What is "Literary Fiction?"

Reading Anne Tyler and Jodi Picoult

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I’ve been juggling novels written by two well known writers this week and wondering about what connects them. First, I read Anne Tyler‘s novel, “Back When We Were Grownups,” which I mistakenly thought was a current novel because it was on Sarah Orman‘s list of books she read in 2024. It wasn’t until I was about halfway through that I looked up its publication date and realized it was 2001.

As with all Tyler novels, it presents a large family struggling with domestic issues worthy of Jane Austen, except the issue rarely involves finding a marriageable partner. Love, loss, estranged family members all feature prominently. In “Back When We Were Grownups,” Rebecca has been managing a family home business used for throwing parties since her husband died. On the day of her daughter’s engagement party, the novel begins: “Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

Based on the opening, I expected a dramatic decision, rather like Delia in Tyler’s “Ladder of Years,” who walks off the beach at a family vacation, gets on a bus and makes a new life in an adjoining town. As it turns out, Rebecca’s experiment in becoming another person involves who she was when she jilted her fiancé at age 19 to marry the scion of the party house. Not surprisingly, she discovers she jilted him for good reason.

Not a lot happens in an Anne Tyler novel, and this one is no exception. The family gathers for events, squabbles ensue, her daughter’s new step-son asks if he can call Rebecca “Gram,” that sort of thing. When the narrative began to drag, I would have stopped listening except that I wanted to see if the dotty uncle got to his 100^th birthday party.

Anne Tyler has written 24 novels, most of them set in Baltimore, and has won the Pulitzer Prize (for “Breathing Lessons” in 1989) and been shortlisted for the Booker prize (for “A Spool of Blue Thread” in 2015). Her genre is called “literary realism,” emphasis on the word “literary.” Who wouldn’t want to be called literary? It certainly beats “commercial,” although Tyler sells plenty of books.

Wikipedia defines literary as

“referring to novels that are character-driven rather than plot-driven, examine the human condition, use language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or are simply considered serious art. Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition. This contrasts with genre fiction where plot is the central concern. It may have a slower pace than popular fiction.”

The other novel I’ve been reading is “By Any Other Name,” by Jodi Picoult. Picoult has 28 novels to her credit, many of which have ended up on the bestseller list, but unlike Tyler, whose novels are generally about one family and their domestic lives, Picoult takes as her topic matters of moral, ethical and legal consequence. She has written novels about abortion. She has written novels about deliberately conceiving a child to be able to harvest an organ to save an older sibling. She’s written about racism. But her novels don’t sacrifice character for plot. She writes nuanced characters facing dilemmas that feel current and urgent. She also does a lot of research.

Here is Picoult talking about her novel where a black nurse saves a white infant against the express wishes of the father who doesn’t want a black person to touch his baby:

Suddenly I knew why I would be able to finish this book – I was addressing the wrong audience. I didn’t need to communicate what it’s like to be Black in America. I needed to communicate to other white people like myself that even though they might not think of themselves as racist, racism is not just about prejudice – it’s about power – and that in addition to the headwinds of racism faced by people of color, there are tailwinds of racism that benefit white people. It’s very hard to admit that our success is not a result of hard work or luck but also quite possibly the fact that we had opportunities a person of color did NOT.

I knew I couldn’t ask readers to take a journey of soul searching about privilege and prejudice unless I did, too. So I attended social justice workshops, and left in tears every night. I read the work of anti-racism activists and met with social justice educators. I sat down with women of color who excused my ignorance and welcomed me into their lives and memories – and who vetted, personally, the voice of the character Ruth.

“By Any Other Name” is a departure for Picoult in a number of surprising ways.

Picoult has taken risks with her winning formula that impress me. First of all, it involves two separate narratives-- one in current day about a female playwright who pretends to be a man in order to get her play produced. Juxtaposed against this narrative is the true story of Emilia Bassano, a published poet in the time of Shakespeare. In the novel, Bassano writes Shakespeare’s plays on which he puts his name because she couldn’t write as a woman.

This novel reminds me of “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” by Elif Shafak (definitely literary fiction) about the real-life man in England who deciphered cuneiform leading to the “discovery” of Gilgamesh, the oldest poem known. It too has a present day narrative.

I felt the energy and fun of a Tyler novel flagged a bit with her two latest, particularly “French Braid,” where two generations of a family diluted the narrative. Picoult, by contrast, has tried something entirely new to stunning effect.

Picoult recognizes that the world of book marketing views her as commercial, not literary. (Which reminds me that in my MFA fiction workshop, when I was asked if I aimed to write a Danielle Steel novel—obviously a veiled comment that my plot had overtaken my characters-- I said “of course.” Wrong answer! Danielle Steel is formula, not literary.)

When asked why she didn’t win literary awards Picoult replied:

I’ve won many, actually – from the Margaret Alexander Edwards award for young adult literature to Cosmo magazine’s Fun Fearless Fiction award – but chances are I’m not ever going to be holding a Pulitzer. For reasons I don’t really understand in this country, literary fiction is considered intelligent, and commercial fiction is considered successful, and rarely the twain shall meet. I believe that there is some really bad literary fiction out there, and some really brilliant commercial fiction, and that these are pretty arbitrary lines that have been drawn by the panelists who judge the National Book Awards, for example. Of course, I’d be thrilled if I was proven wrong!!

This lead me to wonder whether the simple fact that she is a commercial success relegates her writing to a category that is not considered of the same caliber as someone like Anne Tyler. Just look at the cover on Picoult’s novel vs. Tyler’s, more subdued.

Picoult’s is flowery, bold and bright and has absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Picoult ‘s writing stands absolutely at the top of what one would call literary fiction, that is to say, yes, she has a strong plot, but she does not sacrifice her characters for the sake of her plot.

She is not like a formulaic detective story where the issue is who committed the murder. I recently read “Drowned,” by John Banville. I consider Banville to be a writer of superb literary fiction and his book “The Sea” is one of my all-time favorites for sentences that simply shine. However, for years he wrote murder mysteries under a pseudonym. His protagonist is a pathologist named Quirk. According to Banville, he recently decided that his Quirke novels were actually pretty good and so he decided to put his name on them, but when I read “Drowned,” it was clear to me that Banville was not using the skills that he brings to literary fiction.

One way to test this hypothesis is whether I care more about the plot than I care about the characters. And I will say that his plot was very clever, but that I didn’t really care much for any of his characters, which is a problem, at least for this reader.

So I guess this stands for the proposition that an author can write both literary fiction and genre fiction and that they will sound different because different skills are being employed. But this brings me back to Jodi Picoult and her astonishing novel about Emilia Bassano and Shakespeare. Picoult has clearly done her research and we fall completely into the world of Shakespeare’s London, and the life of Emilia Bassano, who, at the age of 13 became a courtesan to an English nobleman.

And that’s when I found another odd connection between Anne Tyler and Jodi Picoult. Anne Tyler wrote a book called “Vinegar Girl” as part of a project where well-known authors take a Shakespeare play and recast it in modern day. “Vinegar Girl’ is a recasting of “The Taming of the Shrew.” So there you have it--two famous authors, one of whom who is viewed as worthy of literary prizes and one is not, both writing about Shakespeare.

Anne Tyler has said she always thinks she’s going to write a different kind of novel and then she doesn’t. This time Jodi Picoult has written a different kind of novel and I for one would love to see it receive a literary award.