Is not in ourselves, but in the genre.
Here’s New York magazine on Michael Chabon’s new book:
“Chabon . . . [a]lthough he cranks away with all kinds of fresh energy, he’s still limited by the detective story’s familiar machinery: When trails go cold, chance encounters heat them back up; imminent death is reliably thwarted by coincidental nearby hubbubs; guilty parties give helpful expository speeches.
I only mention this disappointment up front because it happens to be my single real reservation about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—and technically it’s not even Chabon’s fault, just my own distaste for an unavoidable feature of the genre. Also, I wanted to establish at least the illusion of some kind of critical credibility before I started gushing.”
I’d like to think that Chabon, who tries to champion genre — or, more correctly, champions a more nuanced way of thinking about fiction than genre categorization — would be appalled by this logic. I know I am.
Want to talk coincidence? You need look no further than Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY, which has a huge, honking coincidence at the book’s end. Did the genre conventions jump out of the bushes and mug McEwan’s book? Or — sacrilegious thought — is it possible that all novelists use coincidence? Why is coincidence a problem in crime fiction, but not in mainstream fiction? Has the reviewer of Chabon’s book actually read enough crime fiction to be able to state, oh-so-authoritatively, that chance encounter, imminient death thwarted by hubbubs, and expository speeches are common to them all? I have to admit, when someone is confessing his distaste for something, I tend to think he may not have sampled it very widely. “This wine is plonk; I know because I drink it all the time.”
It would be nice if Chabon’s book, which is getting a wonderful reception, might inspire some critics to question their own rigid value systems. “An unavoidable feature of the genre . . . ” Again, if someone wants to show me the handbook with all these rules and guidelines, I would be happy to have it. I’m have a rotten time with the work-in-progress.
Welcome to the Friday fights. Step into the ring and throw some punches — even if they’re aimed at me.
I have never posted before, but I have to get my two cents in here. While I understand the Memory Project is a blog, and that it is read by other writers, I wonder whether you aren’t overly concerned about critics. I am a reader, which means I pay money for your books, I recommend them to acquaintances, and I give them as gifts to my family and friends. I wonder whether most books are purchased on the recommendation of a critic or via word-of-mouth. Walking into Bibelot in ’98 as a visitor to your town and finding your books there was a pleasant surprise. I have a shelf of your books at home. That sort of loyalty from your readership probably means more than a critic’s opinion, both from a literary and a monetary perspective.
I’m enjoying the Chabon right now, and sure, it uses genre tropes. But I’m not sure how that critic could get through the much more distracting speculative or alternate history cliches and only have a problem with the detective novel touches.
It’s awfully convenient that all the dominoes fell the way they did in Chabon’s version of Sitka. Would it have developed that way in reality? I suspect not. But he’s created a plausible world for the story and situations he wants to write about, and he’s done so very well (so far).
I wonder if the critic, who I gather likes Chabon in general, has ever read any of the comic books based on “The Escapist,” from “Kavalier and Klay,” some of which were even written by Chabon. Good stuff, even if they all have the unfortunate plot mechanisms and styles of comic books.
Interesting comment, re: critics. It’s not critics, per se, that I worry about, but I remain baffled by this tendency for mainstream critics to state that “genre is this” or “genre is that.”
I do appreciate your support. Thank you! And Bibelot — that’s a good topic for a future TMP entry.
Some thoughts on coincidence — a topic I’ve been puzzling over lately.
I appreciate a coincidence, both in fiction and in life. I loved the book Saturday by McEwan. I think I recall the coincidence the critic is thinking of, and I admit, it was a stretch. I loved the movie Stranger Than Fiction which is built on the notion of coincidence. I loved the coincidences that led up to the crime in Crime and Punishment.
I’m wondering what it is that makes a coincidence work or not work in fiction. My sense is that it is not the bare facts of the coincidence. Winning a lotto is based on coincidence. Compare the regular lotto with a money-free lotto based only on the satisfaction of beating the odds. Both types of winners are equally lucky in terms of the odds, but the story of winning the money carries more fascination and perhaps danger.
I think the work of carrying a coincidence-story forward has to be done with an appreciation for the quality of the pay-off, whatever form that may take, not just the likelihood or unlikelihood of the coincidence alone. And like the wishes a genie grants, the payoff needs a dark side.
Yes, please do Bibelot.
What is the criteria for being a critic of anything? Actually, we all critique things, but what is it that means one person knows better than the rest of us?
I think Pirollilaw sums up what matters—people want to read your books, see certain movies, eat certain kinds of food, drive a certain brand of car, etc. Don’t our opinions matter? It is our experience that matters to us, not that someone likes a different car or cuisine.
We have just had a hospital encounter and can only heap on the praise for the care and concern. A friend was there doing that same period and is picking at things that have nothing to do with the care. Who is right?
I myself deplore the genre-bashing of crime novels that the critics are so fond of doing, to such a degree that it sometimes puts me right off of books that have been touted with those dreadful words “transcends genre”, or anything approximately meaning the same. I have not read the Chabon and likely won’t go out of my way to do so, but if I had not seen it on the new books shelf at my local library I would not have picked up Benjamin Black, aka John Banville’s Christine Falls. I would have stayed away from it purely because of having read such commentary. Certainly I would neve have paid my own good money for it in a bookstore. I very nearly didn’t take Christine Falls home from the library either, because every single comment on the back of the jacket is of that transcending genre ilk. But I did check it out and now I’ve read it and if I had not, it would have been my loss. My life would have been the poorer for not having the experience of the beautiful language alone.
While I deplore the critics’ apparent need to make their genre-biased comments, I have to admit I often see where they’re coming from. Not so much about the coincidence thing, but for richness of language and character development, which tend to get lost within the other elements that have to happen in a crime novel to make it work. Banville’s book just referenced very nearly misses working on that level.
The thing is, Laura L., they’re going to be saying those things about you transcending your genre soon, if they aren’t already. And I will for sure continue always to read your books.
Dianne
I just finished THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES, whose entire second half is driven by two, maybe three major, implausible coincidences — and yet, critics praised it as “Dickensian,” in part for daring to break that modern rule.
Of course, Penney’s writing about a remote, underpopulated area, where people _would_ know each other — and it sounds like Chabon’s novel is the same. The fact that people run into each other and coincidences abound may well have less to do with the genre than about the fact that he’s writing about a closed community.
Interestingly, though, S&S seems to be marketing the US publication of THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES as a thriller, which I’d never call it. A crime is at the center of it, but I wouldn’t call it genre fiction — maybe someone there felt the coincidences put it there? Even as I type that, it looks ridiculous.
I can’t remember if it came out of talking with Laura about this or someone else, but my definition of plausible coincidence in a novel is that it occurs early on in a book – preferably within the first third. Think of it this way: anyone could walk into any PI’s office. Any cop could be assigned to a murder case. Any man could get involved with any wrong woman. But those coincidences are setup…the later ones, with rare exceptions, often don’t end up ringing true.
As for Chabon, my reservations on YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION pretty much revolve around the first word of the title, but the genre-sniffing is best-embodied, oddly enough, by a remark made early on in Michiko Kakutani’s glowing review. She called Landsman “one of the most appealing detective heroes since Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe,” which flat-out suggested to me that she doesn’t read contemporary crime novels.
And I realize this is another topic for another day, but it’s all well and good and even necessary to keep returning to the Hammett/Chandler ideal but there have been books, and very good ones, published in those intervening 70-something years that influence new crime writers and readers and have nothing whatsoever to do with the Dynamic Duo.
Coincidence does weaken a book for me, I admit. It’s a lazy way out of plotting, I think and it can’t be trusted. What i mean is coincidence so seldom happens in real life that if you are telling a reality-based or realistic story, if you WANT to be telling one, you can’t use coincidence. I’ve read too many books that lose me after, well, he just HAPPENED to be crossing the street when she…. or of all the universes out there, he just happened to come into…etc. YET, had I not been walking out of the Cambridge post office EXACTLY when I did all those years ago, I would not have seen Joanne, whom I had not seen in a dozen years. Had we not left that excellent pizza place in Cambridge EXACTLY (hmm, a pattern emerges)when we did, we would not have bumped into that Aussie whom we’d just met at that convention and met his friends, the Haldemans, etc. It does occur. Of course, I’m not sure it changes the plot of my life exactly.
Expository lumps are worse and are far too often a given in sf/fantasy. Less so in the mystery genre since authors need to explain the world to readers a little less. Happily there are ways to do it that don’t rely on the dreaded expostory paragraph but it’s apparently not the easiest thing to do, judging from the number of books that contain those lumps.
As for genre conventions (you can see this one coming a mile off, can’t you?) I recommend Left Coast Crime and Bouchercon, Worldcon and well, the early days of Norwescon, not now.
Rim shot. Sorry.
I think mainstream critics say genre is this, and genre is that, because they were the kids in school who couldn’t find anybody to feel superior to.
I think coincedence is a staple in fiction, nevermind genre. When I think coincedence works is when it’s set up to not look like a coincedence. When you see each character’s thought process before hand so it is believable that they end up in the same place at the same time for whatever reason.
As for the coincedence at the beginning of NO GOOD DEEDS, I didn’t like it, but I give you a ton of credit for putting it out there and saying “hey there it is. Too bad if you don’t like it.”
The universe is a dance of coincidences. Why it doesn’t work in straight-genre mystery is that linear deductive reasoning is the historical underpinning of the genre. Straight mystery says there are reasons, and the cause and effect chain is linear. This leads to that. That leads to the other. Now we know. Reason, reason, reason, reason, reason.
In reality, the waves and ripples of cause and effect are every bit as strict as this limited view, but they’re scattered and flowing, and largely unseen. Deductive reasoning is only good for a few inches of paddling. Intuition and an inductive feeling for the dance of coincidence are how we surf them for the most part.
The core of the genre says we can reason our way through. That’s why coincidence and the dance are distrusted. They make people uncomfortable because they’re too much like the reality that linear, block-logic thinking is supposed to allow them to deny.
Coincidence is in the eye of the beholder. I see it in my life all the time. So I’m a believer. Andi, clearly, is not. And both of us have real, 21st century lives. How is it possible that I see coincidence all around me, and she does not?
It is, in the end, how we view the thing, I think. And that’s what makes a book work wonderfully for one reader, while another reader is pitching the same book across the room. Not coincidence, but difference and standing in different places to view the same world. (Or the same book, as the case may be.)
And like a lot of things that readers are critical of, coincidence can work beautifully in fiction — both mainstream *and* genre — if it’s handled right. And can suck tremendously when it’s not. Handled well, it’s invisible; an integral part of story. Handled poorly, it hits you in the face.
Sarah,
That could have been me. Goodness knows, I’m a big believer in the fact that almost every PI novel begins with the coincidence of why this particular PI was hired. (Although, come to think of it, Tess’s work often comes from a referral from a family or friend, which goes back to the Smalltimore concept.) Dave White and I talked about coincidence at length after he read NO GOOD DEEDS because it begins with a pretty bold one.
I was a big fan of Martha Lawrence’s work — which centered on a private eye with second sight — because the books were actually more credible to me than some PI novels where someone gets a feeling, or a hunch, and decides to drive down that street again, go back to visit that one witness . . .
ITA that comparing a writer to Chandler just doesn’t convey any real information. It reminds me a bit of the opening of The Wire, season 4, when Snoop goes to buy a nail gun and comes out with what the salesman has assured her is “the Cadillac” of nail guns. Snoop says, IIRC, “he meant Lexus, but he ain’t know it.”
This may be slightly tangential to the “Coincidence: Hot or Not?” theme, but Keith’s comments on deductive reasoning reminded me that one of the things that really bugged me about the classic Holmes mysteries was that Sherlock always <em>knew</em> that <em>this</em> particular ink smudge <em>(hmm… Freudianly first wrote “smug”)</em> on <em>that </em>side of the opposing fingers ALWAYS meant that of <em>course</em> that person was a left-handed eel-wrangler whose father had spent 14 years in a Bulgarian prison.
Sure, Holmes kept saying that he refused to speculate until he had all the facts, but I can’t remember him ever using words/phrases such as “probably” or “one of the possibilities might be.”
Then again, now that I think about it, I can’t remember how many of the original ACD stories I read, as opposed to listening to the Basil Rathbone radio series versions, so it might have been different in the canon. Still love Jeremy Brett’s portrayal, regardless.
Don’t forget BIBELOT…..Now who else said that?
El Syd
I haven’t forgotten . . . I’m just waiting for the right time.
“Hey, there it is, too bad if you don’t like it” — I might get that embroidered on a pillow.
Linda asks “Coincidence is in the eye of the beholder. I see it in my life all the time. So I’m a believer. Andi, clearly, is not. And both of us have real, 21st century lives. How is it possible that I see coincidence all around me, and she does not?”
I’m guessing – pitch in on this anyone? – that we either lead very different lives or either I deny them more often or you seem and assume them more often?
I don’t quite know why but i’m not sure, my friend, that “leading a 21st century life” has much to do with it. though I’m not totally sure what that means. I WILL give you that we have lives that involve far fewer than the usual six degrees of separation – maybe that has something to do with it?
Rachel – Freudian or not I think you were right with “smug” (a major reason I can’t read ACD; my partner is a major Sherlockian and does not mind it at all) but I SO LOVE “a left-handed eel-wrangler whose father had spent 14 years in a Bulgarian prison.” I’m going to have to find a way to use it (with credit given, of course!)
For me, the difference between whether or not I accept Blatant Coincidence in a story depends on the nature of the story in question. I definitely agree with Becky that there’s an awkward type of Coincidence in writing that just screams Plot Device/Author’s Stuck and/or Lazy, and if the primary asset of the work in question is Plot, well, that’s a problem.
Alternatively, if the plot is simply one aspect of a piece which emphasizes, say, character interaction and development, then I’d be far more willing to accept bizarres coincidences as a means of telling the story.
It was sheer coincidence that I looked in the want ads the day they were advertising auditions for summer theater. It was sheer coincidence that an actress, tired of New York, took a role in that summer theater company. It is not concidence that the actress is now my wife.
Life is a string of coincidences. It’s our job as novelists to not rely on them to forward the plot, like our hero just happening to find the matchbook with the club’s name on it.
Back in the 70′s I hated disco. Every last bumpity-bump. I worked with two black guys, brothers, who asked me if I’d heard so-and-so (sadly, I’ve forgotten her name) and I said I had not. That evening they played a record that knocked me out. Yes, it was disco, but it was GOOD disco.
As Ellington said, “There are two types of music – good music and bad music.”
My point is, in every genre, every category, there are writers who don’t rely on coincidence or hubbub or whatever the cliche might be and there are lazy writers who do.
This critic just hasn’t read enough good writers. Perhaps we should suggest the novels of our hostess.
Coincidence just happens to be the title of a unfinished novel I was working on….a basic crime novel with a family focus…I started it to prove that coincidences do happen in real life, and sometimes at times and places that cause the jaw to drop. I wouldn’t have married my late husband without the coincidence of just happening to drop into a late night writer’s discussion about sports journalism, life, and classical music. Yes, all those things. We had a great online discussion that segued into a phone conversation that segued into dating for a year, then me moving to Florida to marry this marvelous man who believed I had a brain and knew how to use it. If I put it in a book nobody would believe it.
Real life is rife with coincidences. But sometimes a writer will use a coincidence and/or a honking contradiction to get him or herself out of a corner into which they have written themselves. (Did the convoluted sentence on purpose, folks. Don’t write, don’t call.)
Those are the books I figuratively throw across a room. One of the main things I endeavor to do is “play fair” with the readers of my stuff. Yes, I keep the plots convoluted, the textures woven tightly and thickly, but the clues are there if the reader is discerning and notices them. Sometimes you have to go back and reread the thing. But that’s good.
And I have been learning from some of the best for the past 10 years or so. Here’s a glass raised to all of them, including Laura, who’ve saved me from errors that would have shelved me in the “ain’t never gonna read that idiot again” section.
I also learned another thing on the way to the current writing I’m in the middle of: never stop, even if your keys aren’t on the keyboard, think about it, dream about it, and write it. “That book is in you, Becky, just write it down. Edit later.”
Critics, now, are another animal altogether. The only mystery reviewer/critic I hold any respect for at the moment is Oline Cogdill of the Sun-Sentinel here in South Florida. Read some of her stuff. You’ll see what I mean.
She’s educated, and aware, and cares about the “genre”.
The critics who bash without reservation or proof are the ones I don’t trust or care to read. If you’re going to be a critic of a particular part of the fiction world, you need to READ the things in that world extensively to know when there’s something screwy in one or two or three novels or stories.
As a judge once said about something or other, “I can’t put my finger on what it is, but when I see it, I know it.”
When I’m reading good mystery, I know it. It’s like a fine wine that lingers on the palate and tingles your nose and tongue, and then lingers on way past the normal tasting time. It hangs in your throat and in your heart and changes your life.
There, that oughta do it
The judge who said that he couldn’t define it but “I know it when I see it” was Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and he was talking about pornography!
I can’t stand critics who come right out and say they’re prejudice against a genre, or that they haven’t read a lot of it, and then proceed to rip a genre story apart. I tend not to listen to those critics. I think the same goes for movie critics. If a critic states they can’t stand summer movies, I’m not going to read their bashing of Spider-Man 3, but if a critic thinks that Zhang Yimou and Sam Raimi have both made art in the past, then I’m more liable to read their bashing of Spider-Man 3. Does that make sense?
As for coincidences, they’re a part of life. Should novelists ignore this?
I think the Stewart quote goes like this: “I know pornography when I see, but I should take another peek just in case.”
Thanks, Zelda! I was having a senior moment about the judge and what he was talking about, but I KNEW it fit the moment! sort of (blushing)