J. E. Landau

I read a fair bit, and recently I figured it would be good for me to branch out a little. I want to become a better writer, and everyone tells me that literary fiction is focused on the quality of writing. So I’ve been reading literary fiction.

The first thing I noticed is that “quality of writing” is a pretty vague measure. Certainly, there’s certain kinds of bad writing that you can identify. Firstly there’s writing that’s grammatically incoherent or otherwise technically very bad, but that’s hardly bad storytelling, just bad grammar. Some stories have bad characters, boring plots, noting to say, and no themes, but it’s hard to identify these and when a work is bad because of them.

Ever watched NCIS? Or Columbo? These shows are deeply formulaic, but they work, because they know which pillars they can stand on and they stand on them. On the other end, I’ve read lots of thrillers, romance stories, mysteries, and science fiction stories that barely have characters, instead they have archetypes, but the stories lean on their worldbuilding, their themes, their plots, and their pacing to keep the audience engaged.

When you read a James Patterson or a Clive Cussler book you’re not really expecting “high art”, but it’s hard to say that a lot of these books are bad, per se. The authors understand the inherent charm and underlying strategies that are common in their genres. They write in cliché, and they do it well, because cliché only gets to be tired because it works.

This is something that I’ve seen in discussions about literary vs. genre fiction. Genre fiction, according to proponents of literary fiction, can be tied up in cliché. Maybe that’s true. But does it make it bad? I’m not sure.

Another thing that can make stories good or bad is the way that prose is structured in the middle-scale, between the actual underlying grammar and syntax and the overarching plots that it is used to construct. The notable fantasy author Brandon Sanderson describes this as “stained glass” or “clear glass” writing. Some prose is beautiful to be beautiful, some prose is designed so that it gets the information to the reader with as little interference as possible.

There is something to be said about the value of beautiful language. Poetry thrives on this, using few words to say much by relying on the aesthetic and informational quality of each individual word. In William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow, or Moyra Donaldson’s Snakeskin Stilettos, or James K. Baxter’s The Maori Jesus, each word has a place and meaning in the context of the greater whole, and significant skill and artistry goes into that.

But I also don’t think that we should discount the virtues of snappily written plate-glass prose, like soberly written action scenes in a thriller novel or clean, technical descriptions. In my opinion, these two poles aren’t so far apart, either. Simply using simple, clean prose isn’t a neutral fact of reality, it’s also a stylistic choice, and one that informs the perspectives in your story. If a character sees a dead body, and barely notes it, that implies something about them, but if the narrative lingers on that dead body, that implies something to. This sort of “plate glass” prose, in my opinion, makes the most sense for competent, experienced perspectives. They’ve seen a lot, they’re jaded, and they don’t need to spend time really thinking about anything in their environment. On the other hand, stained-glass prose isn’t the opposite, it just reflects characters who are reflective and engaged with the world around them. Neither one is bad, they just communicate different things.

There are, of course, actually bad books. I have read several of them. As part of my quest to read more literary fiction, I started (but did not finish) Luminarium by Alex Shakar. This novel is just drowning in prose. Everything is described in extraordinary, excessive detail. The protagonist can’t do anything without it taking up a page of text, and the thing he loves doing most is thinking, in excruciating detail, by himself. I gave it up when I was about sixty pages in. Essentially nothing happens, which is the stereotype for literary fiction, but the bizarre thing is that the book definitely promises action.

It’s described as a “dense, lyrical, speculative novel” in its reviews, and its summary includes corporate conflict, a comatose loved one, romance, and a slow slide into madness sparked by an experiment designed to give people religious experiences. That sounds great to me.

Unfortunately the actual text mostly concerns our protagonist contemplating everything around him in excruciating detail. The novel is told in anachronic order, starting with the experiment and jumping backwards and forwards to set it up, which sounds like a good structure for intrigue, but the protagonist can’t help but mentally replay his entire life story every time he sees a building or talks to someone in a store. I have been told that this is one of the great mistakes of starting in media res: starting in the middle, and then going back to the beginning in the most plodding way possible.

Of course, this does give us some insight into our protagonist. A friend of mine described literary fiction as being more focused on the characters than on the setting or the plot, and I think that this might be a fair description. After all, this torturous and cripplingly unhurried exploration of our protagonist’s history certainly does tell us a lot about him. There is nothing efficient or good about it, but we do learn about his past.

You’d never do any of this in a science fiction novel of any real quality, and I’m not convinced that it reflects greater quality of writing, merely greater willingness to waste ink and the audience’s time. Certainly, there is very little focus on the plot or setting, but I can hardly be bothered to care about our central character when I’m not convinced he will do or think anything interesting.

Still, one bad book hardly makes for a bad genre. I recently got copies of editions of Best American Short Stories from my local library, one of their 2025 and one of their 2024 edition. Best American Short Stories 2025 was, frankly, bad, and I returned it and switched to 2024, which I enjoyed much more. But there was one story in there that caught my attention for the same reason that Luminarium did: it felt like it ought to be science fiction.

The story was Democracy in America by Allegra Hyde, which is set in a future where people can literally sell their faces to the wealthy. It’s described as follows:

Now this sounds like a classic piece of science fiction, doesn’t it? One of the classic types of sci-fi is the “gadget story”, which was mostly out of fashion by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around. Someone invents a technology, and we look at the way this technology changes the world, or, in its more modern interpretations, at the way that it changes the lives of people who interact with it. Here, the technology is selling your face, and it impacts the life of Honey, who is a young, down-on-her-luck woman that the protagonist has a fling with while he studies American politics in a slightly-dystopian near future. It’s just like science fiction, and when I read it, I thought “ah, this story is just genre in denial.”

But, I don’t think that it is. This story has essentially nothing to say about the technology that it portrays, it only has things to say about the characters. The protagonist does contemplate this face-changing technology, but he ultimately ends up reconnecting with Honey, even now that she has lost her beauty. There are lots of sci-fi details, but ultimately, none of them matter, and the author doesn’t seem to have opinions about any of them, not even global warming or face-selling, just about the people there. And that, I think is a real difference.

Does it make it a bad story? No. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have, but I thought it was pretty solid, and certainly better than a lot of the stories I’ve read. But I also think that it highlights a real divide between genre fiction and literary fiction. Literary fiction, it would seem, can’t have much to say about the world as it exists outside of the people in it, or it stops being literary.

I can think of countless examples from the other side, of books that are clearly works of high literary achievement but remain firmly in science fiction. Aniara by Harry Martinson probably helped him win the Nobel prize in literature and is an epic poem about people being stranded in space and dying there. I talk about it in more detail here, but the novel is about people struggling against their doom, and then dying.

Now, you might think that being set on a spacecraft is what makes it science fiction and not literary fiction, but I think the real difference is that the book has a lot to say about the actual universe and the nature of humanity, and not just the nature of our (largely featureless) protagonist. Indeed, the movie, which is structured and presented much more similarly to a normal sci fi story, is in a lot of ways more “literary”, because it places a lot more focus on the protagonist’s struggles and relationships. Aniara is an excellent work of art, but I think it’s disqualified from being literary fiction just because it centers a society and the universe instead of centering the inner worlds of individuals, and I think that’s the real difference.

There’s a stereotype that literary fiction is all about boring people contemplating (but rarely committing) adultery, and I think that there’s a grain of truth there. If the story focused on someone’s relationship, and not the person ­thinking about their relationship, it would be a romance story, or a drama. If it was about them committing adultery, and the implications thereof, it would become a drama or a thriller, because it would be about their actions, instead of about their thoughts. Literary fiction lives only in the inner worlds of its characters; it can’t have stakes outside of them.

And I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with it. There are lots of very good literary fiction stories. The same collection includes The Magic Bangle by Shastri Akella which is about a young man in India struggling with his relationship with another man in a deeply conservative society. It’s literary because the story isn’t about their relationship so much as his struggle with his own future and the lack of acceptance from the people around him.

I’m not sure I prefer literary fiction, but I’m glad that I’ve been reading more of it. I think that, beyond the merit of any one genre, there is value in a diverse media diet. Variety is the spice of life, after all!