DeepGenre

Kevin Andrew Murphy June 18th, 2006

To talk about “Deep Genre,” I think we first have to talk about “Shallow Genre.”  Shallow genre is generally the province of mainstream novels and popular kids books.  I say “kids books” rather than “children’s literature,” because as fond as I may have been of Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, they weren’t particularly great literature or even great mysteries.  But as small mysteries suitable for people just cutting their teeth on the genre, they worked pretty well.

There’s been a lot of hoo-ha over whether or not The Da Vinci Code is any good, with one of the main criticisms being that the “SO DARK THE CON OF MAN” puzzle is a mystery at the Encyclopedia Brown level, designed to be solved by mainstream readers who will then feel themselves very clever after having figured something out your average genre reader will consider boring and obvious, and heavy-duty mystery readers will find so banal as to be insulting.

I’ll admit I’ve only read reviews and snippets of The Da Vinci Code, and don’t plan to read it either since I was less than impressed by the prose samples and would rather get around to reading Foucault’s Pendulum first.  That said, there’s nothing particularly wrong with easy riddles, simple mysteries, small romances, less-than-intricate intrigues and the other trappings of shallow genre work.  Everyone has to start somewhere, and even well-read readers can still enjoy them if they’re willing to suspend disbelief just a bit more.  When I read Snape’s “Potion Challenge” in the first Harry Potter, my inner critic raised an eyebrow, not because Hermione could solve it, but because Ron and Harry couldn’t, and you’d have to wonder what sort of potion Snape had been snorting to put such an embarrassingly easy puzzle in place (unless he’d left it as a trap for Hagrid, to see if it would kill Hagrid anyway).  However, suspending disbelief, it was an enjoyable and entertaining little logic problem that didn’t stop the action of a fun light read, and in that light, was perfectly acceptable.  Besides which, Harry Potter is a fantasy, and even a relatively simple bit of cryptography like Sherlock Holme’s “Code of the Dancing Men” would have stopped the action dead.

Shallow genre is also not even seen as genre.  Consider the ghost story.  Charles Dickens is hardly considered a fantasy author, despite the fact that “A Christmas Carol” is probably the world’s best known and most overproduced ghost story.  Ditto Oscar Wilde, author of “The Canterville Ghost.”  You can throw a ghost into just about any story and a mainstream readership will hardly blink, and when you consider that Medium and Ghost Whisperer have primarily mainstream audiences, it becomes a question of what exactly is genre.

I define genre as “stuff for people who like that sort of thing.”  The mainstream leads to the shallows which lead to the deep ends of the various genres and subgenres.  The deepest pools of the genres tend to mix the most freely, so a vampire romance court intrique is not even cross-genre but its own subgenre.  Likewise time-travel romances, a deep genre phenomenon that regularly splashes into the mainstream, most recently with The Lake House.

• Definitions