Rotting Your Brain With Genre Novels: The Beach Read on Trial
Not on trial here though. Come on. It's a metaphor.
In summer the need for genre reading grips me, stacks of fat squat books howling my name like newsprint-scented wolves. I love serious fiction. There are Great Books gathering dust unread on my shelf. But ultimately the call of the genre will get me, wrap me up in a quick-drawn world and plot-drive me where it will. The inevitability makes me wonder how bad a fate that is.
[Want to know what I mean by genre? Luckily I told you here.]
Most of genre is reading for entertainment—it’s choosing Saturday morning cartoons and blow-stuff-up movies instead of Citizen Kane or something poetic and subtitled. And let’s all say it together: “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
But literary empty calories do cost. When I’ve been reading genre, I speed through with barely a thought about whether I can trust the narrator, or whether all is what it seems—unless the author wants me to think something’s fishy, which is generally noted with a line like, “Samara thought something seemed fishy.” I don’t think about symbolism. The emotional weight of what happens to the characters doesn’t hit me—even if the murder victim is the sleuth’s dear ol’ grandma, I know she’s basically a blue-haired, peppermint-scented MacGuffin, nothing more than an excuse to push the plot forward. I excuse clichés and flat characters and terrible writing with hardly a thought.
And then I find myself writing things like “with hardly a thought”—tied-up stiff phrases that mean next to nothing. It’s contagious. If you’re a writer, genre can cost more than time. Garbage in, garbage out.
If you’re an omnivorous reader, think of the bad reading habits genre forms—skimming, speed-reading, ignoring insignificant details, expecting side players to come from Stock Characters ‘R’ Us and avoid unnecessary movement. That hurts anyone who wants to appreciate what the written word can do for truth and beauty.
But there’s also something to be said for these plot-driven page-turners. Genre opens doors to other worlds, often wider and brighter-lit doors than the narrow crevices of Serious Fiction.
Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series of the 90s is definitely genre—but it’s edgy, political, and some of the best writing on contemporary African-American culture in the business. In 2000, Neely told Ms. magazine, “I thought I was writing a novel that happened to have murder in it… But when the book did so well, I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write.”
Science fiction genre entries usually involve ludicrous sexual politics and at least one scientific impossibility, but many books use the “speculative fiction” angle to tease out questions of morality and philosophy, or toy with the consequences of real developments. The Laws of Robotics are the classic example, but I’ve also read stories from midcentury discussing the backlash from an issue as seemingly modern as in vitro fertilization—before the first human test succeeded, of course. Then there are the books that blend mythology into their plotlines, passing on centuries-old folktales in a new guise.
As for romance, that behemoth of fiction sales, the genres within it break down in their own ways. But some of those bodice-rippers involve real history, accurate portrayals contemporary conditions and plenty of period research. Some are half travel log or Dirty Jobs episode. When the plotline and outcome of the story are basically a given, you’d better have some pretty great window dressing to control 60% of the fiction market. Legal and military thrillers, likewise, can use their platforms to educate as they titillate, competing between books for the most “authentic” issues as well as the most exciting.
And then there are the methods any decent genre writer has mastered—the kind of thing plenty of weightier wannabes could do well to learn. Pacing. Suspense. Tight plotting. Giving just enough of the big reveal to keep us one step behind the game. Those are not simple techniques, and yet read enough genre, and you can manipulate that familiar dance to whatever ends you can imagine. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose is a masterful exploitation of those cues—I really want to spoil it, but I won’t here. Read it.
There’s no point arguing, really. Genre is and undoubtedly will remain the silent bulk of books read and written, whether it’s classed as pure brain candy or some potentially redeemable sort of light snack. The pack is calling me regardless. But as I reach for my beach reads, I’m going to remind myself about all those mitigating circumstances.
Anybody have a recommendation?
You’re right about the dangers of genre fiction–all those adverbial dialogue tags can start to creep up in your writing after you read enough of them. There’s a sort of Wild West air to genre fiction–it’s a critically unexamined ground ripe for use but tempting for abuse–and it makes it fun to work in but hard to read from, and when you read enough of the bad sort, you can notice your own authorial voice slipping away to a place you don’t want it to land.
I really love genre fiction but so much of it is awful, and I hate having to close down a book ten pages in because the writing is terrible. A surprising example for me: recently I picked up Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts. This is a collection of horror/fantastical short stories, almost all of which are inspired, well-written surprising, etc. I got very excited about this writer. Then I picked up Horns, his most recent novel, and had to snap the covers shut only a few pages in. I’m almost certain the thing was written maybe ten years ago–there’s that much of a discrepancy between the voices in those two books.
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