“I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons,” said author Kazuo Ishiguro, defending his approach to the fantasy genre in his 2015 novel, “The Buried Giant.” Ishiguro’s statement came in response to stones thrown by science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who criticized Ishiguro’s use of the “surface elements” of a literary genre. Welcome to the genre debate, the conversation about the shift in reading and writing that currently dominates literary discussion.
As I began to dive deeper into contemporary fiction and the corresponding discourse about it, many questions arose in my mind. How did these rigid rules of genre form — was this categorization out of convenience or pure snobbery? Are genre books and traditionally serious “literary” books, books that hold merit through social commentary or the exploration of the human condition, mutually exclusive? When did it become acceptable to use the word “genre” as an adjective?
Genre may have begun as a matter of convenience, but in the last century of American literature, a clear divide emerged between genre novels and literary novels. This bisection rested on the American public obsession with realism, a fascination not mirrored in other countries. To this day, award-winning novels tend to focus on the minutiae of realistic life. Novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex” and Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” win Pulitzers while other writers whose novels consider the strange and the uncanny are overlooked.
But after years of genre novels beginning to incorporate the characteristics that earn literary novels prestige, the boundaries between “literary” and “genre” are beginning to dwindle. A genre novel, “Swamplandia!,” was a runner-up for the Pulitzer for Fiction in 2012, the year no one won the prestigious prize. With its transcendent writing about a family running an alligator wrestling amusement park in Florida, the unusual “Swamplandia!” presumably would have won if not for its uncanny subject and the fact that the author, Karen Russell, was extraordinarily young when she wrote the novel.
More and more established authors are conflating the status of literary with the escapism of genre. When Colson Whitehead, esteemed novelist and winner of the McArthur Fellowship, penned a zombie novel, it was surprising. However, as Whitehead said in an interview with NPR, “I did have to give myself permission because zombies were so popular. But I think the idea is that if it’s good, people read it. So all I could do is really salute my childhood influences and try to do the best I could in reinvigorating the genre, putting a new spin on it.”
With genre becoming a part of mainstream “serious” literature, there is an increase in capitalization of these beloved methods of literary escapism. Stores like the exclusively mystery book-driven Aunt Agatha’s in downtown Ann Arbor thrive because of their audience’s devotion to the mystery genre.
I talked to Jamie Agnew, the co-owner of Aunt Agatha’s, about how this fusion of literary and genre is affecting the 24-year-old store. He cites a growing interest in mystery and the loyalty of the mystery reader as the backbone of the store’s continued success. But Agnew doubts there’s going to be much synthesis between the literary world and his genre of choice: mystery.
“I know that many people, especially in a place like Ann Arbor, think that slogging through a painfully serious and literary book is somehow more virtuous than reading a book that is entertaining, but to me that’s a fairly recent attitude,” Agnew said. “The great novels of the 19th century are both profound and enjoyable to read, and quite a few of them had to do with the themes of modern mystery such as identity, guilt and murder. If ‘Crime and Punishment’ came out today, what section of the bookstore would it be shelved? I’ll add that I think literary fiction is a genre like any other, with just as many artificialities and strictures.”
Agnew sees mystery, which has an incredibly different history from other genres like romance or science fiction, as growing to greater significance since its conception.
“The movement I have seen the most is from static protagonists — like Poirot or Philip Marlowe, who change little over the course of many series books — to more nuanced figures like Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight or William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor who, over the course of succeeding installments achieve a depth of characterization impossible in any single novel,” Agnew said. “Lately, it has been the vogue for ‘literary’ writers to attempt thrillers, presumably seeking the vitality and popularity lacking in their own genre, but not all of them have the skills to pull it off.”
As the lines between literary and genre continue to blur in this way, we’ll inevitably see some failures and some dazzling successes. Genre conventions will always exist, there’s no arguing that — but maybe in the next few years, some of our favorite books will be ones featuring more unconventional protagonists. When the genre war is over, Ishiguro will be proven right — the victors will inevitably include the pixies and the dragons.