On Genre Fiction

it’s clear that it’s not all one-way traffic here – readers suddenly discarding the traditional staples of summer fiction in favour of more serious fare. It’s also the case that literary fiction has been stepping more and more boldly into traditionally generic worlds. Tivnan notes that many of the most popular “crossover” titles that have made the leap from literary to mainstream markets borrow elements from genre fiction that “can make them seem more mainstream”. He cites “the science-fiction/speculative bits of [Colson Whitehead’s] The Underground Railroad and [Naomi Alderman’s] The Power; the gothic, horror elements of Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney”. To this you might add the supernatural subplot of The Miniaturist, and the way that, in another writer’s hands, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine or One Day might have been generic romance novels. Perhaps what we’re really talking about when we refer to literary fiction is work that pays attention to the sentence, to the choice of words, novels driven by art as well as plot. This makes for a broad church, taking in the best of genre fiction (and excluding many novels that think of themselves as “literary”).
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