Wrap Up Summer With a GenLit Novel

Colson, Lethem, and a truly terrible term I just made up

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I used to have this annual tradition around this time of year, it was a thing I did on that platform I still can’t bring myself to call X. I’d post something about how it’s Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor season. I guess technically that tradition is living on here now that I’ve typed that out, but I’ll be honest and say I won’t have time to get to my favorite end-of-summer novel because I was reading Whitehead’s latest, Crook Manifesto, his second novel focused on people and events taking place in uptown Manhattan after 2021’s Harlem Shuffle. After pulling off some Chicago Bulls magic by going back-to-back with Pulitzers for 2016’s The Underground Railroad and The Nickle Boys in 2019, Whitehead wanted to do something a little different, but still him. I loved the books that won him the big awards, but reading this latest one, I found myself wishing Ossie Davis or Melvin Van Peebles were alive so they could turn it into a film, and coming few months after finally finishing The Deuce, one of the more underrated HBO shows from the last decade, Whitehead filled a void for a really good gritty 1970s NYC story.

After finishing Whitehead’s book, I looked down at my TBR pile. I’ve got a stack of books I’m always reading either for research or possible review. I’d say there are no less than 20 sitting next to my desk at all times. But since I’ve got a little quiet period as I try to wrap up one big project over these last days of August, I decided to treat myself and pick up a novel that felt like a somewhat natural follow-up to Whitehead’s latest: Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel. How could I not with a title like that?

Lethem and Whitehead are around the same age (I think there’s a five or six-year difference, Letham being the senior of the two). They both grew up in New York, experienced the city’s rough 1970s, and both have used their hometown in their fiction and non-fiction throughout their respective careers. Their two books aren’t that far removed from anything they’ve done in the past, they aren’t some gigantic leaps or changes in directions, especially for Lethem, who seems to be juggling a bunch of influences and genres inside his head at all times. But what I especially loved about reading these two books in a row is it was a whole lot of narrative-driven fiction, with the technical skill of a writer, the sort of writer that teaches fiction, wins big awards, and might get labeled as writing “literary fiction.”

What is literary fiction? My gut answer is honestly “Who fucking cares,” but there has been enough discussion about it over the last few years that I have to be open to its existence. The same goes for another strain of writing that was relegated to sit at the other end—artistically speaking—of the literary spectrum, genre fiction. You could go read my friend Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft and he’s better at explaining what these things are, the little nuances, and why both types of fiction are valid and important. But for me, somebody who has always approached fiction simply from the point of just a person who likes to read, who doesn’t have an MFA, and thinks there’s room for all the weird, fun, made-up mishegoss you can throw my way, I see it like this: literary fiction is what I read when I want more of an experience when I don’t need to care as much about the story as I do the writing and the feeling I get from it. Genre fiction is plot-driven. It’s crime, sci-fi, romance, all that stuff. That’s my take on it and I don’t think I’m totally off-base, but I can go for one or the other at basically any time depending on where my head is at.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky, because I don’t know of many writers that truly want to be labeled anything, let alone being told they write genre fiction or literary fiction. It’s all writing, right? I try to appreciate that and tend to go into any book with that attitude, that I don’t really know what the writer is going to do or how they’ll do it. These terms are all silly to me at the end of the day, but then I’ll pick up books like Crook Manifesto and Brooklyn Crime Novel and I find myself thinking about how I can’t deny there is something appealing to me when a writer that I might see considered more literary going into genre territory. Again, I think these terms are silly, but when done in that undefined middle ground, then something great happens. I mentioned Lincoln Michel, and he’s a good example of this, so are Carmen Maria Machado or Kelly Link; writers who have put in the work in MFA programs or writing residencies, the sort who can talk about “craft” and I don’t wince, but who are also just as influenced by what we might consider “genre” fiction as they are Borges or Nabokov. In the case of Michel, Machado, and Link, it’s hard to read them and not feel like they read Stephen King or Shirley Jackson at a very crucial moment in their lives and it had a deep and resounding impact not just on their writing, but maybe their outlook and lives.

My cheeky definition of these sorts of writers and books is GenLit. It’s not a new thing: Lethem has been doing it for years, Denis Johnson got into it with his overlooked noir novel Nobody Move, and Jonathan Ames has even found ways to parody it in his fiction and on the criminally underrated show Bored to Death. Elmore Leonard and John le Carré were masters, but their books still get relegated to the genre shelf, but I’d say they were both as literary as anybody.

I tend to use GenLit in my own mind and probably shouldn’t be sharing it with anybody else because I realize how dumb it sounds. Yet after reading the latest by Whitehead and Lethem, and reading Zadie Smith on how her upcoming book is a historical novel, and how she swore she’d never write one of those, I started thinking about how a lot of newer novels I’ve picked up over the decade have jacket copy about what the books mean or how the character is searching for something but they don’t know what, or something like that. And sometimes that’s fine. But I honestly had to look myself in the mirror a few years ago and say, “Jason, you really like knowing there’s a plot. Just admit that. You don’t want to read 400 pages of ‘good writing’ and three pages of actual story. Come on, man.”

That’s not to say any of the writers I’ve mentioned have engaged in any of that as far as I’m concerned. I just think we truly lost an appreciation for plot over the last few years. We also lost the plot, but that’s a whole other discussion. Every other week it felt like I’d pick up a novel or read about one coming out and think, “OK, sounds cool. But what’s it about” and that’s likely why I started retreating to older fiction.

But I feel like I’m coming back around and getting excited about new novels again. I didn’t go away completely; I just got more selective, I suppose. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to all the books and writers I mentioned. It feels silly to say, especially since, as readers, we invest time and energy into sitting down and reading, but I want the best of both worlds. I love having both of those silly labels at the same time, so I just combined them into one very obnoxious little term.