Some thoughts on Fiction

Two weeks ago I read Gillian Flynn’s Dark Spaces which I found so disturbing (though brilliant) that I told myself I would stay away from crime fiction and read some “real” literature for a change. And so I picked up Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections that has been sitting on my shelf for almost two years now. Jonathan Franzen is not a favourite of mine - he strikes me as too pretentious. I have read Freedom which I found boring at times and The Discomfort Zone which infuriated me (because I found it pretentious), so I was keeping away from The Corrections.

When I started reading The Corrections, however — which I liked a lot, I have to admit - something became very clear to me. Crime fiction is a literary genre, for sure, but it’s not Literature with a capital L. Crime fiction, which I love - don’t get me wrong - is what I would call fast food, while Literature is a gourmet dinner. I think that’s because crime fiction is usually driven by plot and is focused around a murderer; you want to know who did it, so you rush toward the end of the book, binge reading, if you are like me, because you have to know.

I read Flynn’s book in two days. But Literature, even if it’s not in the form of a 600 page novel like Franzen’s, requires different speeds because it’s not the plot that drives it, but the characters and the language. Of course good crime fiction also has well developed characters and powerful language, but it’s always the murderer that you are after, so the language becomes secondary. In Literature, on the other hand, you take your time, savouring the words, thinking about the characters, because you are not rushing to get somewhere. You know that you will get there eventually, so you take your time inhabiting the novel as if it were your home. And if the novel is good, how great it feels to be at home.