Genre in flux
Katharine Kerr June 16th, 2006
Deep-genre, cross-genre, mixed genres : the thing is, most people who read genre do so for entertainment, and entertainment demands variety and novelty. Genres have to expand and change if they’re going to keep their audiences. There will always be a segment of the readership that wants the comfort of having their old expectations exactly fulfilled, but there are too few of them to keep genre publishing afloat. The two kinds of readers are not precisely demarcated, of course. We all doubtless have favorite books that we re-read when we just want the the real world to go away. At the same time, we don’t want to read the same book over and over. “Only the names have been changed” is not enough change.
A long time ago, Marshall McLuhan gave the formula for popular success as “90% old, 10% new”.  With Fantasy and SF, we can stretch this to 20% new, maybe even 25% if it’s a really good New.  Those higher proportions of innovation mean “deep” genre to me.
In my own subjective experience, the comfort books that we re-read are not the formulaic ones, however, but those that inspired them. How many times have how many of us re-read Jane Austen? How many times her imitators?
I agree with Lois here.
A further thought. There are books chock full of elements that have proven to please audiences (elves, magic rings, mysterious forests, etc) and they might serve a brisk one-time read for people who like those elements, but a comfort book–from which we might all our lives appreciate, perhaps for a changing set of reasons–usually turns out to be far more complex than it appears. P.G. Wodehouse is often cited for being fluff; that his books don’t contain a modicum of real life conflict or meaning, but the seemingly effortless skill of the plotting (I think him the master of the feuilleton) his distinctive voice, bring readers back again and again.
Gee, I LOVE Wodehouse — and for exactly the reasons you cite. And I agree with Lois, too — the twists that were the most interesting were the ones that captivated me. But we already know that we who WRITE deep genre and going to be the readers of the deeper version if it, no?
Barb
I don’t know that I write it–it seems to me that’s a claim that readers have either to make or to dismiss–but I respond to it as a reader. I love reading other writers’ ideas of what sparks them to come back again and again to a book or story, but I am also intensely interested in non-writers’ views as well.
I too love Wodehouse. Under his fluffy blanket hides someone who has keenly observed human beings all his life. Knowing what will make people laugh is no mean talent. His characters’ antics are exaggerated versions of real behavior — avarice, lust, rebellion against parents, chronic lying, etc.
My comfort books aren’t genre, usually, unless we count Tolkien as genre. Wodehouse is another author I do haul out, but lately a small press has been repriting some of his stuff that’s been op for decades, so I have new Wodehouse to read! I do re-read Proust a lot, too, but I don’t know if that’s comfort reading or merely that I keep finding new stuff in the various rooms of the mansion.
But I know lots of people who re-read genre books, and that’s why I made that remark in my original post.
When I was younger, certain genre works were part of my comfort reading. However, I’ve read them so often now, that like my non-genre comfort books, they don’t work that magic for me now.
To my very great surprise what has taken their place are genre television series, arc series like, yes, indeed, Buffy (though not limited to Buffy, or those with discrete stories within the series, like Prime Suspect, and many, many of the BBC ‘classics,’ made from many of my longtime favorite novels.
Love, C.
Kit: re rereading genre, I just finished my summer reread of the Bujold Miles Vorkosigan series, and some others. And as always, I found new things to appreciate and think about after I put the books down.
Your comment about Proust makes me think about that fascinating shift between the new and the familiar. I remember one of the first definitions of art put forward by the Encyclopedists during the later salon period was that it must pique and surprise. Many books inside genre as well as out were famed primarily for being first, for their shock value, and it seems they were seldom reread, or at least they haven’t lingered into the present day. (I’m thinking of Trilby, for example, or Diana of the Crossways, Orinocco, or even E. F. Benson’s Dodo.. (All of these, as I reflect, about sex and attraction, who has the power in a relationship, the tensions between men and women…another fascinating subject but I expect way off base here. Anyway, what they had to say shook society of the time, but seem tame now, and there doesn’t seem to be enough merit to bring readers of the succeeding generations back.)
In a sense, are all rereads comfort books? There will be no shock of the new, after all. That makes me want to look more closely at the term “comfort book.” It appears to mean to most people a cozy book, with no challenge to one’s worldview, moral assumptions, etc–safe and sereno–perhaps the ultimate in bourgeoise self-satisfaction.
yet what about those who, like you, reread Swann’s slow but inexorable tragedy? That book, deceptively slow-paced, light on action, is like a thunderstrike to the spirit, full of bolts aimed at the society of his time, homophobia at the very center in that famous long, long sentence that is so elegantly constructed. (oop, sex again! Yes, what about the wonderful conversation when the women talk about how they react to men–what makes a truly attractive man?)
People say they have to be “in certain moods” for certain rereads–but is that not also true for Wodehouse and the more upbeat comedies of manners, even satires of manners, whether in or out of genre? I am not going to speak for others, but I tend to reread Wodehouse when I am tired, stressed, anxious, maybe sad. When I am feeling in top form I reread my favorites among the worldshakers–Left Hand of Darkness, All Quiet on the Western Front, Swift’s funny-but-savage works. All of them, all, offer a measure of refreshment to the mind, if not the spirit–sometimes an exceedingly acerb refreshment, indeed–but in counter-balance to my mood.
To wrench this gassing back to the topic, when I peruse my shelves, I see that i have roughly the same percentage of genre books to non-fantastical and non-futuristic fiction (to avoid that minefield “literary:) as I think exists out there. (Though of course I could be laughably wrong about the ratio. it’s too hot to even attempt to count and then do the math.)
No, I don’t think all re-reads area comfort books, but comfort books tend to be about re-reading.
Genre at its best, and what’s being called here “deep genre” in particular, are in my opinion ideally suited for producing for the reader what I think of as the Perfect Birthday Present Effect — that is, the state of being completely surprised by exactly what you always wanted.
But did you know it was what you always wanted before you read it, or only afterward?
That’s the surprise part!
It’s the unexpectedness of the thing that does it; you’re finding out something new about yourself at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with a top-flight example of something that you already know suits you down to the ground — but for absolute perfection, you can’t beat a new thing that turns out to suit you even better.
(I actually got a birthday present like that once. So I know they exist, and not merely as metaphor.)
My Perfect Birthday Present was a copy of the original Dungeons and Dragons game. I had no idea that I’d like such a thing, but it turned out to be a whole career in a box, leading as gaming did straight to my writing genre fiction. The friend who gave it to me was just as surprised as I was.
With Proust I keep finding things I know I’d read before but had forgotten, most recently, for example, Proust stumbling across a beautiful piazza in Venice by moonlight — and then never being able to find it again by daylight. ( I am so tempted to rip that idea off for an SF book set in a vast city . . . esp. if the story spawns a character who, like Marcel, is looking back on an obsessive love and wondering how he could have felt that way . . . )
Since I know now “how it comes out”, I can linger over those perfect bits on the X-many-eth time through. The first time I read it, I hurried because, yes, I found it suspenseful in some strange way. So for me, to return vaguely to the subject, it’s a “comfort book” because I know I’m going to find something I missed and enjoy it, and while I’m reading it, I won’t be thinking about anything else.
Ditto Wodehouse. His daffy world takes my mind over completely, but I must admit, that on the third re-reading of THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS, the magic has got quite dim.
Debra, I like that, for indeed I have experienced the Perfect Birthday Present Effect (hi, Kit!).
When I read a book that produces that effect, I am just so all over in love with reading yet again.
I tend to dig back to the things I read as a kid for comfort. Often they’re not particularly *good* books — I bought the whole L. Frank Baum “Oz” series recently, and some of those are just dreadful — but comforting nonetheless. (Luckily Tolkien was one of those I read as a kid. Le Guin and Herbert too.)
Re Marshall McLuhan’s 90/10 Rule… I think there’s a whole separate art in spreading innovation over time that some “shallow” genre writers have mastered. Think of Stephen King, who pumps out a thick book every year. Often the books seem remarkably similar to the ones he’s written already — it feels like he’s constantly revising the same draft over and over, making subtle improvements and alterations each time.
Which reminds me of something Neil Young once said. A heckler yelled out during one of the quiet moments at a Crazy Horse concert, “They all sound the same!” To which Young yelled back, “That’s because it’s all one song!”
That’s a great Neil Young anecdote, Dave.
This seems related to, but different than, the old discussion about how a writer has one “story” she or he is telling over and over again, and if she is lucky, it’s a very big story so you can’t recognize it in every single narrative he writes, and if not so lucky, then it’s just the same story obviously retold with minor variation.
This is where writing with an eye on history helps. History is filled with other people’s stories. While a writer might return again and again to the same theme ( that ‘one story’ is also known as a theme, despite our genre dislike of such terms,) ideally a book should contain a lot more than a single theme.