Be our guest

Now and then I’m asked at cons why I don’t write fiction of the respected sort. You know, he is a professor and she is a professor and they are having adulterous affairs, and they are almost overcome with guilt and angst, and there is no God, and scientific progress doesn’t enter into it, and just about everybody in the world is upper middle class.

When that happens, I ask the questioner abut Martin du Gard. Have you read him? Have you heard of him? Invariably the answers are no and no. Then I explain that Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year H. P. Lovecraft died.

That’s Gene Wolfe over at SF Signal answering the question of why sci-fi and fantasy can’t get no respect.

He’s got a point, and it’s an amusing tactic, but I also think it’s maybe a little unfair. I’m all for extending the respect that so-called serious fiction gets to the genres as well. But there are plenty of Nobel laureates in literature who are still read today — including Eugene O’Neill and Pearl S. Buck, who were awarded the Prize in the years before and after du Gard, respectively. Wolfe isn’t wrong that “respectable fiction” is littered with names that posterity has quickly forgotten. But then again, so too are fantasy and science fiction. It’s a little disingenous to suggest otherwise.

The winners of the big awards in those fields (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy) do fare better in continued name recognition, at least in the Best Novel category. But it’s important to note that these awards don’t go back as far as the Nobel Prize — the Hugos, official only in 1953, are the oldest — and they’re drawing from a much smaller pool of writers. (Some have even suggested, perhaps not without merit, that the awards are at times too insular.) But even within that pool, how widely read today are authors like H. Warner Munn and Daniel F. Galouye, or Leigh Kennedy and Wilson Tucker? I don’t mean to pick on those specific four — quite the opposite, in fact. In any list, there’s going to be a handful of names that you or I, or many of us, will no longer recognize, but that alone isn’t a reason to dismiss their work. Those four writers may very well have deserved their nominations (and deserve to still be read today). Name recognition isn’t by itself an indicator of quality, or its lack.

Obviously, I don’t think Wolfe is suggesting that it’s a popularity contest — even some kind of weird, semi-reverse one where the unpopular kid (in this case Lovecraft) is more popular in the long run and nobody can remember the prom king (in this case du Gard) once that particular dance is finally over.

Honestly, I think the only criteria for respectability is whether or not the writing’s any good.

Gene Wolfe’s own writing — which I guess I’ve been taking a long, digressionary route towards discussing here — is really quite wonderful stuff. I spent a lot of 2009 reading his so-called “Solar Cycle” (twelve books in all) for the first time, and it’s a staggering and wonderful body of work. They’re not always the easiest books to read, over-flowing with allusions and wordplay and unreliable narrators. I’m still not convinced I really understood half of what was going on in Urth of the New Sun, for instance. But they’re such fun and inventive and challenging books that I’d absolutely recommend them.

I’d also recommend An Evil Guest, Wolfe’s most recent (2008) novel, though I’m not sure it has the same depth and genius of his earlier work. Or maybe the problem is that it does, but it’s crammed into too short a book, or that that the ideas Wolfe brings to play don’t mesh with the style in which he’s chosen to write them.

I honestly don’t know. It’s an odd, genre-hopping book, at turns very funny and inventive but also just about impossible to pin down or understand. Reading the comments to Adam Roberts’ long review at Strange Horizons, I see it described as “frustrating, slow, vapid in places”…and you know, that’s not inaccurate, even if it maybe misses the point of Wolfe’s intentions. But then again, what are those intentions? It’s rare to come across a book I like and dislike in such equal measure. There’s a lot to admire about An Evil Guest and flashes of Wolfe’s genius, but there’s precious little to love.

In the end, I think I most like Kage Baker’s review of the book:

Imagine a — oh, let’s say a middle-aged redhaired writer who goes out on a date with a handsome bald writer gent. She’s dazzled by his expertise, his charm, his effortless brilliance. He knows all the right wines to order. His conversation scintillates with intelligence. She goes home thinking to herself that he’s the second coming of God at least, and maybe the Dalai Lama too.

Then she goes out on the second date with him. He appears to have smoked crack just before picking her up. He ignores her, he disappears for long periods into the toilet, he tells crude ethnic jokes, he spends half their meal talking on his cell phone with someone else, he leaves her with the check, and as she runs out into the parking lot after him he peels out in such haste he runs over her foot. As she’s standing there, cursing, a crowd of his fans approach her and make nasty remarks about her intelligence. Is she bewildered and angry? Jesus H. Christ, what do you think?