Sunday’s NY Times “Week in Review” featured a short essay by Charles McGrath that takes inspiration from the recent case of Joan Brady, an author who recently made headlines in England for an out-of-court settlement from a shoe factory near her home for physical damages and what the press initially categorized as, in McGrath’s summation, “a loss of concentration that caused her to abandon the literary novel she was working on… and instead crank out a potboiler.”
“What’s behind the Brady controversy,” McGrath writes, “is the assumption that genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories—is a form of literary slumming.”
Which leads to a lot of discussion about how thrillers can so be real literature, how some genre writers work their way up to canonization while others don’t, and backhanded compliments like the way P.D. James delivers “a characterization so rich and detailed that for long stretches you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place.” Along with the resurrection of the theory that genre fans are implicitly attractive to the repetitive, formulaic elements, because they offer the comfort of the familiar, “living up to their implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails.”
“Oh please!” responds Bella Stander. “The promise of any novel should be to hold the reader in thrall from beginning to end.” That’s it.