Literary Fiction. Dead.

What is literary fiction? How to distinguish it from commercial fiction and does anyone care? And what about the in-between: that middle-brow, pleasing-to-chattering-class fiction that is so adored by editors and markets.

Literary fiction, as I have known it, loved it, and tried to write it, is difficult to find in the anglophone world of writing.
A psychological intensity (roman d'analyse), a palpable sense of interiority, an exactitude in language, that ineffable thing referred to as 'voice', a singularity of observation - gone. Risk. Who is taking any kind of risk? What is at stake? The urgency has disappeared from the act of writing. In its place exists graphomania, which, like all mania, has a strong autoerotic component. Exception: who writes with a real sense of urgency? Jonathan Franzen (sentimentality pervades his characters, plot is predictable, he lacks rigour, and his characters' tend to remain on the surface, schema overrides depth - but these are all grouches. What is felt in his writing is his urgency, his sense that something literary is at stake, an energy. He is not being 'clever' - that awful tic of so many British writers).

So the idea of risk is attached to notions of brand and sales. What is at stake is an author's bank account, an editor's ego, a publishers' growth (note: different measure than in days of yore when a small profit of margin was desirable, not a continuing push to 'growth'. Surely, this kind of inflationary pressure will cause the balloon to burst. And it did, but has it changed the ways in which editors read books?)
And where are the editors with a lived experience of the literary? What is a literary eduction? Very simply, someone who reads a lot, has read a lot, has a profound and enveloping love of books; whose engagement in a manuscript summons up ghosts of multiple authors, and multiple books from eras, epochs, cultures that preceded our own and surround our own. For whom the first question is not: 'will this sell?' but 'what is the author trying to do?' Now it seems most editors want to run the company, have bonuses and praise showered on them. They are primary, not the writer.

What is in its place?
Middle-brow, plot-led, soft realism.
Splashy bragadoccio storytelling.
Cartoon.
History posing as narrative.
Narrative posing as imagination.
Research in lieu of ideas.
Places in lieu of character.
Adolescent: stories, sensibilities. Whether clever or delicate, in-your-face or thoughtful, an emotional range which tips 30 at its outer limit.

And what about the exotic, the post-colonial posing as 'international'? Has cleverness superceded deep imagination?
Then there is the problem of sentimentality, and the connection between a disturbing rise in emotional kitsch and political correctness. Or sensationalism (grossness) posing as darkness, an outer edge of psychological register.

All is lifestyle. The capitalist-consumers have won. And no one even knows it.
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