Wanna read a mystery-romance-literary-sci-fi-cozy-thriller?

             I have a whole stable full of hobby horses, and probably the one with the most mileage is the question of genre.  A writer friend of mine had reviewed the opening chapter of a novel I’d just started, and asked, “What is this?  Mystery?  Romance? Mystery-Romance?”

            My first response, unspoken, was “What freakin’ difference does it make?”

            This writer friend is a published novelist, and he was right to ask, and I’m sorry but it’s a legitimate question.  The need to classify everything is an irresistible human impulse.  Probably a survival instinct.  We obviously need to impose some level of order on a chaotic, confusing existence.  It makes us feel more in control, less threatened by our rambunctious day-to-day reality.  It also provides a common language, a sort of spread sheet where individual objects can be compared to others, fit into a reasonable set of descriptions that are best understood by similarities and deviations.  Science and linguistics are utterly reliant on taxonomy and philology.  It all makes sense, making sense of the world.

            But there is a dark side.  Classification has a tendency to leave out the oddballs, which is not that bad in biology or chemistry, but when it affects people, the downsides are manifold.  No one wants to be stereotyped, or pigeon-holed. Even classified.  Put in a box. The same can be said about writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

            I understand why bookstores want to know where to slot a new book.  They have shelves with labels, and have to keep things organized and customer friendly.  People search for books according to their likes and dislikes, usually defined for them by genre.  If they can’t easily find the type of book they usually enjoy they’ll leave the store, as will most others, and the store will eventually go out of business.  Consequently, booksellers are diligent in describing their offerings according to genre, and sub-genre, better to align with publishers and not disturb customers. 

           

            So we’re stuck with this, us writers, who may occasionally want to drift outside our assigned paddocks.  Publishers hate this, by the way, and usually try to discourage these impulses, giving in only when a successful novelist is such a hot property they can afford to play around a little with YA, or sci-fi, or write a cookbook (John Irving's 101 Ways To Grill a Bear).  

It doesn’t seem to matter that many detective novels are now considered great literature, and established literary works are filled with intrigue and gunfights.  Critics get to play in this sandbox, as do Ph. D candidates proffering theses on the poetry of John La Carré or “Frankenstein – Horror Novel or Towering Critique on the Social Consequences of Rampant Industrialisation?” But publishers and booksellers have to sell books, and these nuances are lost on the genre-focused public.

            My beef, and yes I have a beef, is that too many of us humans only know how to think about something in relation to how it fits into a belief system, which is all a genre is.  You might call it dogma, or ideology, or simply a set of preferences and biases that conforms to an organized array of convictions.  In its simplest form, think of a Catholic who believes all of the church’s doctrine.  Alternative views, say by a Presbyterian or Jew, are inadmissible.  If you are a behavioral psychologist, you have a body of scholarly work that you cleave to, and by definition, reject the beliefs of a competing gang of scholars, say those anachronistic Freudians.  You can call it group think, or kin selection, or tribal loyalty.  You’re a Mets fan or you root for the Yankees, and that’s all you have to think about.

            And that’s the point.  You don’t have to think.  You just have to check those pre-existing boxes. 

            This is not a wise life strategy if you want to understand as much about the world as you possible can.  Unless you own a bookstore or hawk paperbacks out of the back of your van, genre matters not a wit.  What matters is the quality of the work, judged by that ineffable emotional response to an artistic expression, of any sort, from any source.