Litfic and genre conventions
Reading Luster this week made me think that I do not read a lot of contemporary litfic and I feel somewhat estranged from the conventions that are currently in play, because I have a sense that there are conventions, or maybe tropes, that are perhaps of the zeitgeist, or what is acceptable to publishers at the moment or whatever.
I have remarked before that litfic has its subgenres and conventions and tropes just as more obviously genre fiction does but this is less spoken of, though this is perhaps more visible in retrospect. Though possibly gets reconstructed as a 'school' or 'movement', cf those works on 'rebel writers'/'angry young women' of the early 60s that I was reading and commentating on last year.
Anyway, I was having a sense that I did not quite know how to 'place' Leilani's novel -
Aside from going, in an extra-textual fashion, how (and indeed, why?) is this guy meant to be an archivist? the work he is doing sounds more like conservation, except that it covers a rather wide range of materials, including 3D objects, all of which seems a bit improbable, and that's before we get to the scene involving cotton gloves, cringe, moan /archivist rant off
- and then I read this review in today's Guardian Saturday: A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp review - power games: 'This gripping debut about an opera singer’s relationship with an older man explores issues of financial and sexual inequality' by somebody who seems to have identified this subgenre, maybe?
Like Raven Leilani’s Luster, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times or Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, A Very Nice Girl focuses on a sexual relationship between a twentysomething woman who is struggling for money and an older, considerably richer white man. There are several threads that recur across these novels.
although I'm not entirely happy with the following comparison:
But it seems reasonable to think that similarities in these stories expose something about the lives of young women now, in the same way that the exit strategies of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina (Crimp’s Anna mentions both novels), or one of Ibsen’s heroines, are stories about the constraints placed on 19th-century bourgeois wives.
Ummmm: I do think one could eschew invoking narratives by mega-patriarchs Flaubert and Tolstoy assuming that suicide is the only possible end - yay for Henrik and the slamming door, though even he had Hedda Gabler.... - if we're talking about C19th wives/women. Why not, we ask, Gwendolen not chucking a rope to her drowning husband?
I'm also thinking about agency/lack of agency of women in literary fiction/middlebrow fiction/popular fiction/genre and women drifting and being acted upon rather than acting.
And I may be a product of my own time and what is happening here is in fact about reflecting the anomie of the present moment for the present generation.
Though I have just managed to dig out the volume in which there is Dame Rebecca's viewpoint as at 1974 on the young women writers of her day, and the sad fact that in spite of all the advances in the position of women, they were no 'luckier in love than their mother and grandmothers, and [taking] it better if they were unlucky'. She concludes:
[I]t will take centuries before the sexual life of a woman... becomes guaranteed against the humiliation and insecurity described by contemporary women novelists.
Plus ca change.
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