Literary vs. Popular Novels

there are bestsellers and there are works of literary fiction now and then a book comes along that is both but it's the exception that proves the rule or is it well this is a long-standing debate and with the summer reading season just around the corner let us revisit the feud joining us now for that deidre Lynch the Ernest Birnbaum professor of literature at Harvard University and author of loving literature a cultural history Nick Mount associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and fiction editor at The Walrus magazine Russell Smith columnist at The Globe and Mail and author of confidence and of course we welcome back Jennifer Robson author most recently of moonlight over Paris good to have you all around our table here at TV Oh Russell what differentiates a best-seller and a literary novel look nothing does literary novels can be hugely commercially successful as we've seen if we even look at the current bestseller list we see that it's a mixed particularly Canada of the literary and the so-called genre now there's this huge debate over what classifies genre usually there are several genres such as science fiction romance Western why a which tends to be a sub-genre of romance in Western yé yé no young adult fiction young sub genre of romance aimed at young people and and thrillers crime novels etc in content they tend to follow certain tropes that is they tend to follow certain conventions and formulas of storytelling which literary fiction does not have to follow and this and the setting is not so not so narrowly defined as well but a big difference that people don't like or tend to talk about as much is a difference in the interest in style or technique that is literary fiction tends to focus more on language as language that the people who say they follow it are interested in sentences as sentences as innovative as poetic as impressionistic as a minimalist genre fiction people tend to read for story for content rather than for form I'm watching Dede and she sort of I'm wondering how much of this here signing on to but I would say that sometimes I'm I'm the sort of person who can read say Charlotte Bronte for the plot over and over and over again Oh will mr. Rochester and Jane get together in the end and when I'm reading it that way I think I'm I'm not reading it as the literary fiction that it becomes when I bring it into the English department classrooms so so otherwise I think I would agree very much with Russell's differentiation of our laughs refusal to differentiate all that firmly literary fiction from popular fiction in which case let me ask the other professor here what does it take to get it into the classroom hmm has to be short and available from a publisher at the moment I you know wait depth the stuff that's done well in the Academy has tended to be stuff that needed explanation which is one of the major factors to plays against accessible genre quad Gryphon literature because by and large you just read it and enjoy it whereas something like you know the wasteland Ulysses it takes a professor to stand up there and explain it to you which is why we picked those books because it makes us both that much smarter in which case let me Sanders will bring this list up right now here's a globe males Canadian fiction bestseller list this is from June 11th and we start with Kathy Reichs speaking in bones and the illegal from Lawrence Hill and down the list we go and there's our top ten and do I mean Jennifer you look at that list does that lists was it speak to you in any particular way that if I haven't read already I I want to read they're interesting books they're they're profoundly different and I don't see why they can't all coexist on it on a list at once you know sometimes when we break down the lists as Russell was saying into the the subgenres and so on what it does is give an opportunity for people like myself who write John were fiction to leap a little higher up the respective list but I don't really they're they're moments when I I think to myself is it is it worth for myself asking where my books belong or is it where should the work that I do concentrate on writing the best possible book for my readers who have come to expect a certain type of book for me and and I'm not I fully admit I'm not experimenting with the boundaries of the genre I'm not looking to reinvent the novel what I look to do in my books is write a story that the people will enjoy do you feel following up on what Nick just had to say that when people read your books they need a professor at the front of the room helping further analyzing yeah no I mean insofar with my books as an historian I like to think that people will come away from reading the books knowing a little bit more about the period of the Great War a little bit more about the people who live through it and if I'm teaching it's a gentle kind of teaching it's not that that feeling of having being force-fed something in grade 10 pedagogy yeah and finally enough I remember for example in grade 10 English being force-fed business and and hating it English food force-fed shipping also more it is now because then when I went back in my 20s and reread it I was blown away by how much I liked it and I couldn't I ate for the life of me why did I hate it so much then and and love it now but someday these closure readers don't let her hear that okay you saw that Global mail list do the books feel all of a sort on that list together for you oh they're wildly different kinds of books on the hub list I mean I'm one with Russell to a point at the point where I leave you is that literary books are subject to Convention as genre fiction yes and then somebody reads the slush ball for The Walrus do you see a lot of well what's sometimes called the Reilly MFA fiction and you can tell I mean it's stuff that focuses more in description than on plot there's also particularly Canadian genre isn't yeah best-selling literary Canadian fiction has particular convention yeah it does tend to be historical actually it tends to be about the past and memory and family and loss so those are conventions as strict as any Western yeah the most important difference is ultimately between a good book and a bad book but there's still differences between the two but in literary literature that aspires to recognition and literature that aspires to sell sure Dedra when did we start to regard novels as either literary or commercial a lot it was a fairly late development I mean not the problem was that novels were commercial from the get-go unlike other genres unlike drama unlike poetry they have no existence in manuscript culture people argue about about this so but novels grew up in as print culture grew up and they grew up as part of the commercialization of culture so it took a really long time for novels to become literary about a century and they became literary when people started writing historical fiction as it happens even if now I think the tendency would be to demote historical fiction from the category of literary fiction but Walter Scott at the start of the 19th century he is the person who made the the novel response respectable by turning to the past by teaching people things very gently through his fiction and how about that genre historical fiction you a fan or not I am a fan I am actually a huge fan of historical fiction and I don't understand exactly the the wish among many people to demote it or to feminize it which is to say which is almost to say the same thing in two different ways ah yeah Jennifer how's your work received by the broader world let's put it that way the broader world reasonably well I would like to think I tried hard not to pay too much attention to that but I what's interesting is more and more I get emails and letters from men who have said to me I saw your book on the coffee table at home my wife had read it and I just opened it up and I wasn't sure what to think of it and then I read it and I surprised myself by really liking it hello and I think that's as much a function of how they're marketed that the covers are decidedly you know designed with with the female reader in mind that is not to say let's take a look at that they're very pretty covers you know I wonder if they were given different covers to whom they would appeal necessarily I mean it's the question you you can ask about any genre pop a different cover on it from what is the expected cover and and would you find a different question I don't have the answer to Russell I think it's interesting to point out too that writers don't always choose their genre their publishers do for them and it's a marketing decision rather than an artistic decision that the publisher will tell we're going to try to sell this as genre acts and that might come as a surprise there's certain writers you don't often sit out do you read popular fiction not much no I'm firmly in the in this snobbish literary cab then in prerequisite to be a globe colonist no no no and I'm certainly against social I'm bucking against the intellectual trends at the moment I mean I've certainly the most popular intellectual trend among among hipster thinkers if I could if I could phrase it so crude away is is to say that we should not make any of these distinctions anymore and that and this is a very post modernist attitude that the high and the low should be all jumbled together in our culture as they are in our everyday lives we must read them all with the same standards I still come back to this issue of a stylo because I do see frequently are there many many exceptions is a sweeping generalization but it frequently I've been reading a lot of why a young adult fiction recently because I've been I've been studying a lot of about self-publishing people who make a lot of money self-publishing these days tend to Reggiano fiction rather than literary fiction I often come from business backgrounds rather than an artistic backgrounds and a lot of young adult fiction is selling wildly without the help of publishers and institutions if you look at that which sells very well what affair very very well you'll find that there is a consistency of style there is a y:i style very different from the MFA style that Nick is describing where that is minimalist the way.i style maximalist it is chatty its explanatory there is a protagonist who thinks a lot and we are privy to her thoughts and it's explained in a kind of breathless conversational prose it's the opposite of the MFA dictum which is to show not tell it's telling rather than showing its maximalist right it's it's explicit rather than implicit let's get another view here if you would Sheldon let's bring up this graphic author Jennifer whiner believes that this isn't simply a matter of snobbery whereby quote unquote art is valued over commerce and populism but that a gender bias is at play to against fiction written by and for women Nick Hornby and David Nicholls she argues also write humorous highly commercial fiction often about relationships but are widely reviewed and highly regarded I do think there is an inherent double standard she says what men produce is deemed art what women produce is deemed craft what do you think it's directly that's certainly true yeah at the case anymore no I think it continues to be the case this is this is a long-standing trend I mean there there's the famous example in mid 19th century America of Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne complaining about hordes of scribbling women as kind of the it's almost a sort of mechanical physical motion rather than having any sort of thought involved in it so so I think that that Jennifer whiner is on to something I would say what I worry about is as as a sort of teacher of English is that fiction itself is becoming feminized that very few men are and very few young men under graduate age willingly embark on on the reading of fiction period Nick do we have to plead guilty do men have to plead guilty to the views just expressed by Jennifer whiner oh by and large I mean theatres right the main audience for fiction and certainly in this country has been you know since we started having knowledge that Seoul has been women and continues to be women I don't want the problem she's pointing to is quite as acute here precisely because that reason because most of our biggest writers are also women so you know you look there are four young women writers coming up in candid a there are very significant you know predecessors as models who were accepted as artists and artistic writers from the get-go so I don't think the problem that she's talking about as quite as acute here it does crop up but Jennifer even run into this double standard so is it a double standard I my experience of literary snobbery it typically the conversation typically starts with somebody approaching me and saying I haven't read any of your books but and then they launch into a critique of the books or the genre as a whole and when I was when my first book was published and I was still feeling overwhelmed by the fact that it's simply been published I I would be content to stand and talk with them and hear what they had to say even though it frankly was worthless in the sense that if you haven't read the books you're talking about where's where's your leg agenda and now I will typically say I just cut them off politely and say I can't have this conversation with you unless you've read my books you put do it do add and hundreds of thousands of people have incidentally know by themselves I suppose but but really and it happened it happens all the time where somebody has an opinion about a particular genre and they haven't necessarily read widely in that genre and it would be the similar to my pontificating about science fiction what's happening with science fiction even though that's a genre I enjoy when I read it but I certainly don't know enough about it to have have a learning opinion on it okay Nick let's try this are their best-selling books out there that those who see themselves mostly or only as literary readers ought to read hmm best-selling books that those are suitable I'm at again in Canada I think those books are already finding their audience so Audrey Alexis is 15 dogs which is both a critical success and the bestseller it's true in the States as well and we forget this but one of the one of the sort of pre requirements for a novel a modern American novel to become accepted in the classroom was that it first had to be Celer and part of that simply has to do with with professors noticing it yeah Thomas Pynchon is the crying of lot 49 was a best-seller and an extremely difficult book what is it vote I mean what would you say there's a genre book that fits clearly in genre that the literary person would be a snob not to read it's been a number of those accepted like sort of de noir novels in particular have been some elevated to the literary - a yeah I mean the most important distinction is ultimately between a good book and a bad book right wherever it comes from but there's still a difference one always you know there's a difference is that when literary writers write genre fiction they'd like to let you know that they know that they're writing John in fiction well let's as we approach summer considered not whether a book is good or bad but whether it is heavy or light because the assumption is as we go into the summer it is a time only for light reading because goodness knows we can't tax our brains with anything too heavy yet the cottage on the beach wherever going is that an appropriate way to approach the summer in your view Dedra I think summer does open up these or at least we have the illusion that we'll open up spaces in which we will get to read uninterrupted and I have to say I just choose very long books for the summer the ones that I know I won't be able to get finished during during the school year because you have fewer outside interruptions right I see no students in office hours in this summer yes so what's on your list um well what is on my list um I am going to reread actually Elena Ferrante this summer the Neapolitan quartet I've already read it once but I'm going to reread it why because you can read it once for the plot and then once for the astonishing style for what she's doing with the novel tradition with the tradition of having a single Harrow this is a book that has two heroines and or at least we think it does I think yourself though if I read us if I read a book that I've already read again what am I not getting a chance to read for the first time because I'm doing that I guess I think that but I also believe strongly and in kind of rereading just closing things to you that you don't see the first time and especially the first time you read the Ferrante novels you read for the plot you think what is the awful thing that is just around the corner for for these protagonists I want to see what it's like okay I should not be distracted by Russell later heavy this summer I don't even really get what that discussion might look like in practice I mean because because the books that are called light to me often seem a little bit dull and then I find that they're heavy for me to get through so I need some I mean I need to be excited to have fun I need intellectual stimulation and that might count as heavy to some people you want to personally I'm just beginning Don DeLillo's new novels you're okay which is a bit aphoristic and heavy in style but it has science fiction elements as it's set slightly in the future Nick what's on your list of summer I just started that's my research group so I started trying to read the what's it called the girl in the spider's nest the most recent one from from The Girl Who Kicked the hornets nest and I fell asleep yeah how about you so I have a stack of in my to be read you know the TBR pile that people talk about I have a stack that's that's built up over the last few months while I've been finishing my latest book one book that's on it is hazel gainers new historic work of historical fiction called the girl from The Savoy which is set in a period that I love in the 1920s and 1930s and she she exemplifies somebody who's writing she's at the top of her game so to speak in terms of writing historical fiction and the books are beautifully researched there you're propelled through them I find a very kind of compulsive reading I tend to her previous books I've picked up at 10:00 at night and then found myself finishing them in the wee hours and then I just I have a pile of nonfiction which is the research for my next book which I'm diving into you know I mean it feels like five minutes from now out of me I mean I can't really say just yet but it'll be set in the the next book that I just finished a set in the Second World War and then the book after that which I'm about to begin writing is set in the early post-war period so mid 1940s cool I am nothing like any of you I'm reading a biography of George Bush the father by Jon Meacham over the summer that's light reading for me I'm going to enjoy that I thanks so much everybody for coming around this table to TVO tonight and talking about literary fun helped EVO create a better world through the power of learning visit t v-- org and make a tax-deductible donation today

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 29,845

Rating: 4.8091874 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Literature, Books, Bestsellers, Fiction

Id: TtrWe1YaJNk

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2016