Roundtable: McCarthy, Chabon, and Franzen
N. K. Jemisin
I agree — there’s something that SF/F readers are seeking in their fiction that mainstream readers neither expect nor want, and vice versa. Speaking in generalities, here… But I’m often surprised at how angry some readers get when they’re confronted by what are (to me) commonplace literary techniques like the ones I used in my first novel. I’m like, what, did they somehow escape doing that 20-page paper on James Joyce back in high school? (Wish I had.) I’m not doing anything new or groundbreaking, but the way some readers react to a little stream-of-consciousness or nonlinear narrative, you’d think I tried to convert them to a dead religion.
Which, now that I think about it, is a really appropriate analogy. For some SF/F readers, this genre is more than just something they like to read; it’s a part of their identity. It’s associated with a lifestyle and modes of thought that they’ve probably meticulously constructed over a lifetime, and which they’ve no doubt had to defend against detractors — I know I’ve gotten my share of “When are you going to read/write some real (literary) fiction?” cracks. After embracing the geek identity for a few years, for some readers it must be offensive to then see literary writers get praise for reading/writing what SF/F fans have been ridiculed for. And by the same token, maybe SF/F fans get angry at the encroachment of literary “culture” (and writing that smacks of it) on their preferred genre because it feels like an invasion — and to like that encroachment would be a betrayal of who they are.
So the embrace of idea over story, etc., might be part of this.
(Note that I’m not saying that literary fiction techniques = good writing. It’s just that “good writing” is a little nebulous, and since you mentioned “literary training” I was trying to use something more concrete to discuss.)
Karen Joy Fowler
In meeting with and participating in book clubs, I’ve become more aware of different kinds of readers. Some readers are willing to read the beginning chapters of a book in a state of substantial confusion. These readers are confident that if they just keep reading things will come clear. Figuring things out is something they actually LIKE to do.
Other readers find that period of confusion intensely unengaging. They maybe like to figure out for themselves who the murderer is, but not the whole world of the story, not the vocabulary in which the story is told. They really don’t like not knowing where they are, even for a little while, which unfits them for much of sf. I don’t know, because I haven’t read it, if this second type of reader will like The Road or not. I know they have trouble with A Canticle for Leibowitz because I’ve made them try.
John Clute
I don’t think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road exactly rides unacknowledged on the shoulders of his predecessors; putting aside the question of acknowledgement (I don’t think McCarthy talks about anything very much outside the frame of what he writes), I rather think The Road rides comfortably in the saddle of the prior, makes no bones about doing so (which is to say he does not atwoodishly deny that he is doing so, which is enough for me), and adds a welcome reborn intensity to the mode.
It is, moreover, impossible not to read the book as sf without making a fool of yourself. I was sort of attending (and quasi-mentoring from an sf critic’s standpoint) two papers on The Road given last year at the Monash Conference in Melbourne. The word sf was ne’er heard at all, the papers (over and above suffering occupational sclerosis as usual) were genuinely uncomprehending and virtually incomprehensible. I think the most cogent thing said (it wasn’t really cogent at all, of course) was that the road itself was a semiotic marker of the gap between late industrial capitalism and the discourse of wilderness, or some such. In other words, Cormac McCarthy clearly knew what he was writing, or it would not have been incomprehensible to those who didn’t know what he was writing.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Interestingly (well, to me it was) Chabon did an essay on The Road which began by discussing how hard many critics worked to avoid saying ‘sf’ and how silly all that was … And then he ended up with what was probably meant to be a flourish (Chabon’s endings are his big problem for me, anyhow) by declaring ‘Anyhow, it isn’t sf, it is …horror!’
The horror.
John and a few others here know I have always felt we collectively waste a ton of time in categorization, anyhow.
There will be a couple more spin-offs of this discussion to come next week.
