A little rant I started here and finished on my blog:

"To me, contemporary literary fiction is as much a niche market as something like Fantasy or Western. It seems to be written for English students (undergrad and grad), English professors, former English majors who are somehow still involved in the literary world, and writers."

Christ, you can say that again.

I've been trying to get published in literary fiction venues because they happen to be the best market for the autobiographical stuff I write and the autobiographical stuff seems to be the stuff that people like best out of all the different kinds of things I do. So periodically I gird my loins and head down to the local news stand, where I spend a great deal of time window shopping— which is to say that I graze the literary magazine section looking for dirty words and paragraphs that begin with conjunctions. Then I sit down on the floor of the shop and read until I'm satisfied that the editors of a given magazine are committed to publishing the kind of thing I like to write. I usually leave with no more than a brace of publications in hand, which I take home and put on the tank of my toilet, since that's really the only time I'm willing to devote to most of what passes for literary fiction these days.

Because it's all just so unforgivably formulaic, isn't it? Lots of highbrow types have that complaint about genre fiction but my experience is that most "literary" authors will be fucked with a shovel before they'll write a story with a beginning, middle and end where, you know, something actually happens. As far as that goes, most of their literary chops seem directed toward obscuring how little they have to say.

You pick up any magazine whose title ends in Review you're likely to be confronted with something like this:

My mother often spent afternoons combing her hair in front of an antique mirror her grandmother had brought over from the old country. She counted the strokes of the brush in a quiet murmur like a litany. Our house was full of rituals back then. They gathered in every room like ghosts. They ambushed me at turns. I couldn't step through a door without thinking of all the things I might be required to do beyond the threshold, depending on the time of day or the season.

Then there'll be about 5,000 words of back-and-forth about the time the narrator saw his sister naked and some shadow play about the smell of dust in the attic until finally the story wraps up with something like this:

She smiled sadly and handed me the comb. I remember it still— the texture of the grip in my hand and its peculiar weight. I looked at myself in the mirror, the mirror her grandmother had brought over from the old country. The lines of my face were brushed away by the shadow of my mother, standing behind me.

Puerile shite most of it, and dead formulaic into the bargain. The usual theme is the destruction of innocence; "The summer I realized my parents were thinking about getting a divorce," or "The summer I realized that we all die someday." These elemental standards are usually propped up with palettes of tone and color to produce an oeuvre rather than, say, a situation. In addition to which fucking insult, the subject matter is almost universally predictable.

Most of it's about people's parents. I recognize that criticism may sound a little hypocritical given how much I write about my parents but I draw the distinction along these lines: my parents were interesting, is why I write about them. My dad was a gay drug dealer who died of AIDS. My mom was a certifiably insane artist with a coke habit. They lived extreme lives and there are a million little stories about crazy shit they did or said at various times.

What I never stop being amazed by in literary fiction is how much energy "literary" authors spend trying to make their boring lives and their boring fucking parents seem interesting by implication. "She glanced at the picture and quickly looked away." And the home viewing audience is meant to be drawn in by the mystery— what's her association with the picture? It's that "the wonder in everyday life" number, and it's a complete fucking dodge. Some twat with an MFA rattles on for 8,000 words about how his mother wore white lace to his father's funeral and how it's all a symbol for this one time when the father cheated and how the author learned the frailty of human love that day. Balls.

Me, I learned about the frailty of human love the day my dad used my food money to score drugs. I ended up having to survive on top ramen and kitchen scraps from the school cafeteria for six weeks and I never forgave the fucker. I know it's not as transcendental or metaphorical as the white lace thing but some of us actually have to come by our life lessons in plot rather than theme. Excuse the shit out of me. I'll see if I can't come up with something about my dad wearing white lace to a parent-teacher conference but I've got a feeling that's not what the editors at the Podunk College Town Review are looking for.

You know what I wish is, I wish it were still possible to draw an audience with pulp fiction magazines. These days I reckon the Internet is the new pulp fiction medium. Fine as far as it goes, but you can't make any money off it and what I really want to see is so-called genre fiction stomping so-called literary fiction in public; pulp fiction out-selling literary fiction. Never happen. Literary fiction is the proving grounds for getting into the game: for getting a teaching post somewhere that allows me to quit my job as a Xerox repairman and write full-time. In order to make it in literary fiction, I have to keep submitting to literary fiction magazines. In order to submit to literary fiction magazines, I have to keep buying them. As long as I keep buying them, they'll keep publishing and as long as they're publishing they'll remain a gateway to graduate creative writing programs.

It's a vicious cycle that produces a lot of extremely boring and repressed literature. Alas.

Joshua -- I'm out of town and don't have much chance to check the internet or email, but I loved this so much I'm going to post a new entry to point people to it.