Literary Fiction: A Consolidated Practical View

By Also · Apr 13, 2022 · ·
Popular/"commercial" and literary fiction differ considerably in the norms and values that shape them. Their core readerships want and expect different things—in many respects opposite things. The body of received wisdom that's usually applied to the writing and formative critique of popular fiction often does not apply to literary fiction and may not strengthen but weaken it.

In this post, I've systematized my thoughts on how and why "good" popular and literary fiction are so different, and what characteristics appeal to their respective core readers.
  1. This is a re-collated and distilled consolidation of my four earlier blog posts comparing literary and popular fiction.

    Literary Fiction: A Consolidated Practical View

    What is literary fiction, and how does it differ from popular fiction? It's a perennial question with as many answers as there are people who presume to answer it.

    At the poles of one or the other form of writing, the distinctions are clear. And to write successfully for one market or the other requires an appreciation of the differences between them.

    Although there are many ways to describe the differences between popular and literary writing, the book trade today uses a practical definition that is neither complicated nor esoteric.

    Contemporary popular fiction conforms to a clear, widely known-and-discussed set of conventions, expectations, models, and reference points. Although these standards differ to a degree by genre and subgenre, they share a core, and there are abundant resources available for learning the guidelines for popular storytelling – any number of "rule books" one can consult. The purpose of all these is to make books readable, relatable, and enjoyable for "the average reader." It's reasonable to say that a manuscript that colors outside these established lines is unlikely to gain traditional publication in the popular market or to appeal broadly to readers in that market.

    Contemporary literary fiction
    is defined by the book trade in contrast to commercial, mass-market fiction. It is fiction that does not fit into the categories and cater to the conventions, expectations, values and restrictions of popular fiction or its various genres. The modern definition really is not more complicated than that. Whether such a book will appeal to a substantial group of literary readers is, however, more complicated than that, and I'll get into those factors in a moment. But the essence is that literary fiction colors liberally outside the lines, and that is exactly why it appeals to its readers.

    Goodness! Is it that simple?

    The difference between popular and literary writing is not how "good" they are. Both forms provide ample outlet for advanced and virtuoso writing. "Good" simply means different things in the two arenas.

    Why "Popular?"

    Popular fiction, commercial fiction, genre fiction, mass-market fiction, mainstream fiction, and other terms, while not describing precisely the same things, describe the majority of fiction sold and read today. I'm choosing the term popular fiction for this discussion because it fits well with the commonly understood definitions of popular music, popular culture, popular cinema, and the like.

    All of the names I just mentioned for popular fiction have some currency in discussions of the subject, and any of them can be heard by some as putting down popular or literary fiction or even (by different listeners) both. But such merely potential reflections are a distraction.

    For instance, both popular and literary fiction can be commercially viable (or not) in different contexts and to different extents. Both popular genres and literary fiction have their own mainstreams at any given time, in fact usually more than one apiece. Both popular and literary fiction give space for excellent writing, although excellence in each is measured by different yardsticks.

    The key distinction is that popular fiction in most of its genres is written for (and meets certain expectations for) the widest possible appeal. Literary fiction is not. It really is that simple.

    Is it "Literature?"

    Literary fiction is not a synonym for literature. Literature is fiction of any kind that has been canonized into cultural heritage. When it was written, it may have been entertainment or art or both, by whatever standards prevailed at the time, and many of today's conventions in popular fiction originated in what we now call literature—but literature is not synonymous with literary fiction in the latter term's contemporary sense.

    In-between forms

    In practice, there are some intermediate forms, and while I won't go deeply into those, it's helpful to be aware of them and how they differ.

    Upmarket fiction, often called book club fiction, is in essence popular fiction, but written for readers with a higher reading level who have expectations of more complexity in treatment. It rarely ventures far outside the models, tropes, and reference points of popular fiction – else it would be something else – but it gives the familiar touchstones a more complex treatment.

    Alice Seybold's 2002 The Lovely Bones can be called upmarket fiction. It sticks to traditional elements, but with language and perspective that transcend the popular market.


    Hybrid fiction, sometimes called semi-literary fiction, is in essence literary fiction, but written with an eye to wider market appeal or possible cinematic adaptation.

    Peter Høeg's 1997 Smilla's Sense of Snow can be called a hybrid murder mystery. It's digressive and discursive and includes cultural reference points that place it well outside the realm of upmarket or book club fiction, but it contains a popular action mystery that got a much simplified version of it into cinemas.

    Donna Tartt's 2013 The Goldfinch is an essentially literary novel that earned commercial success by incorporating some more conventional elements that made it relatable to a wider audience and led to a film version.


    So far I've been talking in abstractions like "in essence popular" and "in essence literary," devoid of specifics defining or characterizing them. In a moment I'll get to the specifics, but they all flow from the characteristics of two broad types of readers with contrasting traits.

    Core readers and conventionality vs anti-conventionality

    Popular and literary fiction written since the mid- or late-mid-1900s splits along a common line that runs through nearly every point of comparison. I'll look in more detail at those points in a moment, but the single thing that more than any other distinguishes core readers of popular and literary fiction (save possibly reading level) is conventionality.

    Popular fiction


    Core readers of popular fiction expect and crave conventionality: common, familiar (or at least recognizable) forms and treatments. Such readers demand conventional endings. They appreciate creativity within and variation on the familiar, but they want their expected plot points, their familiar tropes and character roles, their conventional story arcs. They want to read favorite sayings and descriptive phrases they've often read before or heard in daily life. They want to know which characters to like and which to dislike. They expect clarity and strongly dislike ambiguity. And they derive much enjoyment from recognizing each element as it appears, familiar but re-imagined for a new story.

    Such readers' tolerance for coloring outside established lines has definite limits. Look for instance at the scathing low-star Amazon reviews of Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, or especially of the modified UK translation retitled Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, to see just how strongly such readers react against deviation from convention, the confusion and anger it causes them. And see from other readers' high-star reviews how enthusiastically they rave about the very same characteristics of this odd fish of a book, which has elements of both upmarket and hybrid fiction. (Conventions in the European book market differ from those in English-language markets.)


    The conventions readers expect were at one time new and innovative, but have since become codified and made accessible to readers with at most a high-school education.

    Nearly everything one finds written today in books or on websites about "how to write good fiction" refers specifically to popular fiction. Contemporary literary writers conspicuously ignore many or most of those dicta. If they did not, then literary readers would not be drawn to them.


    Literary fiction

    Core readers of contemporary literary fiction shun conventionality. They read literary fiction precisely because they crave some combination of authenticity, abstractness, higher truth, novelty, unconventionality, rule-breaking, experimentalism, and the structurally or stylistically unexpected they do not find in popular fiction They want to be challenged. They have a high tolerance for transient confusion. They generally enjoy depictions having moral and emotional ambiguity. They're drawn to a writer's skillful coloring outside of lines, stretching the reader's assumptions, expectations, and the like. They are often bored by conventionality, and find the cinematic, high-showing, high-enactment treatments of much popular fiction to be tedious.


    Some subgenres like steampunk and cyberpunk inherently inhabit an in-between ground. Their premise is already unconventional, and they revel in some forms of unconventionality—a trait they share with much of science fiction. They have their own conventions and values that override external ones. Looking past the elements of milieu and speculation, their storytelling may be as conventional as other popular fiction or as complex as other literary fiction. Their core readers are already so devoted that descriptions other than the genre identification may not matter.

    General fiction is a category for writing that doesn't fit standard genres. It can be either popular or literary, depending on its reading level and degree of conventionality.

    Core types versus practical reality

    Of course these two types of reader are polar abstractions. While it's true that the large majority of book readers today are drawn to popular fiction and have little if any interest in or patience with the literary side, a sizable number of literary readers also enjoy reading popular fiction at times. This parallels consumers' habits with film, television, music, and even cuisine. Still, there tends to be an overall preference for one or the other, corresponding to respective readers' outlooks on life in general.

    So conventionality versus anti-conventionality—or more aptly aconventionality, a disregard for convention. There is no other universal distinguishing characteristic of modern literary writing, but it can be helpful to look at the conventions defining popular fiction and some of the ways that literary writing ignores or transcends them.

    Distinguishing traits

    Length

    Agents for popular fiction reportedly claim that millennial readers have no patience for books longer than 100,000 words or chapters longer than 3,000 words. As a result, those limits have become de facto standards a new author must meet.

    Literary fiction does not adhere to arbitrary limits on the length of novels or chapters. Literary writers use the number of words they need to tell a story in the way they wish. The same contrast is seen in the lengths of popular music versus cultural-legacy music.

    Reading level

    The canonical reading level for popular fiction is designated 12th-grade. (Never mind that most 12th graders no longer read at that level, despite its definition having been adjusted downward a number of times.) Reading level is a combination of factors like word length, word rarity, sentence length, sentence complexity, cultural reference points, and more. Commercial tools like the scanners at readable.io exist for gauging reading level. Core readers of popular fiction are annoyed at encountering words they don't know, rarely look up their meaning, and leave negative comments about them in online reviews.

    Literary readers have a high reading level regardless of formal education.
    They tend to delight at discovering well-chosen words they haven't previously seen.


    Language

    Writers of popular fiction are encouraged to use simplified but artificially vivid language full of strong verbs and crisp, snappy descriptions. They're told to avoid passive voice, which is frequently misdefined and misidentified in the critique group setting. They're told to replace stative progressive-aspect forms of verbs (was sitting) with the dynamic forms (sat), even when it causes ambiguity or loss of nuance or meaning, and stilted style.

    There's a parallel in the way that most commercial and retail photography (since the advent of digital) uses artificially hypersaturated colors that appeal to many consumers, while photographs in fine-art galleries and art books strive for colors that match real-world hues and saturations.


    Literary fiction tends to use more complex language than popular fiction. It tends to use a much larger vocabulary. It has as many moods as impressionist painting. It may be muted and subtle in one place, rhythmic and eccentric in another. It is often neutral or plain. It is usually careful of grammatical tense, voice, mood, and aspect. What it rarely is is artificially vivid in the way that authors of popular fiction are taught to write counter to everyday language.

    Literary writers and readers alike have a fondness for elegant or otherwise interesting sentence structures that may be significantly more complex than 12th-grade level. They appreciate poetic qualities of prose that may rely on subtle elements within sentences and paragraphs such as rhythm, repetition, allusion, assonance, alliteration, and others.


    Lingering, even poetic descriptions that would undoubtedly be cut from a work of popular fiction are perfectly at home in literary fiction. Neither a sophisticated peer, an agent, nor an editor would cut such a thing if well-written. There's a high tolerance for stylized language and for authenticity of dialect—though a literary writer might be more inclined to describe dialect eloquently than to reproduce it literally. On the other hand, some literary books are deliberately written in a coarse, ungrammatical narrative voice that would be corrected if the book were somehow published in the popular market.

    Literary readers tend to follow a writer wherever he or she goes, as long as they're rewarded with satisfying finds.


    Scenewriting

    Since about the last quarter of the 1900s, popular fiction has increasingly been written as a series of "scenes" depicted in-the-moment, the way they'd be shown in a movie or a television show. This seems so natural to readers born in that period of time that they may wonder what other orientation is possible. But before that period, "scenes" were for stage, television, and cinema, while "chapters" were for fiction. Even in popular fiction, the traditional chapter blended in-the-moment scenes with above-the-moment narrative to an extent that has nearly vanished in popular fiction today.

    While literary writing has no universal characteristics, it is often significantly less scene-oriented than popular fiction, may be less linear, and may hop freely into and out of a selection of moments. Just as significantly, it often characterizes moments and periods of time rather than depicting them explicitly. Such narrative flexibility is prized by literary readers.

    Literal versus Interpretive storytelling

    To use painting as an analogy, much popular fiction can also be likened to literalist painting in the hyperrealistic or photorealistic style. The writing itself is constructed to be so transparent as not to distract from the things described and the story being told. Such transparency is a demanding skill in its own right.

    Contemporary literary fiction is often akin to a more interpretive approach to painting. Perhaps the style of a given story calls to mind Andrew Wyeth's painting Master Bedroom, which is quite literal and in a sense realistic, yet unmistakably non-literal and interpretive, with understated colors and contrast; existing within a particular moment while also standing distinctly outside that moment to make it more than merely a moment, in Wyeth's characteristic style. Or perhaps a story's style is comparable to John Haymson's Michigan Boulevard or any of his many other street scenes in which trees, people, houses, automobiles, etc, are still recognizable as themselves, but parts of the paper or canvas may be blank, and subjects not so much literally depicted as characterized in lines and colors. Conceivably, the style of a story might even be analogous to some of the abstract painters of the early 1900's.

    As John Gardner wrote of literary fiction in his 1983 classic The Art of Fiction, "There are no rules" when writing something intended to be more art than popular-culture entertainment.


    Show-and-tell

    The most widely repeated and abused dictum in the writing and critiquing of popular fiction is Show, don't tell. A common naive interpretation of this guidance is to enact most of what happens into action and dialogue. Critique group fiction tends to be even more highly enacted than published, successful popular fiction, but high enactment is surely one of the most defining traits of modern popular fiction.

    In contrast, artful telling (as in *ahem* "storytelling") is the essence of much literary fiction. After aconventionality, artful telling is the closest thing there is to a defining characteristic of literary writing. Literary readers tend to experience "high-showing" (more aptly "high-enactment") approaches to narrative as tedious. Contemporary literary writing tends to be conservative in enactment. It can often be characterized as artful telling with a sufficiency of showing [enactment]. Such writing may use snippets of dialogue or specific moments the way some editions of Treasure Island used visual illustrations, simply to make the overall narration more specific and interesting. Such narrative can convey subtleties and insights that mere enactment typically cannot. It also avoids drowning the reader or the tone in a flood of detail and impressions.

    Resolutions

    Core readers of popular fiction want clear resolutions. They want a story to end with a satisfying revenge or comeuppance, or with long-frustrated lovers in church or in bed (or at least heading for one of those destinations), or with similarly clear and satisfying resolutions that tie up loose ends. They have little tolerance for unclear, ambiguous, or unsatisfying endings, even though such endings are often more true-to-life. They expect stories (and sub-plots) to end the way it oughta be instead of the way they all-too-often see things end in real life.

    Literary fiction frequently has ambiguous resolutions that leave loose ends. Poignancy and authenticity to real life are two of the motivations for such an approach, and literary readers expect and welcome ambiguity's emotional complexity. Many literary readers are suspicious of traditional resolutions that tie up threads too neatly.

    Plot and Story

    Popular fiction is always foremost and nearly always exclusively about what happens. Core readers want to know what comes next and how does it all end. They want expeditious storytelling with Chekhovian parsimony, in which every other element exists in service of plot and story, and any detail that does not advance their dynamic is extraneous and therefore undesirable.

    Popular fiction has standard and expected plot points and follows one of several familiar action arcs through them. Some of these are universal, while others are specific to certain genres or even to certain authors or franchises. Readers expect the familiar progression of plot points and experience disappointment or irritation when some points are omitted or treated in a manner that feels too unconventional.

    The balance between surprise and predictability in popular fiction tends to tilt purposely toward predictability. The story needs to be fresh, with unexpected elements and turns, but core readers like guessing at uncertain outcomes or truths about characters, and they especially like being shown correct in their guesses—though they like it even better when it looks for a time like they were wrong, but then they turn out to be right in the end. That kind of "good predictability" brings readers back to an author time and again.


    Most often in literary fiction, plot is a pretext that exists in service of everything else, or at least something else. Plot and story in literary fiction tend to form a trellis, a framework on which to hang other things. The true content varies widely, but plot is rarely paramount. It merely needs to be serviceable to the real point of the novel or story, which is often to illustrate character, milieu, ideas, or style. Needless to say, Chekhovian parsimony does not apply. Even the famously minimalist Ernest Hemingway was dismissive of the notion, and deliberately included details that stood on their own, unrelated to anything else.

    Literary fiction is often unexpeditious in its narrative—digressive, going off on tangents that are merely incidental to plot, or discursive, elaborating at length on central points, or both. Literary readers expect and enjoy well-written digression and discursion. Straightforward plot alone, told expeditiously, is seldom enough to satisfy.

    The balance between surprise and predictability usually tilts toward surprise in literary writing. Even in the case of a tragic character or tale, where an astute reader understands that the end is foretold in the beginning, core readers of literary fiction prefer a twist that shows their predictions "correct, but"—or where the tragic outcome is averted by some unforeseen circumstance or intervention. Core readers like being right in some guesses, but they like even more when it looks for a while like they're going to be right and then they're not.


    Characters

    Popular fiction generally shoehorns its stories into one of a number of expected narrative templates, of which every genre has several, some with variations. Each of these templates includes certain character roles, and the author invents characters to fit the expectations for each role. Some are required (protagonist, antagonist), others optional (love interest, sidekick, foil, foe, nemesis, villain, false friend, secret ally, and many others). The skillful popular writer is able to give the characters in the prescribed roles individuality and interest so that they feel at once familiar and fresh.

    Core readers of popular fiction tend to classify and judge characters, and so they want clarity about whether they should like or dislike a character, or possibly consider a character redeemable or tragically fallen. Reversal and surprise are allowed, but ambiguity is poorly tolerated. Counter-examples exist in popular fiction, but in general the principle holds.

    Core readers of popular fiction expect clarity about what a character wants, both overall and in any given chapter/scene.


    Core literary readers are tolerant of complexity and obscurity of motive and emotional state, in many cases directly valuing one or both.

    Literary fiction is sometimes described by other writers as character-driven. That's both a simplification and an overgeneralization, but true in a sense. Literary fiction more often begins with ideas of certain characters not devised to fill a role, simply people with combinations of traits that interest the author, who then puts characters together in his or her mind and imagines how they would interact authentically, in real life—not according to (and usually avoiding) tropes, narrative models, or the pseudo-real-life shown in mainstream television or cinema, which has become a virtual world to which we've grown so accustomed that it feels to us real in its context. Contemporary literary fiction may show an awareness of archetypes and tease at the edges of them, but often avoids entirely embracing an archetype for a character – except, of course, when it self-consciously does the opposite. (Gardner: "There are no rules.") Even then, there is often an ironic or other form of "twist" on the archetype.

    Vicarious protagonists occur in literary but not popular fiction. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a novel first literary and later canonized into literature, provides the narrator's voice, but he exists almost entirely to chronicle the actions, character, and destiny of the true protagonist Jay Gatsby. Similarly, Charles Ryder is the first-person narrator of Brideshead Revisited, but exhibits few of the attributes and behaviors we expect of a protagonist; he exists merely as witness primarily to the tale of the vicarious protagonist Sebastian Flyte, and secondarily of Sebastian's sister Julia and friend Anthony Blanche. Probably the most famous prototype of the vicarious protagonist is Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, whose tale is told through the eyes of the humble observer Ishmael.


    Core literary readers are less prone to judge and more prone to contemplate. Moral complexity makes characters more interesting to them. They simply want to understand characters, and often welcome complexity and ambiguity. Likability rarely comes up in discussions among literary readers and writers; it's akin to asking how good-looking a character is.

    Tension and Impetus

    The tension in popular fiction is always provided by conflict, suspense, or desire, usually in combination. Other primary sources of tension providing forward impetus do not occur. Most often the conflict is man-against-man, less often man-against-nature, man-against-self, or man-against-destiny. The protagonist, etymologically the "primary actor" or "primary warrior," is always active and primarily responsible for advancing the plot, though sometimes by reacting to external events.

    Literary writers often explore forces other than interpersonal conflict, or even conflict at all, that can pull a chapter forward. Discovery is one such force. Suspense is another. Revelation is another. Traditional conflict tropes are often avoided when they might interfere with some other dynamic in a chapter or an arc.

    On the scale of the entire novel, there's often a traditional, if perhaps token or diversionary, quest or conflict to resolve. But be wary of looking for the essence of the book in it.


    Expanding Convention


    Literary writers sometimes turn their attention to popular genres. One of the best-known examples of literary genre fiction came from David Cornwell's (writing under the penname John LeCarré) invention of the…

    Literary Spy Thriller. LeCarré toyed in his first few books with conventional treatments of the genre before exploding the modern spy thriller genre with his much longer and more complex Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People.

    Literary Science Fiction is one of the most common literary-hybrid genres. Science fiction already pushes beyond a number of conventions, often digressing into discussions of technology and modified social mores and systems that would be deemed distractive in vanilla popular fiction. Literary Science Fiction simply takes this farther. A number of writers first known for vanilla literary fiction have chosen science fiction for forays into genre writing.

    Literary Historical Fiction has also been common. The historical fiction genre already blesses limited digressions into period detail such as social mores, technology for things like planting, harvesting, making inks or dyes, machinery of the industrial revolution, and many more that interest readers of popular historical fiction. In pure genre fiction, such observations are usually limited to a sentence or two, but the literary writer takes license to extend them farther, and more interpretively or philosophically.

    Literary Romance is another common literary-hybrid genre.

    Such literary-hybrid forms can attract core literary readers who might not otherwise be interested in the underlying popular genre. And if the balance is just right, they may also attract core readers of the popular genre—though it is common for a majority of such readers to lack the patience for the unconventionality of a literary treatment of their genre, and to give it a tepid reception.

    In sum


    Although there is a middle ground, popular and literary fiction are in essence opposite in a number of dimensions. Principles that apply to one often do not apply to the other; and recommendations that are good for one may be detrimental to the other.

    There's not a single standard or body of wisdom for "good storytelling" regardless of type. There are a number of respects in which what's "good" in popular fiction is not good in literary fiction, and vice versa. Each needs to be understood on its own terms.

    Reading level and conventionality are the fundamental differences that drive all the other differences.

    Improving a work of popular fiction often consists in making it more conventional. Improving a work of literary fiction often consists in making it less conventional.

    Understanding the target readership, both as a group (popular/literary) and in whatever respects may be specific to an individual book or genre, is the key to understanding how to write it successfully.

    JT 2022-04-12

Comments

  1. Xoic
    Somewhere above you mentioned a type of writing that's all but disappeared. I can't find it now, but I'm interested in anything you might be able to say about that, any particular examples or traits of it.

    It occurs to me that its disappearance might largely coincide with the movement toward rational materialism and away from a familiarity with and celebration of the unconscious, which seems to have been far more common pre-20th century. Or even earlier, maybe pre-Victorian era. No, I think it was still largely in evidence at least early in the Victorian, and maybe showed up in somewhat transmuted form in some of the Weird fiction, by authors like Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen or Lord Dunsany.

    Sorry, my thoughts are scattered, and I'm probably talking about several different things here, but I do believe the movement toward the contemporary form of popular fiction with its emphasis on showing and action, causality, and familiarity is definitely a symptom of the rise of rational materialism.
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    1. Xoic
      A little followup on what I said above. I think there's always a push-pull going on between conscious and unconscious, that can't be helped when making any kind of art. But in our contemporary Rational/Materialist mode many people try to work as directly as possible from logic and reason, building stories for example on cause and effect and on the strategies/rules/what-have-you (formulae?) of popular fiction. The 3-act structure, tying up all loose ends, etc—and they try to eliminate intuitive leaps and synchrnicities as much as possible. Creativity relies on fuzzy thinking, not clear rational logic. You can't use pure science to create art. And yet some people insist on trying, or to what extent it's actually possible anyway.

      And of course there's a huge audience for it. No matter how formulaic a genre piece might be there are many people who love it for that very reason. I don't mean to imply that all genre fiction is formulaic of course, only that at the extremes it can get that way. I'm sure a lot of literary writing can also fall into the uncanny valley of formula at times.

      It's the string and the pebble that I wrote about several times on my blog—the string is the tradition, the pull down to earth, gravity—and the pebble (actually the centrifugal force exerted by the spin of the pebble at the end of the string) that allows the pebble to push out beyond the normal limits. There needs to be some kind of dynamic balance between string and pebble, otherwise the pebble just falls to the ground at your feet (the story fails to 'take off') or it goes flying off completely detached and gets lost in the woods (of the unconscious).

      Oh wow! If you click to comment under a comment you get a size-reduced sub-comment. That's kind of cool. I suppose if I had clicked in the comment box under your original blog entry I would have gotten another full-size comment. Good to know.
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    2. Also
      Good points. And I try to work with the unconscious both in the creative process and in the lives of my characters.
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  2. Also
    Offhand, the first example that comes to mind is from Erica Jong's 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying, which I happened to be re-reading (in part) today because one of my own characters mentions it in a letter. I call it a bestseller because it sold over 26 million copies, but it's classic contemporary literary writing for its time, which can be called hybrid because it so heavily leveraged its frank, four-letter discussion of sex in at least every chapter and popularized the protagonist's quest for "the zipless fuck." John Updike and Henry Miller among others were profuse in their praise. The book was closely associated to the second-wave feminism that peaked in the late 1970's.

    For instance Chapter 13 ("The Conductor") is close to 6,000 words and almost entirely sceneless. It's a chapter in the traditional sense, not a scene or sequence of scenes. It does dip very briefly and lightly into three (or four?) specific moments with a few lines of direct dialogue, but at no point does it fully shift from free narrative to scenewritten narrative. Its perspective remains "above the moment" even for the few moments it dips into. By far the bulk of it is not tied to any specific moments.

    The next time I see sceneless narrative in popular fiction from that time (or our time), I'll come back to cite it. But I spend so much time on my own work these days that I don't do a lot of entire-book reading, nor do I tend to browse or edit much outside my own form of writing.
  3. Xoic
    Ok, I see what you're saying, thanks for the explain. I wonder if Jong's book was written that way primarily because it's non-fiction? It seems to me that kind of scene-less writing is more common in non-fiction or in fiction written in omniscient, where a lot of explanation or commentary is normal. I think that kind of writing would naturally decline alongside the decline of omni, which used to be far more popular than it is today, and is often considered old-fashioned now.

    I just read the beginning of the book on Amazon, and while it's called a novel, it seems autobiographical and filled with information and musings, almost like an extended article or nonfiction book with interludes of story. Not truly omniscient, but it doesn't need to be, since the things she's musing on or discussing factually are things she as narrator and character would be aware of. I like that kind of freedom in certain types of stories, and I'm leaning toward it in some of my own writing, which is presented in a sort of semi-fictionalized autobiographical form. Written from the perspective of an older and wiser person reminiscing about his past from a more 'omniscient' future perspective. Something like Mermaids, The World According to Garp, or The Waltons, written from the perspective of John-boy's semi-omniscient future self as author. That kind of writing affords a lot of room for musing and pondering factual information alongside conjecture and reminiscence.
  4. Also
    Fear of Flying looks autobiographical on purpose, but instead of thinly fictionalized reminiscence is actually thinly "reminiscence-ized" fiction. Jong has said that only one chapter was inspired by and based on her own experiences.

    Quite by coincidence, that's the same approach I'm using in my current WIP. I had probably forgotten about FoF until I went looking a few weeks ago at books published in the 5-10 years before 1982.
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  5. Xoic
    I often do writing that's pseudo-fictionalized accounts of my own past, and it turns out to be some of my most interesting work. It's treacherous though, you have to beware of several Scylla and Charybdis-type creatures lurking all around you and avoid their various attacks.

    Just wanted to add that I didn't get any kind of notification of these responses until I clicked in to see New Blog Comments.
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