Roundtable: McCarthy, Chabon, and Franzen

Rich Horton

Franzen grew up about a mile from where I live, so I find his memoirish stuff fascinating, as I recognize the locations quite readily. But his fiction has never looked interesting to me, though there is a copy of The Corrections on my bookshelf, unread.

I have no doubt that Chabon’s professed affection for the field stands him in good stead with genre insiders, but frankly The Road, for all its considerable virtues, does seem quite a lot less “original” than The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I mean, wholly so, really.

Cecelia Holland

The Road for me works very satisfyingly as an allegory of Christianity. The apocalyptic furnishings are a little shopworn but McCarthy is a nut about god.

Siobhan Carroll

I heard more than one complaint that McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel was a less than original conception that stood on the shoulders of unacknowledged giants; I heard no such complaints about Chabon’s alternate history novel.

And therein lies an interesting divide: are SF novels rewarded for good writing? Or for originality?

I don’t think The Road’s non-genre reviewers cared whether McCarthy was doing a New Thing in writing a postapocalyptic novel. They were more interested in whether his stark postapocalyptic fable worked both a fable and as an emotionally-involving story. Whether you found The Road engaging or not, complaining about the story’s failure to acknowledge or push the boundaries of the post-apocalyptic subgenre seems to me to miss what the novel itself is striving for.

I wonder if the kind of “literary training” SF readers receive might not work against the acceptance of novels like The Road. Listening to complaints about The Road’s worldbuilding seems to me to be like listening to a Tolkien fan complain about “Cinderella” because the fairy tale’s magic system and culture hadn’t been thought out properly. Yes, both fairy tales and epic fantasy can be classified as “fantasy,” but they’re aiming at different objects. (A still better comparison might be a fan of beast fantasies like Watership Down complaining about Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’s lack of complex worldbuilding.)

Back to my original question, though, I’ve definitely read some award-winning SF novels that seemed to me to have been rewarded more for their exploration of the ramifications of a new technology than for telling an involving story. It strikes me that well-told stories with engaging characters — whether genre or literary — have a far greater chance of finding readers beyond their traditional audience. Perhaps the difficulty faced by some adult SF novels in transcending the genre ghetto is because they have prioritized ideas over story?

To pick up on another implication of Brett’s remark:

that stood on the shoulders of unacknowledged giants

I wonder if award-winning SF faces a similar dilemma to that faced by the authors of academic books. Reviewers and judges tend to be well-versed in the history of their particular genre; they know the work of the “giants,” and the books most likely to interest them are those that acknowledge the giants by building on previous work to construct something new.

However, such books are rarely going to be embraced by the general public. Joe Public reader is looking for an entry-level SF novel/a general history of American presidents. Joe Public Reader does not want to read 50 books in order to appreciate the virtues of the one he has just lifted from the shelf. By this formulation, the SF books most likely to achieve extra-genre success are those that assume their readers know nothing about the genre. Which, as a previous commentator remarked, is probably one of the reasons YA books have an easier time “breaking out” than adult award winners.

Cecelia Holland

I agree with this. Sf’s focus is often so much on the set-up, the world, the gimmick, and the working out of the implications of the gimmick, that it sacrifices story and character, which are the primary reasons people reading mainstream writing. This thinking is glaringly obvious in the remarks on The Road. The box sf is in is often way too small.