Hi Margo,
The term "airport book" has been bandied about a lot lately, partly in response to our column, "
The Plot Thickens at The New York Times." This expression has long served as shorthand for the mindless fiction commonly available to passengers on the fly, books that have the staying power of cotton candy. It's also, by the way, a term that has outlived its truthfulness by at least a decade: Powell's Books was among the first to recognize that the demographics of the average airport junkie weren't consistent with the racks of mass paperbacks they once were forced to choose from. In 1989,Powell's expanded to the Portland International Airport. Fifteen years later, virtually every major airport has acquired its own version of a quality bookstore. Today the term "airport book" can mean anything from Garfield to Shakespeare.
All the same, the term "airport book" still stands for lite reading. It also sums up the disdainful attitude "serious" book people have toward popular fiction. It's a form of snobbery, but not without reason: The more educated the eye, the more apparent the shortcomings of books with one-dimensional characters and clunky writing. As a girl, I thought "Gone With the Wind" was the best thing I ever read. But as an adult I understand why it's not as good as "The Sound and the Fury." Both are contemporaneous novels about the South, but one is entertainment, the other is Literature with a capital L.
Whether it's the "airport book" or the historical romance novel, or any other variation on a theme, popular fiction is the two-ton elephant in the book section living room. Most book editors are
discriminating readers who prefer to read real serious fiction and realize that there's a devoted cadre who share their convictions. But, unless they work for
The New York Review of Books, they know that the majority of people who read their publications have more plebeian tastes. So what do you think they do: preach to the converted, or try to broaden the base of book section readership?
You know the answer as well as I do: Most book editors lean toward wooing those who share their personal tastes. I even did my own thumbnail survey of book editors at newspapers around the country to make sure my thesis stood up. To one degree or another, they'll give a nod to the latest Stephen King or John Grisham. But their argument is that 1) commercial fiction will sell whether they review it or not, and 2) it's a waste of time to give it "serious" review consideration because such books are skin-deep and there isn't much to say.
But is this formula helping or hurting book coverage? Are we at risk of being literary snobs and turning people off when we implicitly sneer at their favorites? Do book sections risk becoming too precious by targeting a narrow base? Or are they correct in assuming that discriminating readers are the only ones who will read their sections, anyway?
Hey Ellen,
I think you've hit a nerve -- the same nerve that was jarred by "The Plot Thickens" piece. I was amazed at how many people leapt to the defense of so-called serious fiction after that piece appeared. Yet few of them attempted to define what they meant by that term. Even fewer questioned the quality of the current work that attracts that label. On the other hand, most of them seemed certain that anything commercial -- read popular -- should be disdained.
Yes, I do think too many of us -- critics, editors, and readers -- are literary snobs, and the persistence of such an attitude is one of the reasons good fiction is having such a hard time attracting attention these days. Look at what happened to Oprah when she tried to bring good literature to a mass audience. She was shelled by those who consider themselves advocates for high art, criticized for trying to dictate tastes, and accused of liking only books with women protagonists who were abused. Never mind that she consistently picked books that would fit the category of serious fiction. Never mind that she fought the money people when they pointed out that her book club segments were the least-viewed shows in her line up. Publishers honored her (she sold books, after all, and made authors into millionaires), but the literati continued to dis her. No wonder she turned to dead authors.
We can't have it both ways. We can't complain that no one pays attention to serious fiction and then applaud fiction that is so inaccessible that only a handful of people can understand it. We can't complain that so-called serious fiction is not attracting readers, and then conclude that any fiction that does can't be serious.
So what's the solution for newspaper book sections? I don't think the
Times' Keller and Erlanger were as off the mark as their critics assert. Book sections need to mix it up more. We need to back away from the formulaic individual reviews and try to tackle book subjects on a broader basis, asking more fundamental questions. I happen to agree with Keller that there IS more happening in non-fiction than fiction these days. But why? Is serious fiction becoming too precious? And what is it about certain literary titles -- "Cold Mountain" and "The Lovely Bones" come to mind -- that hit a chord in people despite their complexity?
Margo,
Serious fiction covers such a wide range that it's hard to generalize about whether it's too precious. Maybe the problem is less with fiction than with the way it's covered, as previously mentioned. The standard high-low dichotomy suggests that Stephen King and John Grisham are not worthy of serious reviews, but that's true only if you assume that reviewers must confine themselves to literary merit.
A small example: I'm reviewing a first novel right now that shall remain unnamed, but it's being published this month by a major New York house and comes with starred reviews in
Publishers Weekly. Early on in the story, I read about a "respected psychiatrist" who taught at the University of Chicago around the turn of the 19th century. This seemed inconsistent with my understanding of Freud and Jung, and an Internet search unearthed an active association of neurologists but no psychiatrists in Chicago at that time. So I contacted the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, which informed me that in 1910 the school had a psychology department, but no faculty identified as psychiatrists or M.D.s. I'm not sure yet how relevant this information will be to my review of the book, but it does open up another potential avenue for discussion: What's the harm of a few anachronisms in an otherwise well-done piece of fiction?
There's plenty of vitality in non-fiction these days, a result of the huge cadre of excellent journalists in the field and what we all learned from the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, in which writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Truman Capote co-opted literary conventions to add power to their work. Is "In Cold Blood" better than fiction? In a way, yes, because the fact that it actually happened adds a degree of horror that even Stephen King couldn't produce.
Still, non-fiction doesn't replace fiction as a form of truth telling. Precious or not, made-up stories take us forward or back in time and put us inside the souls of people with whom we have nothing in common. Reading fiction requires the ability to suspend disbelief, to dream, and that's a critical faculty that we all need to exercise. Whether it's the much-maligned "airport book" or "serious literature," whether it's "Gone With the Wind" or "The Sound and the Fury," fiction rides on the wings of our imaginations.
I wish every bookpage editor in the country would take...
