the here and now and spiced with sex and money. And although the genre in question was known in British publishing as shopping-and-fucking novels, the books were about neither shopping nor fucking, but mostly about what would happen next, in an utterly familiar and predictable structure.
I remember coldly and calculatingly plotting my own one of those. It concerned an extremely bright young woman, plunged into a coma by the machinations of her evil aunt, so she was unconscious through much of the book as a noble young scientist hero fought to bring her back to consciousness and save the family fortune, until he was forced to wake her with the shopping-and-fucking equivalent of a kiss. I plotted it, and I never wrote it. I wasnât cynical enough to write something I didnât believe, and if I was going to rewrite âSleeping Beautyâ I was sure I could find a better way to do it.
But story privileged is a good thing for me. I care about story. Iâm always painfully certain that Iâm not much good at story, always happy when a story feels right, or comes out properly.I love beautiful writing (although Iâm never convinced that what the English think of as beautiful writing, which is writing thatâs as clean and straightforward as possible, is what the Americans think of as beautiful writing, and itâs definitely not Indian beautiful writing or Irish beautiful writing, which are other things entirely).
But I love the drive and the shape of story.
I spent much of the last four days with my ninety-five-year-old cousin Helen Fagin, who is a holocaust survivor and was professor of the holocaust at the University of Miami for some time, and a wonderful, remarkable woman, and she was telling me about when she was in the Radomsko ghetto in 1942. She had been at Kraków University until the war interrupted her studies, so she was assigned in the ghetto to teach younger kids (she would have been nineteen, maybe twenty), and in order to assert normality, these ten-or-eleven-year-olds would come in the morning and she would teach them Latin and algebra and things that she was uncertain that they would have any use for, but she would teach them. And one night she was given a copy of the Polish translation of Gone with the Wind, and she explains this is significant in that books were banned. Books were banned by the Nazis in an incredibly efficient way, which was if they found you with a book they would put a gun against your head and shoot you. Books were very, very banned, and she was given a copy of Gone with the Wind . And each night she would draw the curtains and put the blackout in place and read, with a tiny light, two or three chapters, losing valuable sleep time, so that the next morning when the kids came in she could tell them the story of what she read, and that was all they wanted. And for an hour every day they got away. They got out of the Radomsko ghetto. Most of those kids went on to the camps. She says that she tracked them all later and discovered that fourâout of the dozens of kids she taughtâhad survived. When she told me that it made me rethink what I do and made me rethinkthe nature of escapist fiction, because I thought actually it gave them an escape, just there, just then. And it was worth risking death for.
As I get older Iâm more comfortable with genre. More comfortable deciding what points a reader would feel cheated without. But still, my main impulse in creating a story is to treat myself as my reader, as my audience, and tell myself a story that amazes or delights or thrills or saddens me, that takes me somewhere new.
But still, as Edgar Pangborn put it, I persist in wondering . . .
Do we transcend genre by doing amazing genre work or do we transcend it by stepping outside of it? Is there any merit in transcending genre?
For that matter, at what point does an author become a genre? I do not read Ray Bradbury for moments of genre gratification, I read
I remember coldly and calculatingly plotting my own one of those. It concerned an extremely bright young woman, plunged into a coma by the machinations of her evil aunt, so she was unconscious through much of the book as a noble young scientist hero fought to bring her back to consciousness and save the family fortune, until he was forced to wake her with the shopping-and-fucking equivalent of a kiss. I plotted it, and I never wrote it. I wasnât cynical enough to write something I didnât believe, and if I was going to rewrite âSleeping Beautyâ I was sure I could find a better way to do it.
But story privileged is a good thing for me. I care about story. Iâm always painfully certain that Iâm not much good at story, always happy when a story feels right, or comes out properly.I love beautiful writing (although Iâm never convinced that what the English think of as beautiful writing, which is writing thatâs as clean and straightforward as possible, is what the Americans think of as beautiful writing, and itâs definitely not Indian beautiful writing or Irish beautiful writing, which are other things entirely).
But I love the drive and the shape of story.
I spent much of the last four days with my ninety-five-year-old cousin Helen Fagin, who is a holocaust survivor and was professor of the holocaust at the University of Miami for some time, and a wonderful, remarkable woman, and she was telling me about when she was in the Radomsko ghetto in 1942. She had been at Kraków University until the war interrupted her studies, so she was assigned in the ghetto to teach younger kids (she would have been nineteen, maybe twenty), and in order to assert normality, these ten-or-eleven-year-olds would come in the morning and she would teach them Latin and algebra and things that she was uncertain that they would have any use for, but she would teach them. And one night she was given a copy of the Polish translation of Gone with the Wind, and she explains this is significant in that books were banned. Books were banned by the Nazis in an incredibly efficient way, which was if they found you with a book they would put a gun against your head and shoot you. Books were very, very banned, and she was given a copy of Gone with the Wind . And each night she would draw the curtains and put the blackout in place and read, with a tiny light, two or three chapters, losing valuable sleep time, so that the next morning when the kids came in she could tell them the story of what she read, and that was all they wanted. And for an hour every day they got away. They got out of the Radomsko ghetto. Most of those kids went on to the camps. She says that she tracked them all later and discovered that fourâout of the dozens of kids she taughtâhad survived. When she told me that it made me rethink what I do and made me rethinkthe nature of escapist fiction, because I thought actually it gave them an escape, just there, just then. And it was worth risking death for.
As I get older Iâm more comfortable with genre. More comfortable deciding what points a reader would feel cheated without. But still, my main impulse in creating a story is to treat myself as my reader, as my audience, and tell myself a story that amazes or delights or thrills or saddens me, that takes me somewhere new.
But still, as Edgar Pangborn put it, I persist in wondering . . .
Do we transcend genre by doing amazing genre work or do we transcend it by stepping outside of it? Is there any merit in transcending genre?
For that matter, at what point does an author become a genre? I do not read Ray Bradbury for moments of genre gratification, I read
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