‘Literary fiction.’ What is it, exactly?

When I get asked what category of fiction Who Is Mr Satoshi? falls into, I generally do a bit of protracted umming and ahhing before telling the questioner that my novel is ‘probably literary fiction’. This usually meets with a facial expression which can be roughly translated as: I’m not going to read anything by this halfwit; he’s not even sure what genre he’s writing in.

What I generally fail to go on and explain is the source of my hesitation. For some bookworms, literary fiction is whatever a prize committee decides it is: if a book’s on the Booker longlist, or gets a nomination for the Costa, it’s ‘literary’. For others, a literary novel is simply one written in prose which seems somehow to stand above the average piece of writing. But, for many readers, ‘literary fiction’ is synonymous with ‘unreadable’, ‘pretentious’, ‘plotness’. And - here’s the trouble - I sort of agree that those last three epithets do aptly describe a big swathe of contemporary literary fiction.

It’s not that I’m opposed to lyrical, self-conscious prose (I’m partial to the odd ‘epithet’, ‘aptly’ and ’swathe’, after all). But I do fear that ‘literary fiction’ has become the sweep-up category for a lot of middle-of-the-road novels that have abandoned the pleasures of narrative tension in favour of over-excited similes (’her hair was like, like … a mane of overflowing … hair’).

The author Monica Ali recently suggested on Twitter that ‘the most basic element of plot is suspense … some students [of literature] struggle with that, as it’s associated with popular forms of fiction.’ That struck me as very interesting, and mingled in my head with another observation aired at around the same time. On the Culture Show I’d seen Sue Perkins describe her experience of being a Booker Prize judge, and spilt my coffee in surprise when she casually mentioned that out of the 134 novels she’d had to read for the award, at least 100 were ‘completely plotless’.

Depressing, I thought, tending to the second-degree burns and sofa stains. But maybe not surprising. I’ve lost track of the number of literary novels that have passed through my hands in the last few years which have contained not a shred of suspense. It’s as if suspense itself has become associated with cheap tricks, with a ‘genre’ approach to fiction-writing which is deemed to be both lowbrow and gimmicky, and if you want to be taken seriously as an Artist (the capital letter is essential, Darling) you need to steer well clear of it. Either that or many modern literary novelists are simply unable to pull off narrative suspense - plot is not in their writerly toolkit - which is perhaps even more worrying.

In the past, authors from Dickens right through to Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood and Beryl Bainbridge have put absolute faith in the power of story-telling, in the spell-like allure of an engaging plot. The writing was beautiful, but it was employed in the service of a compelling story. Even arch stylists like Woolf and Joyce knew better than to turn their noses up at narrative tension (in Mrs Dalloway we wonder whether Septimus will kill himself, and whether Clarissa’s much-hyped party will be success or disaster; in the deceptively sprawling Ulysses we are plunged straight into the tension between Stephen and Mulligan, the latter making a cruel remark about the former’s mother). Plot, tension, suspense - these were not dirty words as far as the great novelists of the past were concerned.

Could we say the same about many of today’s literary novelists? Would John Banville be pleased or put out if we approached him at a literary event and told him his Booker-winning novel The Sea was ‘entertaining’, or ‘a good read’, or ‘a page-turner’? Is calling a novel with literary aspirations a ‘page-turner’ a compliment these days, or a patronising pat on the back, like telling Heston his latest Triple-Dipped Liquid Nitrogen Scallop & Dairy Milk Risotto ‘filled a hole’?

A lot of my favourite books are what critics might call ‘dense’, ‘difficult’, or ‘inventive’ - but on some level they also fill a hole, offering me a narrative that makes me want to keep turning the page. I don’t need dead bodies, Harvard symbologists or girls with dragon tattoos - but I do need the character to want something (risotto? coffee? a new sofa?) and be changed in the getting or not-getting of it. And if I find myself staying up past my bed time, turning that page and then the next one, caring about the character, I don’t dismiss the author as one who makes effortful nods toward genre convention. I think to myself: oh, this writer knows what they’re doing. Writers like Sarah Waters, David Mitchell, Paul Murray, Tim Pears - they know what they’re doing. They combine thoughtfully plotted, elegantly suspenseful stories (yes, actual stories!) with thoughtful, elegant, challenging prose. But too many supposedly ‘literary’ novelists seem to see the very concept of ’story’ - of having a beginning, middle and end (which don’t need to be carefully signposted, of course, or even in that order) - as being a cheap concession to the numbskulls who buy their books.

Those Artists often produce works which more closely resemble rambling, structureless blog posts than novels. And who, in the end, wants to read one of those?

Who is Mr Satoshi? is available now at Amazon, Waterstones, or your local bookshop.

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