Lev Grossman wrote a fun essay about genres and their delineations and whether they matter. Does he write fantasy? Or literary fiction? Or....?
From the piece...
What Tartt started, Susanna Clarke finished. When I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I calmly closed the book, swept the 18-month-old draft of my novel in progress into the trash, and started The Magicians. The wall had collapsed. It was like that moment in Swords in the Mist when the barrier cliff separating the Inner and Outer Seas of Newhon collapses, and the waters flow into each other. Or the bit at the end (spoiler alert) of Remembrance of Things Past when Marcel realizes (I think, I never got that far) that Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way are basically pretty much the same way.
Either way I lost something; the ability to see literary fiction and genre fiction as anything other than fiction. That sense went dead in me. Certain conventions and expectations applied and were in play, but ultimately they were just texts on a continuum. This sounds wonky and graduate-student-y, but it’s what happened. It’s not even that the two had stopped fighting each other. But the resistance had come up from underground. They lived on the same plane.
It’s not a huge deal. I get that bookstores have to shelve them in different places. I respect the harsh realities of retail bookselling. I’m always curious where The Magicians will turn up, but either aisle is fine. Probably it reflects some unconscious Oedipal rage at my dad, or something (cue uncomfortable laughter), but I just don’t have the ability to make those distinctions anymore.
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