morgan leigh.

But the heart of Krystal’s argument, as I see it, is less about style than it is about plot. When we read genre fiction, Krystal writes, “it’s plot we want and plenty of it.” In Christie’s books, he says, nothing comes between us and the story. But what exactly does plot do? If nothing comes between us and the story, what exactly are we left with? Krystal alludes to, and honors, the power of story at the end of the essay — “if the story moves, we, almost involuntarily, move with it” — but he doesn’t appear to be willing to grant that a great story can mean something. Not the way literary fiction does.

This, most fundamentally, is where I disagree with Krystal. It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher.

I think a lot of you folks will love this. I agree with around 95% of it, which is pretty good. I guess my only sticking point is that for me reading genre fiction definitely is a comforting form of escapism (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). I don’t use my critical brain in exactly the same way when I read a fantasy novel (not that I do that very often anymore), or go watch an action movie, etc. But that doesn’t mean that crafting a genre novel (or film) isn’t an enormous amount of work and worthy of serious artistic consideration and admiration. I do not think, for instance, that The Avengers is a perfect movie, but I will be damned if I see a movie with a more technically impressive screenplay this year. That was a fucking accomplished piece of work, and it deserves to be recognized as such - just as all genre fiction does, even if it’s not asking to be considered in the same hyperintellectual way that highbrow works of art are.