Can Serious Fiction be Fun?
The Orange Prize for Fiction bronze figurine called the "Bessie"
Daisy Goodwin, the chair of this year’s judges panel for the Orange Prize for Fiction, received harsh criticism when she announced the 2010 long list for the price on March 17. It wasn’t the judges’ selections that people had problems with; it was Goodwin’s comment about women’s fiction not being much fun to read anymore. “There’s not been much with and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there,” she told The Guardian and added:
There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.
That comment earned her accusations of being a racist.
Last Sunday, William Skidelsky defended Goodwin in the Observer section of The Guardian. “As a man, I must admit to some wariness about venturing any sort of opinion about the state of women’s writing. But I do think there’s a possibility that some of Goodwin’s critics may have misunderstood her,” Skidelsky wrote. He pointed out that for plot and character development to happen, some things have to go wrong in a novel, but wonders if we’re losing the fun in serious fiction.
Recently, however, there does seem to have been a movement away from comedy in fiction, a growing feeling that, in order to be ‘serious’, novels have to be dark in tone. And, arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial ‘chicklit’ and more serious, ‘literary’ work.
Amanda Craig, one of this year’s long listed novelists agrees with Skidelsky:
There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there’s a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect.
What do you think? Is this a gender issue, do women authors have to be less fun than men to be considered literary?
Is it possible to write a fun literary novel that will be taken seriously? If so, what’s your favorite serious fun book?
Lorrie Moore’s pretty damn funny. So is Hempel. So is Bender. So is Stacey Richter. So is Aurelie Sheehan. So is Stacia Saint Owens. So is Amanda Eyre Ward. So is Pagan Kennedy. These women all write serious fiction. They’re all funny. Are they fun? What would be a fun literary work? Are men expected to write “fun” fiction?
Oh, and so is and was Molly Giles when she visited!
I know I get a lot of enjoyment out of the funny ladies–Lorrie Moore especially–but I do see the trend of women taking things more seriously in fiction than men, whether they’re expected to or not. I think part of the problem is that there is “women’s literature” but not necessarily “men’s literature.” We’ve been given a category and that’s difficult to overcome. It seems like the more popular female writers (I’m not saying the best writers, but the more popular) write about mothers, daughters, sisters, babies, marriage–”women’s issues”–perhaps because they feel they know more about them than relationships between men, politics, or what have you. And somehow the humor often gets drained out of them, like if they joke about mother-daughter relationships that devalues them. I don’t quite understand this thinking. I’m tempted to say that women feel more like they’re under the microscope than men do. And maybe they are. That makes me really sad.
As for a favorite serious fun book… A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. (A man–huh.)
I think you’re right in suggesting that men can get away with more than women (women are under the microscope more). This is because people are, generally speaking, ignorant and selfish, and thus slow to believe that good women writers are and ought to be held in the same high esteem as good men writers.
In my own experience I’m finding fiction written by women to be much more enjoyable than that written by men. Though I’ve only read a dozen books in the last two months, I’m finding more and more that male writers and their characters lapse more quickly and often into a sort of staid defeatism, this sort of plodding overly self-aware drudgery. (Though I’m currently reading Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens, and it moves along rather well. It also has one of the most simply disturbing cover designs I know of.) Does this make me sexist?
In any case, like Sam, I’m a fan of books that are funny while serious. And I like it when I find myself chuckling even though, when I stop and think about it, I probably shouldn’t be. That’s a difficult thing for a writer to pull off. It takes a lot of skill to handle multiple emotional levels at once, and since supposedly the female brain is better suited to multi-tasking, it’s perhaps only natural that I find myself being gut-wrenched, sucker-punched, and made giddy all at once more often by women writers than men.
Great comments guys.
I’m one of those people that find a lot of books fun, which other readers didn’t find entertaining in the same way. I thought The Emperor’s Children by Messud fun, while many of my friends found it tragic. Maybe “fun” is a subjective thing. Maybe I find sarcastic very entertaining and confuse it with funny.