The narrow mind of the literary world

As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction.  His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme.  The only problem?  Well, here’s what Gough has to say:

This is the first line of the review: “The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods.”Now, I couldn’t quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably “the first to contend” that migration “afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods”. And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not “literary”, nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

I’m not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he’s already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto:  it’s

a ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.

I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it’s badly overpraised, but some of it’s worthwhile.  What I do have a problem with, as I’ve noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn’t a genre, but rather is simply what’s worth the attention of the serious reader.  This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don’t recall anyone actually disproving his arguments).  Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.