How to write a book that 'transcends' commercial fiction

I've observed that there is a crop of recent awards-nominated literary books that draw heavily from commercial fiction, but are seen, by critics, as elevating or transcending the commercial elements they supposedly embody.

The problem is that this transcendence often manifests through techniques that slow down the reading experience and break the novel’s implicit promises to the reader. You see, if you're writing high-brow fiction, then you need at all times to maintain that separation between your work and popular fiction. You have to aestheticize these ostensibly-commercial elements. The reader must always be reminded that it's the form of this book that's truly important, rather than the content.

The literary novel seeking to maintain an elevated separation from ostensibly-commercial elements can use three major tricks: objectivity; misdirection; and subversion.

Essentially all three tricks are the same. They seek to create an object that must be high art, because it doesn't give nearly as much pleasure as the 'low' novels that it resembles. The message "You are reading an important work of art" is baked right into the form, because the only reason to read something boring is because it's art!

To utilize objectivity, you create a situation where the reader would expect the book to come down firmly on one side or another. For instance, if you're writing about a serial killer, you take the point of view of a woman who is in love with the serial killer and obsessed with the serial killer. You lovingly describe her feeling that only she can tame this man, that only she can truly understand the hunger that drives him. In a commercial novel, eventually there'd be a moment of understanding, where this man finally betrays her, and she realizes that she is his prey—she is just another victim. But in a literary novel, that doesn't happen—he kills and eats her, and she never betrays a moment of shock or hurt.¹

To utilize misdirection, you dwell at length on images that are completely ancillary to the story you're purportedly attempting to tell. For instance, if this is a novel about the suffragettes, you write extensively about fields and trees and things that really have nothing to do with their attempt to get the vote, or with the core of their emotional lives—you include the kinds of scenes that could take place just as easily in any novel, about anything. These scenes are so obviously out of place that the reader assumes there must be some higher purpose for their inclusion.

To utilize subversion, you simply undermine the expectations inherent in the story you set out to tell. If it's a love story, then they break up at the end. If it's ostensibly a thriller, then they never actually confront the serial killer or other erstwhile enemy. If it's a detective story, then the mystery is never solved. These are things that any genre novelist could do, and many have considered doing them (in a "wouldn't this be so funny?" sort of way), but they resist the temptation, because their publisher wouldn't stand for it and their audience would rebel. In a literary novel, this subversion reads as 'bravery' (a refusal to give the audience what it wants), when in reality it's quite literally the most obvious thing that could happen—obviously most mysteries aren't solved, that's why they're mysteries—most enemies never get defeated in heroic confrontations—most relationships end in heartbreak. Anyone could write the most obvious ending, the entire reason we read a commercial novel is to see how the author manages to avoid writing the obvious ending.²

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The final trick is achieving the social standing that allows you, as the literary writer, to do things that most genre novelists would never be allowed to do. This is the hardest task of all. What you need is to steadily accumulate markers of your own talent and intellect. This involves reading the room very carefully. It begins in your MFA workshop—you look for the things that your students and instructors find most impressive—the figures of speech, the story elements, the sets of situations—you lean into these things. You learn to surprise your instructors and peers, to wow them. The trick is, your audience as a literary writer consists of a tiny subset of the overall reading audience. You need to learn how to cultivate that spark in their mind of 'This is brilliant!' You need to learn which figures, which tones, which techniques, will give rise to that spark.

Fundamentally, it's a matter of fashion. In one era, a cool, clipped detached tone will do it; in another era, it requires a lot of extended, overwrought metaphors. This is precisely why feedback ("Oh my god, I couldn't believe the story went right into their bedroom") is so valuable—it teaches you exactly how to wow people.

It’s not that MFA program teach you how to write badly; it’s that in order to succeed in literary fiction, you’ll need to learn how to impress the sorts of people you’re likely to meet in your MFA program. In many ways, the MFA workshop audience is the hardest to truly impress, because it’s the only audience you come at de novo, without the imprimatur of awards and other credentials. By learning how to impress these people, you gain the ability to write stuff that will impress other people.

That’s all fine, that’s exactly how workshop is supposed to work.

The key is, once you’ve learned how to impress these kinds of people, you can take that set of tricks and impress other people—journal editors and the selection committees for various minor fellowships. After a while, this gives you a fund of credibility that you can trade upon in various ways. And one of the ways people choose to trade upon that credibility is by writing fiction, like these genre novel pastiches, that is aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment. It does become an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario, unfortunately, where because we know the author has been hailed as a talent, we assume there must be something in this book that we haven’t seen before. If someone presented this book to us without that halo of respectability attached to it, we’d instantly dismiss the book. We simply wouldn’t read it at all. But because they’ve gotten respect for their previous works, we assume there’s something deeper here.

In some cases, the author is respectful of our time. For instance, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I enjoyed reading the book. But is it really better than, say, David Brin’s The Postman, which is a book that’s about exactly the same thing—how the vestiges of the liberal order can have meaning even after that order has collapsed? No, I don’t think it is. Station Eleven is still a good book, but fundamentally it’s a book that we’re discussing because it’s written by the right kind of person, with the right kind of pedigree.³

In other cases, the author produces something that no genre writer could’ve ever produced and that’s good! Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is so bleak! It also makes no sense on any logical level—how would this society even work if there’s literally nothing that’s alive other than human beings? Like…what disaster could even produce that effect? But…the book keeps you reading! When it won the Pulitzer there was definitely some anger in sci-fi circles—this guy is using our tools and our tropes and winning mainstream respect. But…I felt even at the time like the anger wasn’t merited. The book was genuinely quite different from anything in the sci-fi world.

Neither of these books would’ve gotten attention if they hadn’t been presented to the world as being written by serious writers, who elevated their subject matter. I think it’s fine to give writers some kind of leeway, especially when their prior works are genuinely good.

But…works should still be entertaining. The Road and Station Eleven were readable and entertaining on a page-by-page level. Almost all the best works are. The tools of genre fiction are nothing more than tools for moving the reader from page one to page three hundred and fifty-seven. Literary fiction definitely has different tools, and I think those tools can be in productive dialogue with each other, but if you eschew the tools of genre fiction, that is not by itself a praiseworthy choice. You need to offer up something else.

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With Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, which I read last week for a book club, all the reviews tell us that this is a spy novel. It’s about a young(ish) woman who’s hired by some mysterious corporate backers to infiltrate a group of ecological activists.

The problem with writing about this book is that there’s no way to describe it without making it appear to have more substance than it has.

For instance, it’s clear that the people she’s infiltrating aren’t really up to anything in particular, so the woman, our protagonist, is more agent provocateur than spy. But…why? To what end? Is this a real phenomenon, where corporations hire agents provocateur to foment phony environmental direct action in rural France? It seems like the kind of thing that could be real…but is it?

It honestly seems churlish even to ask. The book is so insubstantial, it doesn’t take its own premise seriously at all. What is this book trying to do? What is it trying to say? It’s certainly not trying to tell a story of any recognizable sort. Okay, great, so what is it trying to do? What’s the point?⁴

Every time I write about a book like this, people chime in to say, “I love things that are different from anything I’ve ever seen before.” Okay…so do I. But this book is boring. There’s just nothing there. It becomes very hard to describe the emptiness of this book, because it’s so aggressive and obvious. Even to describe its story or characters seems pointless, because those things occupy very little of the book you’re actually reading.

The book largely consists of three kinds of passages: lifeless setting description that has nothing to do with the story; pointless factoids that sound like they've been gleaned from Wikipedia; and narration of the woman's satisfaction at how easily she's tricking all these men.⁵

Some of the factoids are interesting—I learned about an untouchable class in France called the Cagots—very fascinating, had never heard of them before. But most of the factoids are about the Neanderthals, and I did not find them interesting, because...I already knew that the Neanderthals were the equal of anatomically modern humans. I never thought they were an inferior species at all—most educated people understand, I think, that the Neanderthals lost the intra-human competition for reasons that had nothing to do with their intelligence, soulfulness, or other human characteristics. We also understand that for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, people walked the Earth who were more or less exactly the same as us, aside from their lack of agriculture and writing. Legions of anthropologists have made the point, in legions of popular nonfiction books, that Neolithic people might’ve had a much broader range of family and social configurations than are possible in the modern world, and that if we studied these people we might discover that perhaps mankind is not naturally prone to violence or to hierarchy.

None of that is new! But if you want to write a book about that, then actually write a book about it—don't just put a bunch of suggestive factoids into a novel that's otherwise about nothing at all.⁶

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I do think this book’s vapidness is a key part of its appeal to critics and awards juries. This vacuousness means it doesn’t actually say anything controversial, but because it’s hard to read, it gives the appearance of being ‘difficult’.

However…writing this kind of book is not hard. Anyone could write a book like this! You just tell people a book is one kind of novel (a spy novel), but you present them with a book that doesn’t in any way resemble that sort of book. Voila, you’ve deconstructed a genre and said something profound about…something.

Most writers understand that although there are a few tricks you can use to create the impression that you’re extremely talented, these tricks should be used sparingly. Most writers aim for the minimum possible amount of manipulation—just enough to get published, and then no more. And most writers attempt over time to dial down their manipulation. And that is precisely why most writers are not successes.

You might ask, what is the point of being a success if it really has so little do with literary quality? Well...I don't know, I would imagine that many successful writers don't have a strong sense of what's important or what they'd really like to say. They’re just so used to emitting hot air that the production of these books really poses no difficulties. You get money. You get to travel. You get the admiration of thousands of people. Other writers have to teach undergrads or work day jobs—the successful writer doesn't. And writing these books isn't particularly difficult—it takes about two or three hours a day (although obviously you tell people it takes much longer).

I don’t think Rachel Kushner is insincere, but I do think the book is quite condescending. There’s such a cult of nuance amongst writers—this idea that people are addicted to easy answers, and the point of serious literature is to resist those answers. I agree that nuance is good. But…I don’t think disrupting narrative conventions constitutes nuance. Emptiness is not nuance.

1. I would say all this critique of Sally Rooney (that she essentially writes women's fiction) arises because her books lack of objectivity. Her characters actually fall in love, believe in love, are ennobled by love. I doesn't think that makes them bad books! Personally I question the meaningfulness of the literary-commercial divide as an actual marker of quality, rather than a mere marketing category. Some of her books could succeed, with minor alterations (mostly to the endings) as women's fiction, and so what? A lot of women's fiction is good! In other countries (I am guessing Ireland is one of these) they don't even have artificial literary-commercial distinctions. They just have books—some of those books get awards, some don't. But they don't decide per se, before the book is even published, that this is gonna be one of those award-winning books, from an award-winning book imprint. Obviously in these countries an author still doesn't win awards unless they know people and have the right pedigree, but everything is much less formal and all this ranking is much more invisible to the reader. Their snobbery isn't quite so formalized in the very corporate structure of the industry.

2. It might sound like I'm saying literary novels are uniformly worse than commercial novels. I don't think that's true. However, I find that the average literary novel is worse than the average commercial novel, because the latter almost always has a basic throughline that pulls the reader through the story. Most contemporary literary novels that succeed are those that hew quite closely to the expectations of the domestic realist novel—a genre of its own, with its own distinct structure, which combines careful examination of manners with some (but hopefully not too much!) attention to the protagonist’s moment-to-moment experience of life: Fleischmann Is In Trouble and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P and Luster and Such A Fun Age are all examples of this genre that I thought worked very well. Some minority of literary novels are both: a) good; and b) unrecognizably odd. An example is A Little Life. What the fuck is A Little Life? This book is so fucking bananas: one third of the book is just gruesomely unnecessary sexual torture. If I was an agent or editor or even a critic, I doubt I’d have supported this book—I would've thought it was much too strange and self-indulgent. But ultimately…the book does work. These are the books that give literary fiction its reason for continuing to exist as a distinct category where unclassifiably odd books can, hopefully, find a readership.

3. Station Eleven is also a book that uses misdirection to establish its literary bona fides. The book skips back and forth between pre- and post-plague life. But…at the end of the day, there really was not much of a logical or thematic connection between the pre- and post-plague timelines. Both were individually interesting to read, but the fact that they’re present in the same book makes an implicit promise to the reader that this will cohere somehow, and that did not happen. Like, yes, it would be amazing if you could tell some coherent story that spans ordinary life both before and after an apocalypse. That sounds so ambitious and wonderful! But the point of an apocalypse is that it disrupts ordinary life, so in practice Station Eleven’s aims are quite hard thing to achieve. There’s a Neal Stephenson book, Seveneves, that tries to do something similar: it’s about how a group of people respond to the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse. It contains a time jump that skips forward five thousand years, so you can see the ramifications of the initial group’s decisions. It’s breathtakingly ambitious—I also think it didn’t totally work, but at least the book contains some coherent theory for why these two halves are part of the same book.

4. Brandon Taylor wrote a review of Creation Lake in LRB, and although his review is an outlier (the vast majority of notices for the book were positive), his take is also largely correct.

He made a mistake bringing up Zola in his review, because it felt pointless and made him sound hostile to Kushner’s intentions, but I understood the temptation. When you’re reviewing a book like this, you always want to be like, “Where did the author go wrong? What was the author failing to achieve?” But in this book, the aims are so unclear that it seems pointless to interrogate them. Emile Zola’s Germinal is indeed a much superior book that’s about direct action amongst disenfranchised people in rural France, and if I’d read it recently, I could see the temptation to bring it up.

5. Description:

This steep connector switchbacked down to the D43 past huge walls of limestone. As I walked, the high sun illuminated uncanny colors in the limestone, colors so vibrant and bright they looked artificial. Some areas were lavender, but patterned with lichen that was gold-bright like ground turmeric. Other lichens were creamy white and stretched along the rock face like embroidery. I passed, on these switchbacks, limestone cliffs that were striped in lemon yellow. Aren’t rocks supposed to be gray? I passed bands that were streaked the red of freshly butchered meat. Farther along this same section of rock shelf were drips of pale pink like candy hearts, and then thick vertical washes of baby blue. This had to be paint. I stopped to inspect. I touched the rock. It was warm as a body, from the sun. It wasn’t paint. The color was inside the limestone.

Factoids:

The old story about [Neanderthal], Bruno said, was that he hunted only slower terrestrial prey that was easy to catch. It was believed that the fastest-moving non-terrestrial creatures—birds and fish—were far beyond Thal’s grasp.

But over the last two decades, Bruno said, there has been new evidence that Neanderthals regularly caught corvids, pigeons, and choughs. Scientists conducted an experiment in Croatia to reproduce the Neanderthal conditions for night-hunting of choughs and found there was no “hunting” involved: the birds settle down for the evening in the nooks of a cave. The scientists went into the cave with headlamps and began picking up sleeping choughs and placing them in a basket. In their findings they reported that picking up these birds, one by one, was like picking apples from the low branches of an apple tree.

Self-Satisfaction:

It was curious to realize, as I tasted these grapes, how much I knew about this region, a place I couldn’t care less about. I would not be here long, and when the job was finished, I would never see this remote little corner of France again. I would drive the rental car to Paris and meet my contacts and get fresh documents and then it would be a flight from Charles de Gaulle to my next destination. This place would all but cease to exist.

6. Personally, I think a factoid novel can be interesting. I like David Markson as much as the next girl. I liked Dept. of Speculation a lot too. But at a minimum, the factoids have to be individually interesting. If they don’t meet that threshold, the novel fails.