Are You Tough Enough To Read This Book?

Peter Straub has written an interesting piece for The Millions, where he makes some excellent points about the relationship between genre and literary fiction, and suggests that horror, done correctly, is as free of barriers as literary fiction is supposed to be. Also, I suspect that Straub is sick and tired of fielding questions from an apparently endless parade of effete, fussy mandarins, because he goes at them (well, their effete, fussy, straw man stand-in, anyway) with a rhetorical hatchet.

And that’s fine. I’m sure he’s sick and tired of defending his chosen genre against imputations that all examples of such writing are inescapably, axiomatically inferior to literary fiction; who could blame him for hitting back? But I don’t know if the best way to fight back against snobbish, pretentious, dismissive people is by basically calling them a bunch of pussies:

How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.

Never mind that your average Nine Inch Nails fan would say exactly this sort of thing. And never mind the fact that people who are removed from their own negative feelings are often only able to maintain their distance because their lives are fucking sweet, or that they rightly consider that distance a blessed luxury. That’s not the problem. The problem is that some of these same folks have no difficulty whatsoever in employing this quién es más macho tactic against others on their own, and therefore would assume that you’re not even talking about them in the first place. Because these literary mofos are tough.

Maybe you didn’t like The Road. Huh. You obviously lack the grit and the steely-eyed determination that’s required to crawl your way a through sewer, only to eventually realize just how wonderful the fetid muck you’re buried under actually is.

You might laugh—but I swear to god, I actually read an analysis of The Road that basically hurled that accusation at anyone who didn’t think the book was very good. (And here’s where I want to kick my own ass for not bookmarking that horseshit, but I assumed it was not worth linking to. Ah well.)

There’s plenty of misery in literary fiction—enough, anyway, that it seems a little odd to claim that its readers are a bunch of lily-livered pantywaists who would never embrace a novel that made them consider just how grueling, capricious, demeaning, or insignificant life is. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that there’s more than a few literary fiction fans who look for works that inspire those sorts of feelings.

What separates the genre fan on the make for gut-punching dread from the literary one, is that the latter requires a kind of intellectual imprimatur to be present before they are willing to give themselves over to a work; they need to be flattered, a little bit. Or, I suppose they might say instead that they have an aesthetic standard that must be met if they’re going to take a book seriously; they want artful writing, if they can get it.

Eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Then again, what the hell do I know? I just wrote an essay sticking up for the toughness of literary fiction readers—don’t ask me what I think.

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