Peter Straub, for The Millions, discusses genre.
From the piece...
Okay: genre genre genre, here we go. Crime novels and horror stories huddle down here in the gutter, right?, while real literature lives in the fragrant uplands and on the radiant peaks where plotting is at most secondary and life proceeds by instinct and intelligence, by fine intuition and a lively moral consciousness, owing nothing to formulae and the requirement to gratify the lazy reader’s expectations of suspenseful suspense and exciting excitement. One is disposable, the other immortal. However… well, just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction: the academic novel, the comic novel, the adultery novel, the comic academic adultery-novel, the experimental novel, the novel of foreign travel or inward journey, of unexpected encounter, of breakdown, of alcoholism, of youth, of middle age, of a hundred different things so well-known and encoded that the fonts used for the titles and the authors’ names tell you as much as the flap copy.
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