I don't *think* it's a case for the Ponceyness Police...
I know I first clicked on this because someone tweeted a line or two that sounded like ponceyness to the max begging for a codslapping, but when I actually read it, there was certainly something I would consider as deviation into sense, or at least what I could only acclaim as a recognition of It's All More Complicated:
Retail Therapy: An excerpt from Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.
I am prepared to give the author a degree of pass on all that theoretical wimble-wambling for actually appreciating that The Novel is Nat Dede and having a sense of its abiding and rather strange weird resistant vitality.
I.e. maybe he's not Mr Mybug (or secretly Will Self) if he can concede that: [O]ur interest in the novel is an interest in encountering the author’s autonomy, which is the real difference-and addition-they bring to our existence, in however mediated a fashion. Only in some instances does it make sense to think of this as an increase in one’s portfolio of cultural capital. Reading in the Age of Amazon is a matter not of pride or power but need, the need for “more” in a basic, sometimes desperate sense.
(which I find a nice counter to the oft made argument that if you don't see it out there, write it yourself, because it's exactly that encounter with another that one wants, surely.)
I will give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that by 'bad' in this passage he means fiction that has not passed the accreditation standards of Proper Litfic: One of the joys of my sometimes painful commitment to reading more than my share of “bad” fiction over the past few years has been witnessing its unruly perversities, sometimes in the very act of doubling down on generic conventions. I have also encountered a few instances of what I don’t hesitate to call brilliant if sometimes quite niche literary visions. Accurately or not, novel writing retains its image as the quintessence of unalienated labor living on in the present, an antidote to the dominance in our world of labor of the other kind. That’s no doubt why so many people hope to find time to do it, and so very many, a dizzying number, succeed. And some of the things they come up with-my god. Among the many who write fiction as though vaguely remembering a TV show are some who really surprise you with the vividness and individuality of their imagined worlds.
(Okay, maybe he needs to go away and read Aspects of the Novel.)
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