{"id":4610,"date":"2012-10-22T13:38:14","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T18:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=4610"},"modified":"2012-10-22T13:38:14","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T18:38:14","slug":"what-is-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2012\/10\/22\/what-is-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Genre’s a funny thing. There are definitely genre books out there. If I pick up anything from Harlequin<\/a>, I know what I’m getting (although, they do<\/em> publish more than just romance). If I swing by Subterranean Press<\/a>, it’s science fiction, fantasy, or horror.<\/p>\n

But even there, in those genres, things are not always so easily defined.<\/p>\n

Mention “Stephen King,” and most people say, “Horror writer.” But as a kid, picking up King’s Different Seasons<\/em> didn’t seem much different than picking up John Irving’s The World According to Garp<\/em>. Garp’s birth and the birth in “The Breathing Method” are both rather odd things. The similarities weren’t lost on me, even in junior high school.<\/p>\n

Kurt Vonnegut<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I always found it interesting how some people — including professors I had in college — claimed to dislike genre fiction…yet praised Kurt Vonnegut. Let’s see…Slaughterhouse Five<\/em>: time travel, aliens…stuff like that. Cat’s Cradle<\/em> gives us ice-nine, a substance that turns water at room temperature into ice — something that can potentially destroy the planet.<\/p>\n

When I brought up these points, the defense was always, “Well, there are stories behind it. Vonnegut’s books deal with something more <\/em>than just genre.”<\/p>\n

Thing is, so do many genre <\/em>stories if you read the right stuff.<\/p>\n

Blurred Lines<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The day Anne Ursu writes another adult novel is the day you might hear actually hear me shout “Yee Haw!” all the way down here in Texas.<\/p>\n

The premise for Ursu’s first novel, Spilling Clarence<\/em>,\u00a0 could have been devised by Vonnegut: a mishap with a break room microwave ends up causing a chain reaction that leads to an accident at a pharmaceutical company that leaves a town covered in the haze of a memory drug. Total recall of all inhabitants’ memories — even those best forgotten.<\/p>\n

In her second novel, The Disapparation of James<\/em>, the protagonists’ son disappears for real during a magic show performed by a clown. Seriously, that’s it — he just…POOF! Gone! Some have drawn parallels with another [genre] book dealing with the loss of a child, The Lovely Bones<\/em>. (They really are totally different books.)<\/p>\n

More Examples<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I really like Jeffrey Ford. His novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque<\/em>, is one of my favorite books — ever! Ford often writes straight-up genre fiction, but many of his novels are as contemporary as anything.<\/p>\n

Don’t think the lines of genre fiction have been blurred? Check out this list<\/a> of genre novels that crossed over to the mainstream. Think of stories like The Time Traveler’s Wife<\/em>; check out this entire category<\/a> of genre novels that crossed over to the mainstream on Tor’s website. Oh, and I’m sure more than a couple people reading this have read a Harry Potter novel.<\/p>\n

Genre fiction is everywhere these days.<\/p>\n

So, Then…What Is Genre?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Okay, obviously, some books are <\/em>straight-up genre. If I pick up a Scott Sigler<\/a> book, I know I’m getting over-the-top violence, monsters, and a world on the brink of destruction (or aliens playing football).<\/p>\n

And there’s nothing at all wrong with that.<\/p>\n

But more and more, it seems, genre is not so easy to define. Sure, George R. R. Martin writes fantasy…but there are a myriad books that are not so easy to define. Whether it’s elements of genre creeping into mainstream and literary books (most novels by Jonathan Lethem come to mind), or full-blown genre novels being read by more than a little subculture, it’s becoming harder to pin down what “genre” is these days.<\/p>\n

And that’s because what matters more than anything are good stories. I may get slammed for saying this, but we’re really long done with suburban contemporary fiction. If Franzen is the best we’ve got, let’s just call it over.<\/p>\n

Tired of the Same Old<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While everything’s been done before in some manner, it seems amplified when it’s John Irving writing another <\/em>book about a boy who goes to a boarding school, discovers his sexuality at an early age, and struggles through a messed up adult life until he figures it out or dies. Read this blog enough and you know I love <\/em>John Irving’s writing, but…certain things he does gets so old. I have no desire to pick up his latest book.<\/p>\n

Maybe because <\/em>we’ve had decades of the same thing in contemporary fiction, we’re seeing the lines of genre blurred — and with it, genre writers striving for that little bit of “something more” that literary fiction and contemporary fiction shoot for. And vice versa: literary writers are beginning to experiment with one of the most powerful things that genre fiction has been doing forever: asking, “What if…?” on a stranger scale.<\/p>\n

Good Books
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Genre’s a nice thing to consider when shelving books in a bookstore: “This kind of person likes a certain kind of story, so…we will create a romance section.” But I can think of so many books that aren’t romance with strong elements of romance in them. (The last book I finished<\/a> has a romance line and a mystery line going through it, even though it’s not a romance or straight-up mystery novel.) There are piles of mainstream novels with genre elements in them, just as there are piles of genre novels with mainstream elements in them.<\/p>\n

What matters to me when I pull a book off a shelf or load it to my e-reader isn’t how it’s grouped by a retailer, but rather, whether it’s a good book or not.<\/p>\n

Sometimes that good book is literary; other times it’s mainstream or straight-up genre. More and more, however, the books that hook me are harder to define — other than, “It’s just a good book!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Genre’s a funny thing. There are definitely genre books out there. If I pick up anything from Harlequin, I know what I’m getting (although, they do publish more than just romance). If I swing by Subterranean Press, it’s science fiction, fantasy, or horror. But even there, in those genres, things are not always so easily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4610"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4713,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610\/revisions\/4713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}