Tag: bookish thoughts

Literary Fiction Book Tag

I haven’t done one of those book tags that make the rounds in a good long while, have I? (I haven’t done much of anything on this blog in a good long while, but that’s another story.) Today I’d like to fix that with a post inspired by the YouTube channel Jasmine’s Reads. Jasmine is one of my favorite presenters in the BookTube community, and seeing how she’s just unveiled her first book tag, I thought I’d do my (undoubtedly minuscule) part in spreading it.

It’s called the Literary Fiction Book Tag, and it’s precisely that: eight questions on the subject of literary fiction. I recommend watching the original video below if you’d like to get a sense of the tag’s purpose before diving in.

One confession before getting started: the prompts below all refer to “literary fiction novels,” but for some of my answers I’ve used high-concept short story collections instead, both because short stories could always use more love and because, after reflection, it turns out I read a lot fewer novels of recent vintage than I’d figured. With that out of the way…

#1: How do you define literary fiction?

I have two ways of defining “literary fiction,” and I shift back and forth between them depending on how cynical I happen to be feeling. The more cynical approach is to say that literary fiction is purely a marketing term, that it says nothing about the content of the work and everything about the sort of person that the publishing and book-selling industries think is likely to buy it. You can probably conjure the stereotype of someone who reads these sorts of books: college-educated, financially well-off, probably subscribes to the New York Times and supports their local NPR affiliate. In this view of the term, “literary fiction” is a signal to this demographic that they ought to read this particular book.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this perspective, especially in a world where books are commodities and not just works of aesthetic appreciation. But I can’t deny that, when I hear a book described as “literary fiction,” I do make certain assumptions about the book’s content. As I tend to think of genres as sets of audience expectations about a given work, it would be fair to say that literary fiction is a broad genre, one that’s closer to “young adult” than it is to “western” in terms of specificity. In her video, Jasmine lists off just about every element I’d anticipate: “social, political, or human commentary; introspective character exploration; not being focused or driven by plot; and also, a large focus on language.” So long as a work meets some of those criteria, one has grounds to place it into the genre of literary fiction.

You’ll note that these two definitions are not contradictory, and in fact may support each other. It could be the case that the supply of literary fiction creates its own demand, which in turn reinforces the industry’s decision to market books in such a way. Nothing wrong with shifting back and forth between definitions when they can coexist.

#2: Name a literary fiction novel with a brilliant character study.

Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

Wonderful, Wonderful Times follows four young adults in post-WWII Austria who are, by any objective account, monstrous. Their adolescent thrill-seeking takes the form of gratuitous violence, whether that means assaulting people in the park late at night or attempting to drown a cat to reenact a scene from Sartre. But while Jelinek is unrelenting in her depictions of moral rot, she still her has empathy for her creations. I’ve written about these characters before, so I won’t belabor the point here, but the longer the novel goes on, the more that Jelinek pricks at the façade that each of the young adults has constructed. We see, for instance, how Rainer’s obsession with existentialism covers for his own naivete, or how Sepp’s upbringing in a Communist household contextualizes his humiliating and combustible relationship with the aristocratic Sophie. The characters of Wonderful, Wonderful Times may be reprehensible at every turn, but their humanity still glows through all the grime.

#3: Name a literary fiction novel that has experimental or unique writing.

Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue

The short version: this book is about a tennis match, in which the Spanish poet Quevedo and the Italian painter Caravaggio trade points in what turns out to be a literal fight to the death. But reading this book bears no resemblance to reading a newspaper write-up of Wimbledon. In Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue intersperses his descriptions of rallies with histories of colonialism in the New World, excerpts from historical documents about tennis (both real and fictional), correspondence with his frustrated editor—just about everything that he can serve up. The result is a narrative that is, admittedly, very difficult to follow at times, but the whiplash between sections works surprisingly well in simulating the experience of playing tennis. Sudden Death also has a taste for the bizarre that keeps the novel from getting too self-serious; for instance, the ball that Quevedo and Caravaggio are playing with is made from Anne Boleyn’s hair, and how that ball came to be is a significant early through-line in the novel. This book may not be to everyone’s (anyone’s?) taste, but oh, am I glad that this sort of thing exists.

#4: Name a literary fiction novel with an interesting structure.

Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith

Public Library and Other Stories is really two books, which it alternates between. The one book is a fairly convention contemporary short story collection, albeit one with a notable fixation on literary history. The other book, though, is what makes this collection interesting to me. Ali Smith assembled this collection in response to the defunding and closing of libraries in the United Kingdom, and she includes numerous testimonials about the importance of libraries as community institutions. The testimonials not only work to justify public support for libraries, but also work to justify the rest of the collection. Remove all those heartfelt letters and Public Library and Other Stories looks like so much inside baseball, like an author flaunting their deep knowledge of the canon. With those letters, though, it becomes clear why all her literary references are so necessary: literature is embedded deeply into our lives. A world that devalues our storehouses of humanity’s literature must devalue humanity itself. Absent the structure that Smith uses here, I’m not sure the message would come across quite as well.

#5: Name a literary fiction novel that explores social themes.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Through 600+ pages of first-rate prose, Michael Chabon reveals the Golden Age of Comic Books to be fertile thematic ground for a novel. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows the title duo of comic book creators across about fifteen years of inspiration and turmoil, touching on a number of social and political questions along the way. What is the value of escapist art in times of crisis? To what extent do capitalist enterprises enable the spread of political works, and to what extent to they stifle it? How do people with marginalized identities maintain their dignity in a world that deems them to be of lesser value? Read the book for the thrilling conclusion! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) In addition to all these macro-level issues, Kavalier & Clay also finds time to explore more personal quandaries, from Clay’s relationship with his absent father to Kavalier’s devotion to a family facing certain death in Nazi-dominated Europe. This was one of the best books I read last year, and it gets richer and richer the more I think about it.

#6: Name a literary fiction novel that explores the human condition.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides is the story of two tragedies: one extraordinary, the other distressingly common. At the center of the novel are the Lisbon sisters, five isolated girls in suburban Michigan who all take their lives in the span of about a year. That’s the extraordinary tragedy. The distressingly common one comes through in the novel’s narration. In a style reminiscent of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” The Virgin Suicides is told in a first-person plural POV, in the collective voice of the neighborhood boys who were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters. But for as authoritative as that POV sounds on the page, for as much information and documentation that the men marshal forth about the girls, it becomes clear by the novel’s end that they never actually understood them. Jeffrey Eugenides casts the narrators as so trapped in their own subjectivities, so caught up on their own perceptions of those mysterious Lisbon sisters, that they were incapable of providing what the girls most needed: somebody who would actually listen. The boys are the perfect embodiment of one of humanity’s most frustrating failures.

#7: Name a brilliant literary-hybrid genre novel.

The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child by Francisco Jiménez

A short story cycle based on Francisco Jiménez’s childhood, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child follows Panchito, a fictionalized version of the author, as his family of migrant farmers from Mexico moves from town to town in California in search of work. The Circuit is the only book I know of that blurs the line between literary fiction and children’s literature. Jiménez’s language is unadorned and has repetitive quality that suggests a story told both about and by a child, yet the struggles Panchito’s family goes through are relayed with the quiet subtlety that one would expect in a work written for adults. This duality is reflected in the institutions that sell this book. The Circuit is published by the University of New Mexico Press, suggesting an academic audience, but it’s also available through Scholastic, the foremost publisher of children’s books in the United States. It’s designed to teach children empathy for people in Panchito’s position, but especially in today’s political context, this book has value for readers of any age.

#8: What genre do you wish was mixed with literary fiction more?

I’m going to co-sign Jasmine’s answer from the video above and say that literary fiction and fantasy could do with some more co-mingling, if only so I could have a go-to fantasy author not named Ursula K. Le Guin. In particular, I think that the two genres are simpatico in terms of finding language inherently pleasurable, rather than it just being a vehicle for telling the story. I’d love a literary fiction novel that is a fun to read, and to read aloud, as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is in Middle English, with its wild alliterative meter and wildly complicated chivalric rituals. The challenge, of course, would come from reconciling fantasy’s emphasis on plot and lore with literary fiction’s indifference to those elements.

That wraps things up for me! If you’d like to jump in on this little survey and share your recommendations in literary fiction, then consider this an invitation. Thanks to Jasmine for concocting this tag, and thanks to you for time in reading this. Take care!

How My Reading Habits Have Changed This Year

I like to think of myself as an omnivorous reader. I always have multiple books on my currently-reading shelf at any given moment, and they tend to be from disparate modes and genres. I’ll switch from a piece of music criticism to a poetry collection to a classic novel with little in the way of direct connections between pieces. Still, despite all this variety, my reading habits have tended to be fairly stable. About 2/3 of the books I’d finish would be poetry collections, with a hodge-podge of novels, nonfiction books, plays and comic books making up the other 1/3.

This year, however, that ratio has flipped. Only about 1/3 of the books I’ve finished this year (22/64) have been poetry collections. That’s a pretty significant and sudden shift, and it got me wondering: what’s behind this change in my reading habits?

It’s not as though I’ve lost my love of poetry, far from it. Sure, I’m no longer in a graduate school environment where I’m required to think about poetry more or less constantly. But I still write poems and pieces about poetry fairly frequently, and I believe that over time I’ve developed a more mature understanding of the art. And reading an excellent poem like Lynn Powell’s “Kind of Blue” or Ted Kooser’s “A Spiral Notebook,” to name two recent examples, still fills me with an unmatched sense of joy.

No, what’s changed is that finding the time to read poetry, at least how I think it best to read it, has gotten more difficult this past year. Quite simply, I’m rarely alone for long enough.

I’ve mentioned before how I believe that all poetry ought to be read aloud, that the sonic dimension of poetry is difficult if not impossible to appreciate unless one literally hears the words as they are reading them. I can’t tell you how often some aspect of a poem’s playfulness, form, or even meaning has eluded me until I’ve read it aloud to myself. Granted, there are poets such as Harryette Mullen or Jaimee Hills, whose work often defies the reader to wrap their tongue around it, but even when the experience of reading the poem aloud is unpleasant, that unpleasantness often helps me to start unlocking the work.

However, because I insist on reading all poetry aloud, I effectively limit the number of environments in which I can read poetry at all. It’s socially unacceptable, or at least awkward, to read aloud to oneself when other people are present; to do so imposes one’s private activity, even one’s private thoughts once interpretation is factored in, onto an unwilling audience. It’s bad enough that reading in someone else’s presence may give them the impression that you don’t value their company. But reading aloud at them more or less says, “I’d prefer you weren’t in my world at the moment.”

Now, when I was in grad school, this wasn’t that significant a limitation, because I lived by myself, and even if I happened to be on campus it wasn’t that difficult to find a secluded place. (The lounge we had access to, for instance, was usually empty.) Now, though, I’m more or less surrounded by people. I’ve moved back into my family’s home, and for various reasons I’ll not get into, my bedroom is effectively a living room. Further, I take mass transit into work, and if there’s one place where no one wants to hear anyone else talking, it’s a long-distance commuter bus.

The plus side of my current reading arrangements is that I’ve had more success than ever in tackling weighty tomes. I’ve had books like Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on my shelf for years, and I’d been reluctant to tackle them for their sheer length. But now that I find myself trapped on a bus for an average of four hours a day, such books no longer seem intimidating. In fact, their size has become almost welcome, for I know that they’ll last me several trips into and out of the city before I reach the conclusion. I just spent the past month working through George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and I’m sure I read at least 90% of that book on the bus. Those were some of the best hours that I’d spent all year.

Going forward, I know that I’ll have to make a more conscious effort to keep up on poetry, whether that means sneaking a few poems before bed, or during my lunch break, or what have you. But I think I’ll also just have to adjust my expectations. After all, I pursued an MFA precisely so I’d have more time to think about poetry. I shouldn’t be surprised that once I finished the program, I lost a lot of that time as well.

What do you think about all this? Do you find that changing circumstances change the sort of books that you read? If so, how so, and how do those changes make you feel? Let me know in the comments! And if for some reason you’re curious as to how else my new job has affected my reading style, here’s a link to a piece I wrote about dictionaries and the pure love of language. (No, really, that piece was inspired by pharmaceutical advertising. We take inspiration wherever we find it.)