Jamming Novels into a Literary Caste System

Is it time to move on?

I love books; I love them more than bagels, jewelry, or cashmere sweaters, and that’s a lot. Reading kept me from teen pregnancy, heroin, and robbing convenience stores with a badass boyfriend. I’ve read great books, good books, mediocre books, and books so awful they damaged my eyes, and it was never the genre that determined how I ranked them.

Whatever the genre, it’s a rare writer who doesn’t battle to get their vision on the page, and we’re not struggling with the story’s classification—we’re working to rope the passion we feel and set that intensity on the page.

After being sold, titled, and covered, the novel is framed within a genre, perhaps by the publisher or critics. Perhaps by the writer. (Literary! Is that the prize? Women’s fiction? Because a woman wrote it? Because women will read it? Does men’s fiction exist, or is fiction written by a man simply . . . fiction? Contemporary? Upmarket fiction. And if upmarket exists, do we have downmarket books? And who wants to tell readers, “Buy my book! It’s down market!”

Novels deemed literary have twisted my guts (in a good way.) Others filled me with over-wrought metaphors, making me bang my head on my desk. Thrillers have lifted me out of moments of couch-stapling despair; others went to Goodwill unfinished. Mass-market novels got me through bleak times–others made my life bleak.

A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry!) showed me the meaning of caste lived. Martha Quest (Doris Lessing!) taught me rebellion. The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor!) taught me the meaning of adults in struggle and support. Marjorie Morningstar (Herman Wouk!) helped me understand the appeal of bad boys. A Stone for Danny Fisher (Harold Robbins!) introduced me to gritty adulthood. Goodbye, Columbus (Philip Roth!) educated me on the hearts and minds of men. Peyton Place (Grace Metalious!) taught me about small-town sex. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton!) illustrated isolation and rural poverty to this poor Brooklyn girl, and, of course, there was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Jacqueline Susann!!), which introduced me to what Stephen King so fantastically coined the gotta-know. 

I read these all well before I turned eighteen.

Which formative reading hours would I have lost if book police determined my choices? If I’d been told (growing up in my decidedly not-intellectual home) that Edith Wharton, Doris Lessing, or Isak Dineson would be too difficult for me, would I have never picked up their books? If my mother had been a different woman and made popular fiction off-limits, would I have missed being lost in Australia with Colleen McCullough Thorn Birds?

It's a sticky situation: judging, eschewing, or making fun of books (often without reading them) because they’re popular. A friend who had written a well-reviewed and book-club-popular book had her offer to blurb her friend’s debut novel rejected because the publisher was looking to position the book as more literary. Were they afraid the ‘popular’ writer would drag the other book into the gutter of commercialism, gasping for more rarefied air?

My debut book was labeled everything from literary fiction to women's fiction to the newly coined upmarket fiction. Goodreads readers have shelved my novels as literary, chick-lit, thriller, contemporary fiction, dysfunction (I can only hope they mean the book and not me), and more.

When seeking blurbs for The Murderer’s Daughters, I queried authors I admired, ones whose books I found engrossing. They represented a spectrum of outlook and presentation because I don’t believe people read one type of book any more than we listen to one type of music or eat only one kind of food.

The classification topic seems omnipresent. "How would you describe your books, commercial or literary or something else?" a member of the audience asked the four authors lined up at a book festival I once attended.

We panelists snuck furtive looks at each other, no doubt vying for last place. I was eager to hear anything but my voice, fearing that I’d say, “I wanna sell like a mutha-***ka at airports and given the reverence accorded Marilyn Robinson.” Instead, when someone passed me the microphone, I mumbled something along the lines of, “My agent describes it as upmarket women’s fiction, but I’m not even sure what that means. I’d probably describe my work as mainstream.”

And what the heck does that mean?

Am I unwilling to stand up and be counted in one camp or another?

According to Dummies.com, mainstream fiction is a general term publishers and booksellers use to describe both commercial and literary works that depict a daily reality familiar to most people. Mainstream books deal with such myriad topics as family issues, coming of age initiations, courtroom dramas, career matters, physical and mental disabilities, social pressures, political intrigue, and more.

Okay, I feel better. Mainstream fiction works for me.

One panelist declared that she would absolutely define her work as literary fiction because she really cared about the words she used. Did that imply that I, describing myself as mumble-mumble-mainstream-upmarket-women's-fiction, didn’t care about the words I use or how I craft sentences? Was I a word murderer? 

Who makes these definitions, and who determines where your book belongs? Is it one of those you know it when you see it things? Is it self-defined or other-defined?

One site considered the sweet spot of online sites for those seeking agents, gives an in-depth definition for everything from horror to multi-cultural writing, defining the commercial vs. literary this way:

If you marvel at the quality of writing in your novel above all else, then you have probably written a work of literary fiction . . . Although some literary fiction can become “commercial” by transcending its niche market and appealing to a broader audience, this is not the same as commercial fiction, which at its core has a commercial, marketable hook, plot, and storyline” all developed through literary prose. Literary fiction often merges with other fiction types to create hybrid genres such as literary thrillers, mysteries, historicals, epics, and family sagas. 

Whoa!!!

Is the above true? Do writers become literary by marveling at the quality of their own writing? What about shrinking violets too shy to stamp themselves thusly, afraid they will be stamped 'full of themselves?' What if your book has a page-turning plot? Can you use the ‘L’ word, or are you setting yourself up to be knocked down?

I give up on defining myself. I am grateful, thrilled, and eternally satisfied to learn that a reader gave up an hour of TV, sleep, or cleaning to turn the pages I’d written. I give thanks if my prose is solid enough to hold up the story. 

Gripping writing (for me, as a reader) isn't fancy or cluttered with metaphors. Great means the story soars off the page and burrows into my heart.

There are many occasions when magnificently crafted sentences married to essential observations soar, but this can happen in a romance, a historical novel, or a mainstream novel‚ yes. Any book can fly; any novel can nosedive. Do we need a caste system of fiction?

Can it be simple? Story + well written = something terrific. Let’s call them, um. . . novels.