The Atlantic
Why literary novels about wrenching events are taking more and more cues from crime writing
Vanessa Saba / Mondadori Portfolio / Getty
At the bookstore where I used to work, we shelved fiction in four separate categories. Crime novels shared a wall with speculative fiction; romance had a set of freestanding shelves. The rest of the fiction room was devoted to literary fiction, which, unlike the others, we never identified by genre name. The publishing industry tends to treat
literary as a descriptor, a nod to a work’s artistic quality or aspirations. But literary fiction is a genre like any other, with distinct conventions, strengths, and flaws. It typically centers the personal, preferring inner turmoil to external drama and usually de-emphasizing plot. At its best, its focus on interior life lets readers live in other people’s heads. It also means that such works are well equipped to handle the long emotional fallout of painful or complicated events, even if some of the events themselves pose a challenge to literary writers, with their tendency to turn away from plot.