Tag: literary fiction

On YA, genre and litratcher

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I was originally going to write a review of this book and discuss this in the review, but I took a nap this afternoon and still have 60-some pages left. Why did I just say “this book” and not the name of the book? Well, I’m doing that thing where I don’t want this post necessarily showing up in search results for the book, especially since this post is going to be pretty critical and it’s important for you to know that I’m really enjoying the read. I’m going to be a little sneaky about which title I’m talking about, though. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

I am a lifelong genre reader, and for most of that time I’ve been fairly open about my disdain for what people call Literary Fiction. Feel free to blame it on me being too dumb for Literary Fiction. That’s fine. I have an ego but for some reason it doesn’t extend to being bothered by that particular allegation. I don’t get most of the examples of the genre I’ve read; I usually don’t understand why anyone bothered to write the book in the first place and I understand even less what anyone is talking about when they praise them. In particular, use of the word “comic” can be a red flag. One guarantee is that any time a book reviewer I’ve never heard of describes a book as “comic” is that it will not, in any way, be funny. In fact, for the most part, it won’t even be trying to be funny and failing. “Comic” means something else to Literature People. I don’t know what it means and I’m not going to bother finding out.

This particular book has a bunch of pull quotes by people I’ve never heard of who wrote books I’ve never heard of on the back. The sole exception is George Saunders; I’ve heard of him and I know he’s fancy but that’s all I can tell you. The blurbs aren’t as bad as they can get; none of them appear to be random collections of words, and none of them use words that should not be used to describe books (“deliciously turquoise and refreshing prose”– HARPER’S) in them. But this was on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books list, which usually means only ten people read it, and it was a National Book Award finalist. Here is the list of every National Book Award winner. I admit, I have read five of them– interestingly, all but one nonfiction winners– and I have never heard of considerably more than five.

Anyway, this book should have been YA and nothing, nothing will convince me otherwise.

If the exact same book had been written by a woman, it would be shelved with YA. It’s The Hunger Games with a more complicated vocabulary, more swearing, and footnotes about the American carceral system. The premise is the most YA-coded thing I’ve ever seen; the idea is that incarcerated criminals can get their sentences commuted if they agree to engage in gladiator combat to the death every so often; if they make it three years and are still alive, they get to go free. They earn something called, no shit, Blood Points as they work their way through the combats; Blood Points can be cashed in for food, weapons, armor, better accommodations, shit like that. There’s this weird color-coded & scientifically implausible technology built into their wrists so that their captors can torture them for talking.

And partway through the book the main character finds out that she’s going to have to fight her girlfriend in her final fight– the convicts are loosely organized into teams, and a rule change means people on the same team have to fight if they’re at the same rank– and predictable angst occurs.

Come the fuck on.

Now, I’m not done with the book, so I don’t know whether the two characters are actually going to fight or not, but this is one hundred percent a science fiction dystopia that would have been shelved with YA with a different author. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! I’m thoroughly enjoying the book, and I’ll finish it tonight, having burned through its 360 pages in less than a day. Unless it completely blows the ending, it’s gonna be a five-star review. But looking at these blurbs and a couple of other pieces about it, it’s hilariously obvious that most of the people reading it have never touched dystopian literature in their lives and haven’t read any YA at all, because … one thing this book is very much not is especially original. I could have sketched out a broad outline of the plot within ten pages of the start of the book. So could anyone who has read any YA in the last fifteen or so years. I’m not going to look up how long ago Hunger Games came out because I don’t feel like being old. But there are a ton of “blabla has to fight to the death, because Reasons, plus fascism” books out there and while this is an excellent example of one, that’s still exactly what it is.

I’ve got lesson planning to do and then I really do want to finish this book tonight, so I’m going to leave this here– I probably will do a second post once I’ve finished the book, though. But come on, guys. Somebody got chocolate in your peanut butter and peanut butter in your chocolate and you’re doing your level damn best to not admit that you’ve got a Reese Cup in front of you. It’s a Reese Cup. We love Reese Cups. Just admit what it is and eat the damn thing.

On Bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading9 Comments

This post has the feel, to me, of something that has the potential to go viral in all the wrong ways, so let me be a hundred percent clear before I get started: Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water isn’t a bad book. It is not a book I especially enjoyed, and now that I’ve finished it I don’t find it especially likely that I’ll ever pick it up again, but that’s on me: literary fiction is not my thing, and this was a rare example of a book that just sort of grabbed me out of nowhere and made me buy it, knowing full well at the time that I was likely to have … well, precisely this reaction to it. It’s 715 pages long and it took me nine days to read, which is a fucking eternity for me, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all on the site were it not for the fact that I happened to take a good look at the blurbs on the back cover and, my God, they are completely out of control. I know what blurbs are supposed to do; they are to sell the book, and whatever editor is in charge of such things is likely to choose the most heavily enthusiastic bits out of the entire blurb to highlight. I get all that. But this level of praise is bordering on unhinged, and I think you need to see it.

That’s … really high praise! Really, really high! I don’t think I’ve ever been “overtaken with joy” even once in my entire life, and I’ve never “caught my breath” while reading a book, or at least if I have I don’t remember it. I am genuinely unsure what the hell the third sentence means; it has the feel of something that was translated from some other language, but the author of the blurb is a fellow Hoosier, born in Kokomo and currently teaching at the University of Oklahoma, of all the Godforsaken places on the planet. One assumes, then, that this was not translated, and thus it’s just incomprehensible. Or at least uncomprehended. One of my problems with literary fiction is the lingering feeling, while I’m reading it, that I’m just not smart enough to understand why it’s good. Like, I read genre fiction, and the people who read literary fiction openly look down on us, and we just accept it and move on with our lives; our shit isn’t as Good or as Important as theirs is … for some fucking reason that I’m also too dumb to have ever figured out. To start an entirely unrelated argument here, if I can get over this bullshit with Christians and morality you’d think I’d be able to get over it with literary fiction and intelligence, but apparently not yet. The gaslighting continues unabated.

(Again, not complaining about the book. It’s not a bad book. It’s just very much a Not for Me book. I three-starred it, and I could be convinced to raise that to four, especially since I really felt the book stuck the ending. But I was never going to love this.)

But, okay. She was overtaken with joy from the first page of the book. Again, maybe I just don’t get it! Let’s look at that first page. Surely fair use allows me to pull out 1/715 of the entire book, right? That’s .13%. I’m good:

Be honest: are you overtaken with joy right now?

To me, the most significant thing about this first page is that I genuinely have nothing to say about it. I’ve certainly read first pages and first paragraphs and first sentences that grabbed me by the shorthairs and didn’t let go, and I’ve read first pages that let me know in no uncertain terms that I was in for some godawful bullshit and I should either put the book down or buckle the fuck in. But … this is just a page of writing, to me. It’s certainly not bad writing and I have no complaints; the imagery is nice, but let’s be real, you could lose the paragraph about the bird and no damage would be done. Or would it? Maybe the bird is symbolic or some shit; I have no idea. But one way or another, I don’t feel anything in particular from having read this. I wouldn’t put the book down, but if you handed me just the first page and asked me if I was excited to read the rest, I’d shrug.

You tell me; I’ll believe you: what’s your reaction to this first page? What am I missing here?

The rest of the quotes on the back are not much better, by the way. Let me know if you want to see more.