you the latest Dean Koontz novel or Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
There's plenty of smart stuff out there, if you take a moment to look.
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