This is the question I get most often when people learn I have a new novel out. I understand the context of the question. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, or go browsing on Amazon, you will see real or virtual shelves devoted to Mystery, Romance, Thrillers, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult. My books, and the books of most writers I happen to know, don’t belong on any of them.
Recently, at a book festival, I was invited to lunch with a couple of the other authors who were presenting. The entire conversation seemed to hinge on whether it was possible, as an author, to move from Romance to Women’s Contemporary. Naïf that I was, I hadn’t even known a Women’s Contemporary category existed, much less that it was a coveted place to belong. These authors were also churning out books at a rate I found astonishing. Their editors were “demanding” novels every nine months, or even six months. No editor has ever demanded a novel of me; I can’t imagine why they would, or how I would meet such a demand.
The default category, for those who either refuse or are incapable of fitting their imaginations to the parameters of these other labels, is Literary Fiction. To claim membership in that club invites one of two characterizations. First, you are parading as a snob, disdaining the so-called formulas of genre writing. (And it doesn’t help to claim that some of your best friends read only mysteries or science fiction.) Second, you are a dunce, literary fiction being a catch-all for boring, precious, pretentious, M.F.A.-style narrative that no one wants to read.
The popular writer Jennifer Weiner has become a self-created lightning rod for the debate between so-called literary and so-called commercial fiction; she has a parallel role in the debate about women’s representation in top-flight book reviews and journals. The conflation of these two debates, of course, makes the question, “What kind of fiction do you write?” even more tiresome for a female novelist, since it’s easy to get the impression that the commercial (“chick lit”) writers are female and any literary writers you’ve ever heard of are male.
Trying to formulate an answer to the question, I find myself returning to Henry James’s vigorous defense of “the art of fiction,” in which he writes, for starters, “It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic.” I think that we who cannot claim membership in any of the genre clubs still feel something of this need to apologize, a feeling that can come off, paradoxically, as arrogant. Poets, however slim their earnings, rarely feel the sting of a history in which their kind was routinely described as hacks. (Interestingly, a shortening of hackney, the term for a horse available for hire). Or consider the double-edged sword of the term popular writer, with its implication that anyone whose work is widely beloved must of necessity be creating shallow material. Even Charles Dickens, that most respected of popular novelists, could get defensive, as in a letter to his friend Wilkie Collins, reproaching the “jolter-headedness of the conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes, and that any writing can be done without the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable.”
None of this helps me know what to say. Lately I’ve been pulling that annoying trick of answering a question with a question, i.e.,
“What kind of fiction do you write?”
“What kind do you like to read?”
They usually have an answer, which puts them one up on me. Very occasionally, their answer is, “Anything that’s good” — in which case, I get my answer for free.