What is 'Literary Fiction,' Anyway?

“Booker Prize novels? Ha! I read the Booker Prize list so I know what not to read.”

A panel moderator said this, loudly and proudly, at a mystery writers conference I attended a few years back. Mysteries, she went on to say, are just as “literary” as any other fiction. Around me, fellow attendees smiled and laughed their approval. I held my tongue.

The Booker Prize may not be on your radar, but winners and shortlisted authors probably are – ones like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, and A. S. Byatt. Here’s the committee’s description of the Booker: “the leading literary award in the English speaking world, which has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over 50 years. Awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.” Among my favorite winning/shortlisted titles are Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Plus anything by Roddy Doyle – winner, shortlisted, or otherwise.

I love organizing posts around lists. But the list is short when I speculate on why using the term literary – and especially, literary fiction – is like waving red cape at many people. It comes down to two things:

1) Reacting to snobbery (real or perceived) against genre fiction. Literary fiction’s “flipside” is genre fiction, and for certain people, genre fiction = bad. They consider it shallow, formulaic, predictable, juvenile. I’ve met very few bashers of genre fiction, but those few did happen to be fellow literature professors, people invested in distinguishing wheat from chaff. Instead of saying they just don’t enjoy genre fiction, they dismiss it. So yes, there are some snobs out there, people who reject work not for what it is, but what it isn't.

Consider Agatha Christie (I know she was racist – that’s another issue). Despite the huge popularity and influence of her well-plotted mysteries, you won’t find her in standard textbooks or anthologies of 20th-century British literature. Popular means accessible, and for snobs, accessible means inferior. If genre writers are praised, it’s because they “transcend their genre.” A backhanded compliment if ever there was one – as if your chosen genre is some sort of artistic morass you’re stuck in. Wallowing there, you must await the helping hand of a critic to pull you upward and out!

So yes, I get the touchiness of that mystery conference speaker and the attendees who enjoyed a laugh. But preemptively rejecting books (or Bookers) as elitist is a great way to miss out on what talented fellow authors have to offer. Reverse snobbery, in effect.

2) Considering descriptive terms (literature/literary) as judgmental. A working definition of a few terms would help about now. I’ve got a big fancy PhD, so trust me when I say that all fiction is literature. That includes graphic novels, thrillers, drug-store bodice rippers, and sparkly vampire fiction. The word literature categorizes. It separates types of texts – Octavia Butler vs. phonebooks, Hunter S. Thompson vs. workplace newsletters. It doesn’t judge. People do. Are Conan the Barbarian comic books literature? Sure. Judgment kicks in when you start adding value-laden adjectives: are they great literature? I’d say no (but still love them dearly). True, some people do apply the terms genre vs. literary as judgment. They’re being petty. Ignore them.

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On to the challenging term at hand: literary fiction. When you combine those words, you’re classifying a type of fiction, not awarding a prize or crowning an achievement. Here’s a good working definition: literary fiction is character and/or language driven. Pondering this, my creative writing students inevitably ask, “Isn’t all fiction character/language driven?” Not really – the operative word being ‘driven.’

Hear me out before brigading my email or bailing on this post. I’ll use an example from my first incarnation as a writer, before my first “genre hop”: publishing scholarly articles on 18th-century Brit lit. Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747-48) is considered one of the greatest of its time. It weighs in at nearly a million words. Here’s what fellow 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson had to say about it: “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”

Johnson isn’t saying don’t read Richardson – just don’t read him for the plot. I’ve read Clarisssa twice, and I concur. It’s an epistolary novel, meaning it’s a massive series of letters (so no, Lauren Myracle didn’t invent a new form with TTYL). The plot in a nutshell: a young woman is lured from her family’s home by a charming cad, drugged and raped, refuses to marry the repentant cad, then dies of grief. That’s pretty much it. But the interchanges of letters – between her and her friends, the cad and his, and more, creates a brilliant mosaic of psychological detail.

Don’t all novels have psychological detail? To a degree. But:

Bold Assertion #1: In literary fiction character development is (typically) in the foreground – in genre fiction, the middle- or background.

You might be gearing up to argue, but I challenge you: think back to the last time you workshopped a chapter. How often were you told to tighten up your work? To streamline? To make sure every detail helps advance the plot? Every conference workshop I’ve taken pushed this advice: “make us care about the characters but keep things moving.”

“Things,” in this case, means plot. Maybe I’ve just taken workshops from hardasses, but I don’t think so. I’ve mentioned in other posts that I’m at work on a historical mystery novel (more on writing fiction in an upcoming post). Mystery readers expect murders, red herrings, clever and potentially risky sleuthing, and surprising but satisfying revelations – and cute pets if you’re writing cozies. Strong characters, it’s true, draw us to mysteries – think Laurie King’s Mary Russell, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, or Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe. But driving a mystery is what happens to those characters. We may enjoy seeing how Mary, John, or Precious grow as people, but plot drives those changes. Not inner monologues. Ditto in paranormal or speculative fiction, romance, thriller, or any other genre.

Imagine Samuel Richardson pitching Clarissa to an agent in 2022. “My 970,000 word manuscript, a multi-character series of letter exchanges, describes the emotional and psychological collapse and death of a woman after a sexual assault.” If the agent reads past the word count, it’s only out of morbid curiosity.

That is, if the agent works with genre fiction. If they work with literary fiction, they could well be intrigued.

So here’s a crucial point for understanding the value of terms like literary fiction vs. genre fiction: literature is business. Reader’s expectations come into play, as well as the machinery of literary agents, editors, publicists, and publishing houses. Even if you’re self-publishing, you still have to think about the last three factors. Readers want to know what they’re getting – and agents want to know what they’re selling.

Agents aren’t evil gatekeepers turning you away from the world of publication. They’re booklovers with preferences about what they read and want to shepherd into print. When agents flag the types of books they represent in their profile (“literary fiction” vs. “historical fiction”), assume that says more about them than it does about you. It’s a preference, not a put-down.

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Back to defining literary fiction – character-driven is one element. The other is language. So:

Bold Assertion #2; In literary fiction use of language is (often) in the foreground – in genre fiction, in the middle- or background.

Again I’ll reference writing workshops. Along with “keep things moving,” teachers push the idea, keep the language simple. Enough said.

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Do you prefer genre fiction or literary fiction? I read both. But I can’t imagine writing literary fiction – that’s one genre-hop I don’t expect to ever make.

Coming full circle: is that panel moderator’s public swipe at the Booker Prize professional sour grapes? Maybe, maybe not. Could be there are some hurt feelings going on there. But does being labeled a genre writer hurt your sales? Nope. It probably boosts them. Literary fiction isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and fewer writers (and agents) work with it. That’s the whole reason the Booker was launched – to encourage more writers to take risks with plot, experiment with form, challenge expectations, or revel in language without fear of the slashing red keep-things-moving pen.

Some genre writers do push the boundaries between genre and literary fiction. Laurie King, Tanya French, Johnathan Rabb, and David Fulmer come to mind. Could Laurie King win a Booker? If she ever wanted to, I have no doubt she could.

Check back next month for more next month on genre hopping and writer's block!