“Fast, Cheap and Out of Control”

“Fast, Cheap and Out of Control”

 

This weekend my mother handed me an article she had clipped as I ran out the door of her apartment. I know I’m not the only writer with a mother out there who clips articles and I approached this one with the same weariness I approach anything I intend to throw away. And to make things worse it was a Time Magazine article. By the time something shows up in TIME can it really be considered news anymore? It was the Lev Grossman February 2 piece on publishing, and rehashes the e-publishing phenomenon. I read it while a guy in Jersey filled my car with gas. It was all very ho hum and so-so, Richardson, Defoe, printing presses, bourgeois literacy, until he says, “[the novel]’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier. More democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.” My ears and eyes pricked up. There is hope yet if even Time knows this. The e-novel in its various avatars is “cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste.” It will be more sentimental, more like gossip and fan fiction, less enthralled to modernism, less obsessed with language. Oh, and it is so much more than that, because what it can be is high literary art which is also fast, cheap and out of control. It dovetails nicely with a wardsix blog by J Robert Lennon about mysteries, and class resentment, and a typical piece of sneering condescension by Josh Corey, where he proclaims his boredom with plot, narrative and character. The only thing Josh finds at all entertaining in fiction is the formal qualities of language, an extended meditation on syntax. So the answer to the question, is there really any literary snobbery out there towards mystery, or genre fiction, is yes. It’s just not in mainstream literary fiction perhaps. It is rather among the purveyors of the avant-garde. And to think I thought it was avant-garde to embrace the lowest forms of art, to reject the idea that there is a high and low or that these things can or should be in opposition. TS Eliot, a big fan of music halls and mysteries puts it very well in his essay on Seneca, and elsewhere. A playwright is not a philosopher but an artist, and art engages the emotions.