Reviving genre fiction
Michael Chabon comments on McSweeney’s No. 10 in this Guardian Article on Dave Eggers.
I had this fantasy of some day running my own magazine that would attempt to revive the grand tradition of the epiphany-free, genre (sci-fi,crime, mystery, thriller, romance, suspense, macabre) short story, a tradition that proudly claims Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Robert Graves and so on. I went on about this and finally, to shut me up, Dave said I should guest-edit McSweeney’s. I couldn’t pass up this wonderful opportunity to try and revive a rich branch of English-language literature, one that I want to see flourish again,’ Chabon says. ‘Anyone who has ever wondered why the contemporary short story, while extremely diverse in theme, subject and voice, is so limited in form and structure and so oddly devoid of story might find something to interest him or her in this issue.’
Uh-huh. Yup. Here on Earth Bizarro, fiction magazines on newstands everywhere are just packed with storyless epiphany-based short fiction. To find genre fiction, you need to track down obscure genre quarterlies from university presses with circulations in the triple-digits.
Of course, Chabon himself knows that this is an exercise in getting the literati to read genre fiction rather than resurrecting a lost and forgotten form. But when the heart of the problem lies in genre fiction just being entirely off their radar, I don’t see how agreeing with them that there’s nothing there helps.
I thought Kavalier & Clay was overrated too!
Posted by skimble on February 20 2003 15:52
There was a book published some years ago that was a collection of poetry that rhymed and scanned, with a smarmy introduction about what a daring experiment this was or something like that. Of course, the poems were all written by people who made their careers as poets writing the sort of obscure rambling stuff that passes for poetry nowadays, and the sort of rhymed poetry they produced was uniformly godawful, childishly unskillful stuff filled with singsong couplets and dreadfully clumsy inversions and contrived rhymes. I imagine everyone took the failure of the grand experiment as further indication that this kind of poetry no longer has value.
Posted by Scott on February 23 2003 14:31