If you wish to write or read a novel that in the current literary environment will be championed as an icon of literary fiction, it had better be peopled by deeply flawed and disabled characters, e,g., idiot savants, people who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD—"characters who don't come off quite right" or "can't relate"), people who are doomed to be the subject of witch hunts; people who are inarticulate yet unbelievably insightful; characters who others might in passing refer to as "too good for this world."
There are so many examples I could name. Here are a few:
· Boo, the reclusive neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird who haunts the cemetery and does benevolent acts of kindness most of which can never be traced back to him.
· Benjy, a mute, mentally disabled character in The Sound and the Fury, who has no understanding of time, cause and effect, or ordinary morality, but who "can sense things…" like, for example, the existence of evil.
· The young-adult character Woolly and the boy character Billy in Amor Towles', Lincoln Highway. Both are incredibly smart and both are oddly handicapped when it comes to making their way in the ordinary world on their own; they are both dependent on the caretaking willingness of two other characters: In the case of Woolly, Duchess; and in the case of Billy, his brother, Emmett.
· In Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, there are so many: For example, Seymour, who, while clearly modeled after a typical set of autistic child symptoms, truly "sees more" as he adopts an owl as "Trusty Friend;" Omeir who, due to his cleft pallet, is thought to be the cause of everything that goes wrong anywhere in his vicinity; also octogenarian Zeno Ninis who is never able to express his homosexual love for a British prisoner of war when they were both prisoners of war in North Korea during the Korean War, but who as an elderly man on the last day of his life lays down his life to save children who otherwise would have become victims of an active-shooter incident; by so doing, he turns himself into a hero.
In other words, literary fiction chooses to make stories out of the weak, the oppressed, the "road-kill," the brilliant yet unrecognized ones who will always be misunderstood and condemned by bullies for their weaknesses and shortcomings; the ones that the mob assembles for, and comes to collect in the middle of the night with torches blazing. Think of Frankenstein, for example. Coming back to life from the dead, is it possible Frankenstein might possess valuable insights people of ordinary intelligence and experience might not share?
I started thinking about all the novels that might be quite popular but which no one would ever think to call literary. They might contain plenty of idiosyncratic, misunderstood characters. What keeps us from thinking of John Grisham's Sycamore Row as a literary work? Well, it's genre, for one. It's a John Grisham novel—about a struggling lawyer trying to defend a last will and testament that is essentially indefensible, so that the sum and substance of the novel becomes, Just watch how he pulls this off!
While reflecting on this, I had a "vision," if you will:/p
Is it possible literary fiction desires to convert its readers into typical liberals who always root for the weak, the broken, the oppressed; those stripped of their rights; and the under-represented and under-appreciated while non-literary fiction does the opposite, converting readers to believe in the stalwart, the stout-hearted and the winners who must win again and again in best-selling novel after best-selling novel? After all, Jake Brigance (John Grisham's hero) always wins each case, right?
That's probably an oversimplification.
But think about this: At its heart, what is a literary genre all about? I say it's all about function over form in storytelling because it's driven by character; while non-literary fiction is all about form (e.g., genre) over function because it's propelled by reader expectations, for example, by a set of rules about how that genre of book must be written and must turn out in the end.
Detective mysteries, for example:
They'd better start off with a crime or there would be nothing for the detective to solve (and for we readers, too, because we as readers of the mystery love to play amateur sleuth). Detective mysteries had better end with the crime solved, or else the author will have broken the genre—gone off track. That might make an interesting literary fiction where the book starts off as a genre, but breaks the genre mid-stream, no? Or maybe it would simply be confusing to readers who expect one kind of entertainment and then wind up reading another.
Any thoughts?
