GENRE WARS*
Another Cynn Corvus cast-off. This essay was born of a passionate but transient conviction that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell resembled a Nabokov novel. No, I don't know either. And not only did I overstate my case in the introduction (to a hyperdramatic degree), but my thesis was far too vague to really argue in the first place. But, I do in fact think along these lines. More or less. In general. Sometimes. Shut up.
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Without much effort, I'm sure you can imagine why I find this head-deskingly irritating:
It's mostly the result of Amazon's inability to distinguish between 'contributing authors' and 'blurb-writers,' since other sites more clearly advertise Gaiman's new introduction, but it still makes me want to stab somebody with a fork. I'm not trying to criticize Gaiman — he's a talented, best-selling, and classification-defying writer whose endorsement means a lot to many people — but was that really, really necessary? Really? Aside from her glamorous Sandman fanfiction (and her glamorous Stardust fanfiction), I don't actually think there's a whole lot tying Susanna Clarke and Neil Gaiman together as authors. They have fairies in common, I guess — but no, no, wait, they don't. Stardust's fairy culture is not even sort of close to looking kind of like the brief glimpses Susanna Clarke has given her readers of the Other Lands, and I'm fairly certain that the gentleman would skin and eat Gaiman's far more 'civilized' characters. Fairies are not all the same, tempting though it may be to generalize them.
And is Strange & Norrell really all that similar to Sandman or American Gods? I don't find that to be the case. Gaiman is Clarke's most vocal and established fan, which is absolutely great, but I don't understand the impulse to pass him off as maybe-a-cowriter-if-you-squint. I really don't believe it's a lack of sales inspiring Bloomsbury to try and stick Gaiman in the novel like a hand in a Muppet; I think it's simple politics. S&N has apparently become another fatality of the genre wars.
Literary genres began to be useful around the time the human race discovered it had enough books to stack into piles, I'm sure, but I think the current battle reached a fever pitch when, several years ago, The New York Times created a special best-selling children's booklist so the publishing industry would no longer be confronted on a daily basis with the indignity of Harry Potter and the's spectacular sales. I understand why the series' popularity upset everyone, because the Harry Potter novels are actually fairly awful even for children's books, but that was simply gross misconduct. If ten million adults decide one day to buy five copies of Muffin the Kitty in Jellybeanland each, then by God the NYT needs to swallow its pride and report that Muffin the Kitty in Jellybeanland is the best-selling book in the nation. Repeatedly, if necessary. It might be painful, but it's the right thing to do. Devising a special new literary category to contain just the books we find unpalatably popular is like fixing the mirror so that it only displays reflections of Angelina Jolie. Comforting, perhaps, but in no way beneficial to anyone.
Possibly as a result of this kind of unfair conduct, the tides seem to be turning against readers who feel that sorting books into prefabricated, exclusive categories is unfair. Protests against the division of reading material into genres has become such a widespread, homogenous fixture of popular criticism that I'm actually starting to see blacklash against it. I know, right? But, I can sympathize. Why moan about a 'literary' novel getting trapped in the tree-tops of Imagination Forest when some of the world's best books have been incarcerated in an unassailable prison (complete with forced conjugal visits!) called The Classics?
But, you know, organizing things into non-descriptive hierarchical orders of meaningless nonsense is just sort of what people do. That mortal predilection, for instance, is what helped serious-minded medieval individuals invent science. It was the very substance of the more boring parts of the Enlightenment. Would we have the benefit of even one modern government without this historical fondness for taxonomy? I doubt it! Shit. I'm sure it also helped with the creation of commandment-heavy and rule-plagued Western religion, far back in the mists of time. Without the ability to ascribe to concrete objects abstract qualities they may or may not actually possess, we lose the ability to impose structure on reality, and therefore the ability to function, both practically and artistically.
Which is nice and all, but in this case evolution is interfering with the proper classification of my favorite book, and I really don't like seeing anything fuck around with my books. Most of the reviews of Strange & Norrell @ Amazon (even — and especially! — the positive ones) involve people whining elaborately about the novel's length and footnotes. But, if you look at the reviews for, say, Pale Fire, you don't see a lot of readers saying: "BAW BAW BAWWW THIS BOOK HAD BIG WORDS & FOOTNOTES 2 I CRIEDED TEARS OF BLOOD :[ :[ :[" Which is, of course, because Pale Fire is Serious Literature written by a Great Artiste**, so only Serious Readers are likely to attempt it, whereas Strange & Norrell is a fantasy novel and must therefore appeal to the kind of dreary moron who delights in the recitation of the dynastic histories of imaginary Elf kingdoms. I'm sure that kind of Tolkien-nourished reader would despise Strange & Norrell, and I'm sure a lot of the people who like Pale Fire would love it, but there's absolutely nothing I can do to facilitate a connection between the two books — or between Strange & Norrell and any of the other venerable works of literature to which it owes a debt and with which it shares an origin.
That makes me angry. Prejudice against fairies isn't nearly as ugly as hatred toward people who actually exist, but it isn't very pretty either.
There are, of course, lots of things beyond the walls of the Fairy Ghetto that stand in the way of Susanna Clarke being repeatedly and publicly recognized as one of the world's great contemporary authors. For one thing, and shockingly, your average American consumer seems to have the readerly discernment of a shoe. People who buy modern novels apparently prefer either 10th-grade narratives rendered in 5th-grade prose (Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown, Sara Gruen), or dreadful imaginary realism that portrays aspirational, hip characters wallowing "creatively" in misery (DEAR JONATHAN FRANZEN: I CAN'T BELIEVE OPRAH WANTED TO INCLUDE YOUR WRETCHED NOVEL IN HER BOOK CLUB EITHER***). There isn't any space on a bookshelf as light as that for things as worthwhile as Strange & Norrell and The Ladies.
I realize that this probably looks very insulting, and it is insulting (Jonathan Franzen, I hope you Google yourself extensively, because I want to tell you that you totally suck eggs at writing!!) (What? What are you looking at? Did any of you actually try to read The Corrections? It put me off narrative fiction for the better part of a year. Or, take a gander at Water for Elephants — or, as it would be more accurately titled, Little Words for Simpletons, Or: Why Think? It Hurts), but it really matters — and not just when it comes to Strange & Norrell, and not just when it comes to remarkable genre fiction, and not just when it comes to books. With every limiting box some money-wielding corporate sponsor builds around an innovation to help it sell better, with every impediment to an ordinary person picking up any given novel and reading it, with every new division of the world into something narrower and more consumption-specific, we lose a chance to be curious and to discover for ourselves what our future will look like. If, before I bought it, I'd seen the marketing (both publisher-imposed and organic) that surrounds Strange & Norrell, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole. As it happened, though, once I'd managed to find it, I discovered that the book touched me. That's what books are for; that's what they do. Reading isn't supposed to be about toadying to personal preferences and prejudices; it's supposed to be way to discover a new world, one page at a time.
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* In the breath-takingly unlikely event that you care, this is what the Bestsellers List actually looks like. I know, right? I cried and cried and cried.
** I actually really like Pale Fire, and Nabokov. This is totally not his fault.
*** I just found out that Oprah added another of Franzen's terrible misshapen word-monsters to her Oprahtastic Fiction Roundup & Funtime Family Barbecue, several years after the The Corrections debacle. She's a better man than I am, what can I say. (Except that I would attempt to read another Franzen novel only in the event that it was one of the demands made by the people who had kidnapped my mother.)
