August 15, 2005
I'm not going to slam so-called "literary" fiction or "mainstream" fiction. But I'm going to give a couple of examples of sometimes why "literary" fiction doesn't seem terribly commercial. It has to do with drama and these particular authors' decisions to not exploit the drama.

Wolf: A False Memoir by Jim Harrison.
Harrison's a pretty fantastic writer, a magnificent stylist, a poet. In this novel, he plays himself, narrating a story of going to northern Michigan to interview a famed engineer about his life. Here's a certain irony, in that the engineer definitely has a life worth writing about--SO WHY DIDN'T HARRISON WRITE ABOUT IT? Instead, we're stuck with the narrator's self-absorbed, boozy musings.

Okay. Backstory, and the gist of my point. The engineer is recovering from an accident that crippled him. What accident? He's a builder of major projects like dams in 3rd world countries. He's also an epileptic, but he hates his medication. One of the things he does when building dams is to rappel down the side of the dams to inspect them prior to getting them going. Only he's been in central or south America for months, hasn't been taking his epilepsy medicine, instead trying native medicines, and while rappeling down the side of the dam has a seizure and falls, scrabbling for purchase down the side of the dam and breaks his back.

My point--Harrison was going after something else. A lot of what he was going after was the poetry of his own thoughts, and how the narrator made choices, as did the subject of the interview, getting on with his life and/or death. But I as a reader thought--I want to know more about the engineer. In fact, I don't want to be told after the fact about that story of the dam, I want to BE THERE when it happened. I want to be inside this guy's head, I want to feel his panic, his fear, the DRAMA of what led him to do this. I wanted the GRAND ADVENTURE!

The Crown of Columbus by Michael Dorris & Louise Erdrich.
A lovely, stylized novel about a historical hunt for the "crown of Columbus" tha was hidden somewhere in the U.S. or Puerta Rico. This could have been a grand adventure on the lines of The Da Vinci Code, but Dorris and Erdrich were so in love with the family dynamics and their own writing style--and there's an epic poem written by one of the characters, a poet, that runs on for about 20 pages of the novel that I skipped over it was so boring--that they seem to have forgotten that there's this really amazing historical treasure hunt going on. The crown, by the way, was the Crown of Thorns that Jesus wore when crucified, still in existence, having been carried across the ocean by Columbus in a glass box. Talk about drama, but the writers chose to almost make it a throw-away aspect of the plot. God only knows why.

Well, that's two, and this was long enough. I was going to write about Nathaniel Hawthorn's The House of Seven Gables, and the family history of "choking on blood," which is mentioned in passing, but never dramatized or done in a way that it seems more than a bit of quirky family trivia. Hawthorn had other priorities, but imagine the horror of a family medical history of ruptured blood vessels in the throat, choking to death on your own blood...

The point being, in today's commercial fiction, readers want drama, they want action, they want to see and feel and hear amazing things, to be in the midst of these things. So-called literary writers sometimes don't seem interested in this, and that's perhaps because the commercial writer is primarily interested in STORY above all other things, whether it be style, theme, characterization, etc. STORY, and STORY is about drama and conflict.

Best,
Mark Terry