Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then haunts you because racism” (White Tears, Hari Kunzru). Though, uh, as I write this list, which I did while glancing at my litfic shelves, I am detecting a decided preference for haunted things and structural oppression.

Maybe that is why I did not get on so well with My Year Abroad! Nothing and nobody is haunted¹ and there is not much structural oppression although there is lots of Wealth. And I am not very interested in Wealth. No rich people are eaten in this book, by the way! Despite several alluring moments when you think they might be! Do not expect a “Soylent Green is [rich] people!” moment, for you will be disappointed in that expectation, as I was. Eat the rich. Or at least heavily tax them. Or at least enforce the existing tax laws on them.

Half of My Year Abroad is about Tiller’s odd, circumstantial encounter with Pong, a businessman who scoops Tiller up one summer to help with his business (why? we never know!), an experience that has left Tiller scarred and traumatized. The other half, interspersed, takes place in the aftermath. Tiller has attached himself to an older widow, Val, and her son, who are in witness protection and whose well-being Tiller has grown to care deeply about.

While the Pong sections of the books are the ones that verge most clearly into surrealism (which I tend to love), I struggled to feel connected to Tiller’s adventures with Pong. In part this is because they were so episodic, but in larger part because Tiller doesn’t feel connected to them. In both halves of the book he’s chasing a sense of connection and belonging that has been largely absent to his life before Pong. But with Val and her son, he’s able to carve out a role for himself, to make himself an active participant rather than a sightseer in his own life. My Year Abroad has drawn comparisons to The Great Gatsby, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise, I still do not love a Nick Carraway.

Lee’s writing tends towards the maximalist, with mouth-watering (and occasionally stomach-churning) descriptions of food and place. He’s as lavish describing a poorly-recalled college karaoke night as a gourmet four-course meal, and the book does succeed in conveying the too-much-ness of a wealthy (or in some cases simply an American) lifestyle. It is a long book. I am very old and tired.

I would add for readers a content warning for the latter fifth of the book, when things get particularly dark and weird. Val has persistent suicidal ideation and makes several suicide attempts; Tiller is coerced into unpaid labor; a terminally ill character attempts to save his own life through alchemical measures that are doomed to failure; and Tiller gets roofied and raped by his host’s daughter Constance. (He doesn’t say no, but also is unable to resist or give consent due to being high, and Constance has deliberately drugged him in order to get him in that state.) I wasn’t quite able to figure out how the book felt about the rape — Tiller clearly feels weird about it but also describes it as “the greatest ever itch for the greatest ever scratch.” Admittedly it’s hard to apply real-life morality to something as surreal as My Year Abroad’s final act, but overall I felt like this sequence, and Tiller’s subsequent relationship with Constance, played into the idea that men constantly want and enjoy sex and thus can’t be raped. I overall felt very icky about it.

So! Yeah! I love weird litfic but this specific one was not my cup of tea. Or jamu. Or mercury. (That’s a little My Year Abroad joke for you.)

Note: I received a review copy of My Year Abroad from the publisher; this has not impacted the contents of my review.

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BUT. Then I read this extremely litficcy book, America Is Not the Heart, by Elaine Castillo, and when I say extremely litficcy you should understand that I mean it has a prestige-y sort of cover (see below) and a review in the New York Times and several interludes in the second person and no quotation marks around the dialogue and a description that doesn’t do a great job of explaining what the book is but that’s kind of not the fault of the marketing department or the author or whoever because this is a tough book to encapsulate — and even with all of those trappings of literary fiction, it still shouted I AM PENNED BY A PERSON WHO CAME FROM FANFIC so loudly that it reminded me about this idea I had had.

(“You are being exceptionally cogent and eloquent today, Jenny,” yes yes thank you, I know, my sentence structure is always impeccable.)

(But really, I do sometimes wish English were like Latin in the way you can just pile clauses on and on and on and on and nobody will fuss at you because they will be too busy noticing how similar your writing style is to Cicero’s.)

America Is Not the Heart is mostly about a Filipina woman called Hero who comes to California in the nineties to live with her uncle Pol. She has recently been released from a government camp where she was tortured; her life with Pol’s family will be a fresh start. The book focuses on two of Hero’s relationships: with her small, fierce, angry cousin Roni and with another Filipina woman, Rosalyn, whose grandmother is a healer trying to help with Roni’s eczema.

I’ve already said what makes the book extra-litficcy, so let me try now to explain what makes it feel fanficcy. For one thing, its protagonist is queer and complicated and possessed of sharp edges that the story does not attempt to file off. Hero is a trauma survivor, an immigrant, an estranged daughter, a stranger to the family members who take her in, a bisexual woman who enjoys sex but has little patience with romance; and the way Castillo prioritizes these many identities rang true but was not what I expected from literary fiction. Though Roni and Paz and Pol are Hero’s biological family, the arc of the book is a found-family story, with Hero moving from isolation to community. It’s also a romance. (I shipped it.)

If your fanfic preferences extend to found family, slow burns, and trauma aftermath, roughly in that order, do please check out America Is Not the Heart. I am sorry about the quotation marks thing. Sometimes literary fiction does that, and you just have to sigh and power through. Here is the book quote I would tell Elaine Castillo to use for her AO3 summary if I were her beta and this book were a fic.

That this could be the actual condition of the world — a world in which there was still corny music, lechon kawali, heavy but passing rain, televised sports, yearly holidays, caring families, requited love — seemed to Hero a joke of such surreal proportions the only conclusion she could make of it in the end was that it wasn’t a joke at all; and if it wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a dream, that meant it was just. Real life. Ordinary life.

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(The title is a joke. We don’t really crack the case w/r/t genre. I don’t want y’all to get all excited now and then be disappointed at the end.)

Jenny: I think one of the H U G E elements to the genre/fanfic/literary conversation is that terms are being defined inconsistently across the conversation. Often when people say that [genre] isn’t doing this thing or that thing, they have a set of genre boundaries in mind that don’t necessarily line up with the boundaries other folks have in mind for that genre. So when we’re talking about literary fiction, the interlocutors are often referencing very different things, including:

• books shelved in the Fiction section (rather than YA, romance, SF, etc) at Barnes & Noble or your local library
• books that are considered part of the Canon
• books likely to receive attention from outlets like the New York Times Book Review or The Millions
• books by white dudes with author proxy protagonists, especially ones where the author insert character is a creative writing professor with a boner for one of his students

(I’m being slightly facetious on that last one, but that’s a category of book that I often see used as a stand-in for litfic and its problems.) Each of these genre definitions might be what people mean when they say “litfic.” Each one (and all the others I haven’t thought of) comes with its own set of complications, and each is a slightly-to-very different circle in the Venn diagram.

Another problem is that even within an agreed-upon set of genre definitions, there’s so many subsets! I live in corners of the internet where romance fans are really really hype for consent and SF fans want All the Diverse Books, and I would bristle if someone told me that romance was full of alpha jerk heroes and SF was all white dudes — even if they were able, and they would be, to trot out numerous examples to prove their points. So part of it also has to be a discoverability issue. When someone goes to dip their toes into a new genre, the things they happen to be handed first is inevitably going to have a lot of impact on how they view the genre, because they don’t necessarily have access to intra-community discussions or knowledge of changing trends.

Maureen: SO, I definitely agree with all of your above points! I mean, both of these genres are so huge and individual readers have had such enormously different experiences within them. It’s hard to find a way to talk about both lived experiences and overall trends and issues in a way that doesn’t feel invalidating to someone. I think people are making great points about the porousness of genre boundaries, and overall I think pushing back a bit against SFF’s identity policing is a really good thing.

That being said, one of my concerns is that the current discussion seems to somehow be flattening both readers who love books at the margins of genre boundaries and readers who love books at the center of genre boundaries. I strongly suspect that none of us are as far apart as we think, but there’s also a lot to unpack when it comes to personal identities as a reader. I always say I’m a genre reader, by which I mean almost everything except litfic; what does it mean for my sense of self when people say that doing that is limiting and wrong? They’re not wrong, exactly, but also not exactly right.

And all of these discussions take place within a history of past discussions and arguments and hurts. Some people are seeing SFF defined by the white guys who like space ships and big guns, but that’s never all the genre has been. And some people are seeing litfic defined by the white guys who like navel-gazing and banging their students, but again, that’s never all the genre has been. So how to move beyond those limiting definitions in a way that’s challenging but at the same time respectful of what people do actually love about these particular genres? I don’t know the answer to that exactly but I think that’s the question.

I do think there is more SFnal stuff in litfic than people often realise. But by the same token, the authors of those books can be absolute jerks about SFF in interviews (“Oh this isn’t REALLY fantasy, I just use dragons as METAPHORS”/”This is SF for GROWN UPS”) and that turns me right off their books instantly (Atwood & Ishiguro, I’m looking at you). Don’t be a jerk about the genre you’re writing in! I promise that you are not saving SF from dull extinction with your brilliance. And I think that legacy of condescension, real or perceived, creates a reflexive antagonism within SFF fans, who are tired of hearing that they have to be saved from their juvenile enthusiasm.

Jenny: YES it’s very true that the literary establishment — the guys who write the big reviews and win the big awards, and I do say “guys” advisedly — has historically turned up its nose at genre fiction. To a large extent that’s still true, though it’s changing. So yeah, that’s definitely informing the conversation.

I love your main question about challenging (crappy, exclusionary) genre conventions while still respecting the strengths of those genres — I think you’re exactly right that it’s the central question. And one of my big answers to that question is to avoid the construction “X doesn’t do Y well,” especially but not exclusively in cases where X is a genre that’s not one’s home turf. Because what I’ve found, as a person who has massively expanded her genre horizons over the past (say) seven years, and a person who doesn’t necessarily feel she even has a home turf genre, is that constructions like that are almost invariably wrong unless preceded with the word “Some.”

Some litfic doesn’t do slice-of-life well. Some romance doesn’t do consent well. Or better yet, “I’ve had a hard time finding romance novels that do consent well.” To approach it in a spirit of inquiry and collegiality, rather than opposition. I KNOW THAT PROBABLY SOUNDS DOUCHEY. But it’s something I’ve really struggled with myself, the recognition that there’s no moral valence to liking one thing versus another thing.

(Please know that I’m resisting with all my might making a joke at my own expense about the moral valence of liking Bukowski.)

Maureen: (But why resist?)

You are spot on about approaching it in a spirit of inquiry and collegiality! It gets super messy because there are such deep emotions about reading and identities and who we are; the stories we love inform us, and the stories we tell ourselves about those stories can have a lot of emotional weight. I know for myself, I had kind of the opposite experience of Cecily Kane, in that I was so alienated by realistic/contemporary fiction for YEARS, and fantasy felt like coming home. But I still struggle with litfic as a genre; it’s hard for me to parse what I will like and what I won’t, even with reviewers I trust. Given that individualized recommendations for every reader are probably not a realistic option (but visit your local library and ask, friends!) how do we work to open these fields to each other?

(And of course it gets more complicated when we start to go into the histories and experiences of marginalized people within both genres, and who has chosen which one and why.)

Second–look, I love the spirit of Max Gladstone’s Twitter thread; I think he’s attempting to do exactly what you were talking about in the sense of “Here’s this cool thing that you don’t think you like but you probably will!” At the same time, the three things being discussed (quiet litfic/SFF slice of life/quiet fanfic) often have really different end goals and tones. I would actually be super fascinated if someone picked up on that and dove into the similarities and differences, where the projects converge and where they separate. But I’m not entirely convinced that it’s as simple as his Twitter thread makes it out to be. You start having to get extremely specific about the literary tone and the emotional objective of the work, which of course is why people keep bringing up fanfic style tagging! But, like, if you want a coffeeshop AU where it’s just two characters you love having quiet & intense moments together, I’m not sure, say, Woolf is going to satisfy that particular itch.

Anyway, if you are willing to give me a recommendation or two for a litfic book you think I would like, that would be neat!

Jenny: Tell the Wolves I’m Home, oh Maureen, I choose Tell the Wolves I’m Home. I think you would love it.

Agree, agree, agree that there’s no simple answer. Romance is a good example for me because that was not an organic thing: I decided in early 2012 that I was going to start liking romance, and then I set about doing it, and it was hard — not to find one book that matched up to my interests, but to set in place a structure that would allow me to continue finding books that matched up to my interests. Six years later, I have a few auto-buy authors and a few pals I can go to for recommendations, but I still feel like a relative newbie to the field. Six years later.

As much as I think we should resist sweeping statements about there being nothing like this in X genre, we equally should resist the (alluring, I agree) idea that it’s easy to start doing or reading or being a new thing. The barrier to entry of learning how to parse a whole new community of readers or set of genre conventions or type of marketing material is a considerable one. It’s not illegitimate for a reader to say “that’s too much work for something I didn’t want that badly in the first place.”

I’d love to see more people talking across genre boundaries — and I’m probably failing at this myself! I read a ton of literary fiction, but most of my Twitter pals are genre people, which means I talk a lot more on Twitter about genre books that I’m excited about. Basically I expect that people who don’t commonly read in a given genre won’t have any interest in books in that genre, and then that probably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So hey, we’ve found an action item for me! I can try this when I talk about books going forward: relating elements of books in one genre to things people might already like about another genre. If you like coffee shop AUs, try out Annabeth Albert’s Portland Heat series. (I punted. I never read slice-of-life literary fiction. I have no litfic ideas for coffee shop AU likers.)

HOORAY. WE SOLVED GENRE.

The post Jenny and Maureen Solve the Genre Wars appeared first on Reading the End.

The End of Everything is about a thirteen-year-old girl called Lizzie whose best friend Evie disappears. On the way home from field hockey practice or something, a car pulls up, and Evie disappears into it, and then she’s gone. In her absence, Lizzie — whose own father left the family — grows close to Evie’s father as the two of them try to piece together what happened to Evie.

And now, spoilers. I guess. If it counts as spoilers when I do not feel satisfied that I know what the reader is supposed to understand from the final scenes of the book. I thought it was really obvious from the start but then when I got to the end of the book I couldn’t tell what Megan Abbott thought was going on. I know what I thought was going on in the book, which is that the father was sexually abusing Evie’s older sister and possibly Evie too, and was grooming Lizzie; and Evie ran away with a creepy guy in order to escape from that whole thing.

However, the ending kind of confused me; and when I went to book club, everyone else at book club thought that Evie’s sister just had a weird creepy crush on her father, and that the father’s relationship with the daughters was normal. I strenuously disagree with this, while also not being sure whether Megan Abbott agrees with me or with the rest of my book club. Basically everything in the book makes me think I am right except that the ending phrases things really strangely, and like — whatever, I don’t know.

Plot confusion aside (I am really pretty certain the father was sexually abusing the older sister), I wasn’t wild about the book as a whole. It felt very, very written, like consciously trying to be beautiful and impactful in its word choices and its stopping-and-starting sentence structures. The thirteen-year-old narrator made a lot of weirdly mature points — weirdly mature not in a precocious way, but in a way that implied long years of life experiences that she couldn’t possibly have had. Then as well, the book kept circling back around to hit the same emotional beats really hard again and again and again. Sometimes I like for a book to circle around one crucial moment, but the reason this works (when it works) is that each pass comes closer to the crucial thing, and gives a new piece of information, or a new shade of nuance. If you’re just going back a hundred times to “Evie and I were super close and it’s weird she didn’t tell me what was up”, I lose interest.

If you read this, what did you think? The father was sexually abusing the older sister, right? I mean — he was, right?

Other reviews:

Jenn’s Bookshelves
Nomad Reader
Chamber Four

Tell me if I missed yours!

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