Critical Generosity

A couple of thoughts on the genre debate.

1984 is brilliant. I haven’t read it since high school, but it’s widely acknowledged among literary crowds that it’s a work of genius, and I agree. But of all the works of genius I have read, I wouldn’t put 1984 even close to the top of my list. If we are ranking the best novels that have ever been written in the Western Tradition, Middlemarch by George Eliot is an easy shoe-in for the top slot, and other options could include Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, all for different reasons.

There are so many incredible novels out there. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most brilliant explorations of love and female autonomy that I have ever read, and no one can can write in the way Toni Morrison can, with emotions that resonate with such a deep force within the body. I often feel physically exhausted after reading her novels, something that was particularly true after reading Beloved and The Bluest Eye. I also adore The Great Gatsby, but as far as works of genius go Fitzgerald is outranked by Eliot for many many miles. They are different works. They do different things, and I am grateful that both of them exist.

So what is it that makes a novel “good?”

I don’t believe in the argument that this debate is entirely subjective. If writing is a discipline—which it is—then it devalues the immense work of writers honing their craft to say that everything is equally good and the value of a work is entirely subjective. I would be more inclined to say that the value of a piece of writing is relative to the intended audience/genre. Young Adult Fiction and Literary Fiction are different genres that attempt different things. A poorly written YA novel and a poorly written Literary Fiction novel cannot be compared, because often the definitions of what makes a good novel are different for each genre.

So then, is one genre generally better than the other? One could take the approach of Terry Eagleton and say that what is considered “good” has generally been shaped by the ruling social class and the development of capitalism. After all, genres did start when publishing books became a viable economic enterprize. The categorizations helped move the financial train along, and the idea that what we read is shaped by our social standing still has not left, in part because it is true. If someone doesn’t have the education or time to read and enjoy high modernist poetry like T.S. Eliot’s, then they probably won’t, to no fault of their own. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the books they read instead are inherently worse.

Of course, there are also novels that are genre-defying. This is a trend that I have noticed more recently, but it’s also something that has been going on for a long time. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were both novelists who wrote “popular fiction” for the masses, but now they are considered serious literature. If Jane Austen and Dickens were alive right now, what would they be releasing? Would they be pent-in by genre, or would they still be read by everyone? Maybe one marker of a good novel could be the ingenuity of the writing and how it blends genres and styles that are traditionally seen as mutually exclusive.

Call me old fashioned, but despite some incredible works that are being written right now, and the fact that some of the best books have come from a blending of genres, I do feel that the standards for what is considered good writing have gone downhill, especially over the last twenty or so years, and especially for children and teenagers. I’m not one to say that Harry Potter is serious literature. It’s not. I will say though that in comparison with any book written by Sarah J. Maas, Harry Potter wins the fight without question every single round. I could probably write another post that has more detailed thoughts/examples/reasons for some of these ideas aside from just a personal dislike of these books.

I know that my comments are influenced by the privilege I have of receiving an education, and by the fact that I am studying English Literature. I am aware that I sound pretentious, and that I’m proving Terry Eagleton right by making these comments, but it does actually concern me that the books we read are more influenced by what is popular on TikTok than what is actually good. And maybe my worries are blown out of proportion. TikTok is an echo chamber after all, and likely the people who aren’t on TikTok don’t really read the things that are popular on TikTok, but there’s no mistaking that social media influences what is widely read and what’s not.

I guess it just concerns me when people tell me that The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is the most well-written book they’ve ever read. You mean the smut story about a woman who gets married seven times and betrays everyone she knows in order to achieve Hollywood fame? To put it (very) bluntly—that’s like reading a tabloid and calling it the Bible. The popularity of sensationalism has ebbed and flowed over the years, but generally I don’t feel that sensationalist novels have the same social staying power of books that look closely and with compassion at complex moral issues, but then this turns into a debate about what the point of literature is, which is a whole other argument.

There are a few cases in which the TikTok algorithm have brought out somewhat decent writing and made it very popular. One example of this is the Irish writer Sally Rooney, who wrote Normal People. I read Normal People two times. The first time I got halfway through, cried for two hours, and then finished it and thought about it for several weeks. I couldn’t decide how I felt about it, so I read it again a few months later. I would call Normal People one of those genre-defying novels. It’s labeled as literary fiction, but it’s not quite there. I don’t believe Sally Rooney will be winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example. But it is something. It’s highly zoomed in to a relationship between two people over a span of five or six years, and main focuses of the novel include social class and relationships in a modern age. I would say that her writing is indicative of the turn many novels nowadays have taken towards “spare, Hemingway-esque prose.” (Is it really Hemingway-esque, or just lazy? And was Hemingway that good in the first place? The jury’s still out.) I do feel though that her writing is okay—depending on the novel—and there’s a complexity there that doesn’t exist in so many other books that make the rounds on TikTok.

I am not the person who gets to decide what's good or not for everyone. That’s something I can only do for myself (thank goodness). I do feel that some books (and genres) are objectively better than others, but someone else may need a book that I don’t. I needed East of Eden as a senior in high school, but the same book might make someone else wish they had spent 600 pages on something more worthwhile. I can appreciate that different books do different things, and that different people need different books for different reasons.

I try not to be too hard on a work of art that might have made someone else feel like life was worth living, but I do still think that the value of what we read is something worth thinking about.