In Praise of Genre Fiction
Being a short defense of the joy and importance of reading trash for fun
Auden devoured detective fiction (and wrote a wonderful ode to the form). Gershom Scholem, a personal intellectual hero of mine, also loved the genre. Just this week Doris Kearns Goodwin noted the piles of them in her home in the New York Times. Science fiction permeates the culture of silicon valley with Bill Gates to Dario Amodei from Anthropic name dropping everything from Heinlein to the Expanse series. Other genres (i.e. Romance and Horror) perhaps still have the whiff of the unacceptable about them but I can tell you of brilliant lawyers I know inhale romance novels, and whip smart writers who can talk at length about the development of the modern horror novel.
Readers read and many of them read mounds and mounds of largely forgettable genre fiction. I know I do.
Why? The answers are myriad. As an escape from the rigorous reading many do for work; as a way to engage with the written world in a low pressure way; as reps to keep the reading skill sharp; for fun; and even, we should admit, as Auden says, as an addiction.
The genres which I engage with the most (the crime novel, espionage fiction, and science fiction) provide peculiar gifts of their own. The crime novel at its best is almost always a story of a place. James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, George Pelacanos’s D.C.,, Attica Locke’s Texas. They usually feature a troubled protagonist who knows the city better than anyone else ever will. They love it, like Connley’s Harry Bosch loves Los Angeles, even when they claim to hate it, despite or perhaps even because of, its horrors and flaws. They take you inside it in ways only a crime novel can and I adore it.
Science fiction is, as you will always hear, a genre of ideas. The most common critique you’ll is its all ideas and no character. That’s fine by me. I didn’t read Foundation for the characters, I read it for the world building and the society Asimov constructed. Sometimes you luck into getting well formed characters, a propulsive plot, AND interesting ideas (i.e. the Expanse series) but even when you don’t, it can still be enormously fun just to cruise through space with a MurderBot addicted to bad TV.
It doesn’t all have to be brilliant. Not everyone is Raymond Chandler or Ada Palmer. There’s something wonderful (and perhaps also genius) about Lee Child who for decades gave us variations on the good guy comes to town motif with Jack Reacher and had me hoovering up the books as fast as he could write them.
I can justify reading Child because his prose is razor sharp. I can tell you I read Neal Stephenson because he’s one of our leading authors of ideas, or that I adore Attica Locke because she has stood the traditional crime novel on its head. All of that is true, but it’s also true that I read them because they’re enjoyable, that they fill my evening with story and character and ideas in a way that feels, well, good. That is, in itself, enough.
I’m about to board a flight home from a trip to Florida. On the way here I demolished a military near future novel about war with China. On the way home, I’ll hoover up a thriller about CIA surveillance. Neither of these books is likely to change my life. A year from now when I am doing my year end book round up I’ll probably struggle to remember the finer points of their plots. But I’ll enjoy the experience and isn’t that enough to ask from a book?