Last Friday, just as I became preoccupied with planning and hosting a two-year-old’s birthday party and then launching into a nightmarish hell of day-job research, The Shelf cried out to me for my opinion about Tree of Smoke and its particular appeal to male-type people and further, the relationship of men to literary fiction that plays with genre conventions.
To which I say, um, well gee, it would appear you have a point, since, um — ahem — well, it’s a spy novel with, um hey, look over there at that shiny object!
Still there? Oh, alright. The thing is I haven’t read Tree of Smoke. But I’ve now added it to the pile — and I’ve now read Jared’s post and the NY Times review, which makes me an expert on the subject by Internet standards. So as for Jared’s core question to me (why would this kind of great book appeal more to dudes, and why is that the case for genre-exploring lit fiction in general?), I feel qualified to put forward a fairly straightforward theory: it’s men who read (or who grew up reading) spy novels and the other genres on which nerdy, middle-aged-man literary books are based. You have to really know and love a pulp genre to want to use its conventions and clichés for a higher purpose (see Tarantino, Quentin) and the audience who will find the most resonance in the adapted use of those conventions and clichés will be those who share the creators’ knowledge and love of the original genre.
Now are there women who read spy novels? Sure. Can a woman love comic books, detective novels, kung-fu movies and sci-fi? Absolutely. I’ve known such women. Well, I know one such woman, and I have met others, I think. But when I walk past the Hairy Tarantula comic shop on my way to the bus stop, I don’t notice any excess of estrogen at the role-playing gaming tables that are visible through the windows.
(What may be interesting is that the genre-benders don’t seem to explore the conventions of romance novels and chick lit and whatever else those from Venus read in large quantities. Obviously the middle-aged be-testicled nerds wouldn’t be writing them, but what about the nerdettes? Are they writing them and I just haven’t heard of them? Is conventional literary fiction already too close to the romance genre for the adoption of conventions to have any effect? Also: the exception-to-the-rule thing doesn’t seem to be applicable in reverse at all. I have never, to my knowledge, met a man who obsessively read romance novels, or who admitted to it. My theory of why this is true, having cracked the cover of one or two in search of naughty bits when the Sears catalogue wasn’t handy during my adolescence, is that romance novels actually suck fairly severely. Just a theory, though.)
All that said, I also wanted to chip in my own favourite genre-lit mash up of the last decade’s wave of such books (and a contender for my favourite novel of the past decade, period): Motherless Brooklyn. An obvious choice, you say? Well screw you. It’s still brilliant.
Jonathan Lethem’s narrator is a private dick with Tourette’s syndrome, a gimmick that yields crazy lyrical language in exposition and lends the noir-ish dialogue a surreal quality saturated in humour and pathos. But moreover, as the above-linked Salon critic points out, the narrator’s syndrome — which exhibits itself through involuntary, unexpected verbal tics but also requires his compulsive arranging and ordering and examining and enumerating — acts as a sort of funhouse mirror of the genre-detective condition, and in that makes the detective genre a vehicle for looking at the entire human need to maintain sanity through the search for order and meaning in assorted, sometimes random accumulations of facts and people and coincidences, to keep it all straight and get it all down, and to share the contents of our experience with other people without having the truth become involuntarily mangled on the way out. And all that.
So, homework for me: read Tree of Smoke. For you, Motherless Brooklyn. (Bonus: here’s the first chapter for free, though you may need to register (for free) on the Times website if you haven’t already.)
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