the revenge of plot

I recently discovered that tons of writerly people are on Twitter. One of the more interesting to "follow" has been Lev Grossman, the senior book critic for Time magazine and a self-described huge fantasy nerd.

I'm sure I read his (spoiler-free) review of Deathly Hallows when it came out, but I recently rediscovered it and took note of it because he pretty much nailed, in a single sentence, everything I think is so awesome and profound and worthy-of-contemplation-by-adults about Rowling's universe: "The essential problem in Rowling's books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles and gritted teeth, and then sweep up the rubble afterwards." Willingness to engage with a book about wizards on an existential level? You've got my attention.

In any case, Lev recently wrote a great piece for, of all things, the Wall Street Journal's Life & Style section, calling for the return of plot to the literary novel, and, in a broader sense, for the breaking down of distinctions between "literary" and "popular" or "genre" fiction. It caught my attention because it was making, not an identical, but a sort of parallel argument to this article by Independent journalist Johann Hari, in which he called on young novelists to stop "ever more exquisitely describing their own navels" and go out and write about real shit happening in the real world. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Hari also recently wrote these excellent pieces.) When I read Hari's commentary, I immediately thought "That's me! That's what I'm trying to do!"

Lev makes an interesting point about why he thinks so many adults have been "cheating on" literary fiction with young-adult novels, the territory of the "unblushing embrace of storytelling," which offer the return of things like "suspense and humor and pacing"--and, I would add, of stakes.

What is it that makes YA books so appealing? Without having done an extensive literature review of the contemporary YA market, I will venture a completely unscientific guess. YA books that are going to make it big--which means they will have to successfully compete for tweens' and teenagers' attention with a myriad of distractions, not the least of which are movies and video games--are more likely to be what we'd call in the film industry "high concept." That is, they tell a high-stakes story set in a unique, original and memorable world. I would suspect that they frequently involve a life-or-death struggle of some sort--because, let's face it, when you're a teenager everything seems like a life-or-death struggle, so that's just a basic requirement to hold the reader's attention. You may notice that these are also frequently the attributes of fantasy tales; I don't think it's a coincidence that there is a large overlap in genres.

Of course, any of my professors would quickly tell you that these are also the elements of a good movie. We want to see characters fighting for something, something they desperately need or want and are having trouble getting, something that matters to us and them. Because conflict is not seen as an optional element in drama, but the bedrock on which everything else is built, paying attention to things like tension and suspense and pacing and mystery, to characters' actions and objectives, is a basic structural necessity and not a stylistic choice. I would wager that if you examined the top-selling YA novels, you'd find they were constructed a lot more like movies than most "respectable" literary fiction, and I'd argue that that is generally a good thing.

If you think about it, it should not really be that surprising that stories with people who do things and want things and fight for things that matter, and that take us to a world we don't already know, are damn compelling. And just because these elements tend more frequently to be found in "popular" literature doesn't mean they can't also be a part of great literature...or that popular literature itself can't be great literature--whoa!

So, in conclusion: pop culture win. Read wizard books. And I'm looking forward to being part of the future of fiction.

P.S. Funny Lev Grossman should mention Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, a 374-page post-apocalyptic thriller in which teenagers are forced to fight to the death on live TV in something like a macabre cross between Survivor and Battle Royale. It seems I am coming a bit late to the phenomenon (a sequel is due out this week), but I recently read the first chapter of The Hunger Games online on Scholastic's website. I was immediately sucked in by the swift and simple prose and the book's hard-bitten, not-remotely-girly teenage heroine. Something about the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which she described her brutal world struck a chord of authenticity with me, and by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. I ordered the book, and when it arrived I immediately read the second chapter, at which point I had to slam the book shut and hide it in the closet, because I knew if I read any more I was just going to have to read the whole damn thing. It's currently burning a hole through the closet door, along with Lev Grossman's own book, The Magicians, which this article pretty much single-handedly convinced me to buy.

P.P.S. Lev also recently wrote this, which really has nothing to do with anything, but which I laughed at for a slightly embarrassingly long time.