Monday, September 14, 2009

Fiction Mondays: In Defense of Plot

Since Rainy September has been delayed a week, I will wait until next Monday to start throwing around Gravity's Rainbow thoughts. This week, I'd like to talk about an essay by Lev Grossman from the Wall Street Journal, asking why novels must be hard (the short answers is the modernists). What the essay is, to me at least, is a defense of plot, of narrative unobscured by knowingly difficult literary tricks (yes, completely opposite of Gravity's Rainbow). I like this essay, especially the bits about YA. I just ordered The Hunger Games, and there are a lot of YA books I've read in the past few years which have really great stories, and yes, really great characters. And in the best of them, there are bold stylistic moves, from The Invention of Hugo Cabret and its frame-by-frame animation over the course of several pages, to Feed, which mauls vocabulary and language to make a point about the intellect of the narrator.

I found out about this essay through Alexander Chee's Koreanish blog. He makes a lot of really interesting points there about connecting with excitement, and I feel like his advice--develop the character by telling the story--is totally valid, and does point to a problem within certain literary circles. In my undergraduate creative writing classes, I read a lot of stories that were so concerned with developing characters at the expense of plot that I don't remember them at all. Strangely enough, I do remember the ones that were maybe not as good, but that had interesting stories behind them. They seemed to at least be written with heart and excitement. I feel like I'd rather read ten stories that love telling stories than one concerned with showing off its cleverness.

I am unabashedly the same reader who could remember every detail from Treasure Island after I read it in second grade--a little smarter, and a little more capable of criticism--and that reader loves plot. I watched Star Wars only a few weeks ago because I missed it. It's pure plot. But I don't think anyone would say that we don't know everything we need to know about Han Solo as the movie progresses: when he comes back to save Luke's ass, we are thrilled, but we always knew he would.

The "literary" books that have a foot in genre know that people love plot, and I think it's something that is, like Grossman argues, changing the face of literature. Since there are a ton of books coming out in the next few weeks, there's a pretty large sample group to back this up:

Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry: Ghost Story
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City: Sci-Fi
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood: Sci-Fi
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice: Detective

I think it's fair to say that 21st-century literature is going to be about plot, about borrowing from genres to change what "literary fiction" means. I mean, the idea of cobbling together existing genres to form a new form is not new: when I think of taking two disparate genres and successfully joining them to create a whole better than the sum of its parts, my mind always goes to Blade Runner. And I don't really believe, considering most of the authors I read, that genre and literary fiction are so incompatible.

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