And, finally, who really cares about this stuff? While elegant prose is a delight and I fervently wish that all authors were capable of it, I don't think that flabby style is the real source of the dismay many readers feel with regard to literary fiction. If I had to nail down the complaint lodged in the heart of Myers' essay and in the hearts of those who have welcomed it, it's this question: Why is so much literary fiction so dull? One answer can be found in the section of "A Reader's Manifesto" that I most savored: Myers' scornful dismissal of what he calls "the sentence cult" -- that is, critics who base their admiration for an author on the surpassing beauty of his or her sentences. Myers goes to great lengths to prove that such praises -- when sung to his chosen five stooges, at least -- are incorrect. Regardless or whether or not he's right, to my mind the whole question is simply irrelevant.
Much of "A Reader's Manifesto" is wasted on meticulous analysis of prose style -- a choice that does seem at odds with Myers' withering disdain for the sentence cult -- when the truth is that you don't need an excellent style to write a great novel. Any critic who begins an essay with the example of Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" ought to know that. Dreiser wrote clunky, awkward, tone-deaf prose. His novels are notoriously hard to "get into," but I still remember where I was and how I felt as I came to the conclusion of "An American Tragedy," transfixed by the claustrophobic horror of Clyde Griffith's impending execution. On the level of sentences (or paragraphs, for that matter), DeLillo can write circles around Dreiser, but when it comes to writing novels, Dreiser wipes the floor with the author of "Underworld." (Likewise, people who read Russian say that Dostoyevsky is an equally inept stylist -- and he certainly in translation doesn't come across as a Nabokovian word magician -- but that doesn't keep "Crime and Punishment" from being a brilliant book.)
When readers complain about contemporary serious fiction, what they often say, yearningly, is, "All I want is a good story." ("Is that too much to ask?" a graphic designer once said to me at a dinner party when explaining why she'd abandoned new novels for narrative nonfiction.) A "good story" amounts to more than just a crackerjack plot. It's an alchemical blend of tale-spinning and character building -- in short a good novel, not just good writing. And I suspect that this is the lack Myers refers to when he duns literary fiction for being short on "action." This unwise choice of words, though, gives Siegel the opening to accuse Myers of touting "action movies in book form" and of demanding that fiction writers abandon any account of "unquantifiable inner experience" -- as if there's no middle ground between "To the Lighthouse" and a novelization of "Die Hard 2."
However, before the quarrel descends into unfathomable depths of silliness, it's worth noting that literary fiction isn't selling very well these days, and that Myers' essay, for all its detours, does occasionally touch on some reasons for its decline in popularity. (In fact, even commercial fiction is suffering; Inside.com recently reported that, remarkably, this summer's nonfiction bestsellers are outselling the fiction offerings.) Most authors of literary novels don't seem to do a very good job of pleasing readers, despite Siegel's protests that DeLillo and company are "commercially successful." (The few literary authors who do please readers -- Alice Hoffman, Barbara Kingsolver, John Irving -- routinely sell so many more books than DeLillo and Auster that you can't help but wonder why Myers never even mentions them.)
One reason why most literary novels don't appeal to readers like my sister -- a nurse who likes Hoffman and Irving and also bemoans the dearth of "good stories" -- is that they aren't intended to; what literary authors are after is the esteem of their colleagues. Just as nuclear physicists strive to impress other nuclear physicists and dog breeders value the admiration of fellow dog breeders over that of the uninitiated masses, so people who write serious fiction seek the high opinion of other literary novelists, of creative writing teachers and of reviewers and critics. They want very badly to be "literary," and for many of them this means avoiding techniques associated with commercial and genre fiction -- specifically too much emphasis on plot. Who, after all, wants to be accused of writing "action movies in book form"? Their motivation in doing so isn't, as Myers bizarrely suggests, a desire to con the gullible book-buying public, but simply a desire to succeed in the eyes of their peers. And if, to those on the outside, this little world seems a bit snooty, well, it wouldn't be the first small community to comfort itself with the notion that it is exclusive rather than marginalized.
Myers, though, has his biggest beef with critics, who, he reasons, ought to be on the side of readers, not the literary elite. How can they lavish so much praise on such slack, turgid books? Many of the reviewers he scolds for doing so are themselves literary novelists, but not all. Why then do we critics champion mediocre "literary" books when we, perhaps above all others, suffer the most from their proliferation?
As Meghan O'Rourke points out in her thoughtful critique in Slate of Myers' essay, the chief problem with literary critics is that, as writers themselves, they practice the craft they review. They move in literary circles, or at least aspire to. This can lead to an unfortunate myopia, and furthers the cause of the sentence cult. Of course good sentences are important -- they're the very material that fiction is made from, after all -- but who ever hungrily picked up a novel because someone told them it had terrific sentences? Nobody, surely, but another novelist or would-be novelist, and even those, I suspect, still harbor at least a small hope of finding something more than just pretty writing when they open a book.
Imagine what film reviews would be like if they were all written by cinematographers. To make "sentences" the primary criteria and focus of literary criticism is a lot like evaluating a movie in terms of its lighting and editing. Light, after all, is essential and central to the art of film, the stuff that movies are made of, and editing profoundly shapes the experience a film delivers. Without light, without editing, there is no movie, but when a film critic is addressing an audience wider than the community of filmmakers, lighting and editing seem like secondary, technical issues.
Likewise, it's mostly other writers who are keenly interested in matters of prose style and form. Nothing wrong with zeroing in on these, of course, as long as you don't mind boring and ultimately alienating that shrinking population of nonwriting readers who actually fork over their hard-earned cash to keep this whole rickety profession afloat. Literary fiction as a whole seems to be sliding into the kind of ghetto that poetry now occupies, a cultural economy in which writers vastly outnumber readers and nobody buys the books. Newspapers and magazines almost never review poetry, and they've recently begun to cut back on other book reviews as well: bad news for fiction, which can almost never wangle coverage off the review pages. One reason publishers give for the cuts is a lack of interest in reviews -- perhaps because their readers are tired of reading about "luminous" prose (always a dead giveaway that the book is a snooze). A few more years of this and it's welcome to the world of the incredible shrinking NEH grant.
Of course, it's entirely possible to combine good writing and strong storytelling -- Jane Austen did it, and as a result people still read her today, but then again, she probably wasn't worrying about being "literary" enough. Still, fulminating indictments of empty writerly affectation and grandiloquent defenses of "difficulty" seem like unpromising ways to close the growing gulf between literary novelists and the readers who would like to become their audience. Writers, critics and other supporters of serious fiction would be better off peeking over some of the arbitrary walls they've erected and recognizing that pleasure needn't be an anathema to art.
About the writer
Laura Miller is Salon's New York editorial director.
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