Balls.

Meg Wolitzer's essay at Beatrice.com:"But the shame I want to write about here isn't sexual. It isn't graphic in any way, and yet I feel a deep unease. For I am a secret lover of chick lit." has promoted a response from Jennifer Weiner:
"I should say here that even though I've stepped over to the dark side, I still enjoy Wolitzer and her colleagues, who fall into their own easily summarized sub-group of ladies whose short stories get published in the New Yorker and whose books are respectfully reviewed in the Times. For expediency's sake (and a Times reference), I'll call them the Gray Ladies."

Personally, I am so weary of authors who deign to admit to reading below the level of what they think they write that I want to send Weiner a dozen roses for her articulate, clever and heartfelt rejoinder.

Since when do authors get to deem themselves as "literary" and determine their own work as "important"? History has proven that only history can make these judgements. Perhaps too many writers spend too much time talking/thinking about what kind of books they are writing and the importance of those books rather than just trying to write better books -- whatever better means to them.

Sometimes you want eggrolls. Sometimes you want pizza. Sometimes you want clams on the half shell.

Sometimes all these authors posturing about their own place in the literary landscape- even writers whose work I admire - make me want to skip the meal altogether and drink myself silly.

Comments

[anon]

Good post, MJ. Thanks for the links. I couldn't agree more. Jodi Picoult's article was one of the most self-centered, self-congratulatory essays I've ever read in a mainstream newspaper. Her contention that she's the only contemporary writer concerned with moral issues would be laughable if it wasn't so depressing that this was taken seriously by The Washington Post. Wolitzer's ridiculous "confession" was almost as bad. Writers, please stop telling us how important you are. Write the best book you can and then step aside and let us READ the book.

[Jim Winter]

And once again, I look at a lit writer and hear Brad Pitt from FIGHT CLUB in my head saying, "You hate me because I am free in all the ways you are not."

And yes, I admit I'm beating that one into the ground. I promise I won't say this again until I run into Jonathan Franzen. (Probably at a taping of OPRAH.)

[Bill Thompson]

Perhaps I'm missing something that others easily see, but I did not come away from the Jodi Picoult essay believing that she was touting her own importance. Nor did I see any reference to a belief that she is "the only contemporary writer concerned with moral issues." I think her point was that she does, indeed, deal with moral issues in her books -- in contrast to writers who don't. Period.

[Bill Peschel]

Now that Meg is put genre writers in their place, I'll go back to my reading. Let's see ... Edgar Rice Burroughs? Zane Grey? Arthur Conan Doyle? How about Earl Stanley Garner? Edgar Allan Poe? H.P. Lovecraft?

Nah. Too genre. They'll never last.

[Morana]

A giggle. A good way to make yourself stupid is to confess to things which you feel are beneathe you. "I'm a writer, but I secretly read Harry Potter!! Be shocked! Please! And then feel relieved because elite writers read the same as the proles.!" Self-aggrandising while trying to be self-depreciating.

Okay, I've used up my quota for long words for today. I'd better go back to ranting about Gender and Genre.

[Rob Jacklosky]

Would-be Literary novelists trumpeting their stylistic achievements. I’ve sat next to these people at writers’ conferences, as I’m sure you all have. They believe that inverted clauses, convoluted sentences turned in on themselves, and piling abstraction on top of abstraction is what makes for literary fiction. And if they were in that workshop to learn, that would be one thing. But they're often there to disdain more direct writing. Maybe they have a half-remembered sense that Henry James was hard to understand, and so straining for a Jamesian strain is the recipe for literary fiction. It seems to me that James is never anything less than clear in his sentence-level intent and execution (once you get a sense of how those long sentences work). But with these other faux-literary writers, obscurity seems to be the aim. After a reader struggles through a morass of inactive interiority, soggy poeticism, an absence of dialogue or action, a comment like “I don’t get it---I don’t understand this sentence, this page, this scene” might elicit a satisfied “Exactly.” My wife tells me there are other things that are more harmful in the world than literary authors who sell under 9,000 copies. Like George W. Bush, Fear Factor, and global warming. That’s true. But is there anything more annoying than this combination of self-satisfied smugness and wrong-headedness? Okay: that's George W., again. I’ll be quiet now.

[danyel]

I couldn't finish that JP piece. Yawn. Thanks for the link, though, MJ.