Stories without stories

Việt Thanh Nguyen

Literary fiction, says novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a genre that pretends not to be. The very fact that we have the term "literary fiction" and know what it means suggests he is right. There are romance novels, westerns, thrillers, mysteries and science fiction novels, and then there is literary fiction, a separate category and thus a separate genre. Popular fiction might be another genre.

The Vietnam-born writer goes on, "My beef with a lot of literary fiction is that there's no plot." He describes a plot as fundamental to a novel. How can you have a story without the story?

His complaint is common among readers, most of whom ignore the kinds of novel he complains about, those lacking a plot or having plot so obscure that discovering it requires too much work. Yet these are often the very novels that win the literary prizes, even if very few people read them and even fewer enjoy them.

The plotless novel was primarily a 20th century phenomenon that still holds power in literary circles. Yet this certainly does not describe all literary fiction. Before the 20th century writers like Austen, Dickens, Hardy and Twain gave us literary fiction with plots even ordinary readers, not just the elites, could enjoy. The popularity of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck during the 20th century demonstrated that even during the age of Faulkner and Woolf plots and literary fiction were not exclusive.

More recently we have seen novels like Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins win over both literary critics and readers.

So perhaps literary fiction is not just one genre but two — those with vivid plots and those without.