Drawing Lines

On Fiction, Literature, Popularity, Aesthetics, and Just Liking What You Like

“One of the differences between fiction and literature is that the latter thrives on layers of ambiguity and ambivalence,” explains Nicholas Kristof in a review he offered up many years ago for his then-colleague’s debut novel, a sort-of endorsement that reads like it was painful to write. Kristof was not even able to assert that the novel in question was literature at all, instead the limpest offering: “and, in [this book], I see the launch of a literary career.”

The finest of distinctions. I mean, I guess?

Kristof’s take is sexist, it’s true, because I can’t imagine a novel written by a male author ever requiring such a pussyfooted response. But also I read the novel last summer, and I didn’t like it either, which—according to mid-’00s anti-anti-“chicklit” discourse (the atmosphere into which the novel was published and received)— possibly represents a failure in sisterhood.

And all this is the sort of dilemma in which I used to tie myself up in knots, back when I was an intrepid book blogger with a Masters degree in Creative Writing who aspired towards Serious Authorship.

I used to like drawing lines—this and that, us and them, good and bad, high and low. Again, this was around 20 years ago, the high tide of Bridget Jones and Shopaholic, when every book by a woman was defined by its relation to “chicklit,” either fitting the mould, surprisingly defying it, or else its author expressing disgust that anyone would dare try to stuff her literary novel into such a sexist pigeonhole. And I was still young enough to think that I could mediate my way through all these tensions, to come up with something absolute, definitive. Literary criticism, I was sure, was akin to a science.