Chad Taylor

Do your thing


In a sure-to-be-discussed-everywhere article Kim Wright asks why so many literary writers are shifting to genre:
The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground and the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there does seem to be a definite trend of literary/mainstream writers turning to romance, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and YA.
The evidence may not be empirical but this does seem to be a trend. If it is I would answer the question by saying that literary authors were always writing in a genre in the first place. John Birmingham and I stumbled towards saying this at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2003:
"Big L" literature, as they describe it [says John Birmingham] no longer connects to the real world. It's left to "small L" literature writers, the journalists, crime writers and drug scribes, to get their fingers dirty and get the meaty stories out there." 
"I really love literature, you need it like you need vegetables," said Taylor. "But it's become this timid thing."
Strolling around a big bookstore (because I find less in them to stop and read, let alone buy) this timidity becomes apparent. From subject to tone to style to title and packaging, "literature" follows as many rules as "romance" or "historical."

David Mamet spotted the "trend" in 2000:
For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le CarrĂ©, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian. 
Each year, of course, found the press discovering some writer whose style, provenance and choice of theme it found endearing. These usually trig, slim tomes shared a wistful and self-commendatory confusion at the multiplicity of life and stank of Art. But the genre writers wrote without sentimentality; their prose was concise and perceptive; in it the reader sees the life of which they wrote, rather than the writer's "technique."
O'Brian wrote the Master and Commander novels, of which Our Mr Reynolds was a great fan. He was always pressing them on me. I didn't like them so much but we found common ground in Le CarrĂ© – the early ones, at least.

Maybe lit's still good. There's crap in the genre shelves as well. The Clean said it best: Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten.