From an email: subject: novels

I didn't say it well, but what I was saying on novels is they are a major category to get complete understanding of (parts in relation to the whole) because they carry so much within them in terms of depiction of human nature, the ways of the world, language in all its sophistication and simplicity, much of what defines culture and civilization, including what sophisticated types consider high culture (the way the novel mirrors the fine arts in terms of schools - expressionism, realism, naturalism, impressionism for instance), and not least of all the way the novel is able to contain a real hierarchy of low to high influence - mechanical genre novels (science fiction, westerns, fantasy, romance, etc.) up to rarified literary works of higher inspiration - which enables one to really see development in understanding as one engages different works at different levels in this hierarchy (if one is able to ever discern that hierarchy to begin with).

On that last point I recently read an article on Slate written just after the death of John Updike where the writer was asking "is it OK now to stop pretending we like John Updike novels?", which was a good theme to write on, Updike being horribly overrated by the shallow northeastern literary establishment, but this writer also complained in the article that writers like Frederick Forsythe were not considered 'literary' compared to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It made his complaints against Updike easily mocked. It's a common instance, though, of a person who is not able to discern hierarchy of influences. He wondered why a genre novel - the Day of the Jackal, for instance - was not considered to be at the same level as War and Peace or the Brothers Karamazov.

I won't write a treatise, but here's a clue - a general rule that has its exceptions - for discerning a lower level novel - like a genre novel - from a more literary novel: the lower level draws you in with little or no effort of attention on your part. The higher level requires you to bring some effort of attention to engage it. Also, at the lower level there are many works of equal worth. At the higher level the works become more rare and individual. (I mentioned the first rule has its exceptions, that's because sometimes a great novel can read much more easily than one might have expected when first encountering it, like, say, War and Peace, which was written very before-its-time cinematically, not counting the didactic material strewn throughout its massive bulk.) Of course genre novels usually have a more two-dimensional characterization and don't go very deeply into the various themes of the human condition (the crime novel genre can come closest), but mainly want to carry the reader along via plot without much aforesaid effort of attention on the part of the reader. This goes without saying. When I say a person should get a total understanding of the novel as a category I am referring to the full range, or hierarchy, of literary novels.