Some teachers of writing disdain genre writing. I’m not one of them.

I’m not one of them because it would be hypocritical of me as a consumer of comic books, pulp novels, the occasional horror or science fiction or Western novel, to turn up a nose at genre. Samuel Beckett spent his idle hours reading detective novels, so who would I be to judge? Turn up a nose at badly written genre? Sure. But because of what it is? No. In some way, to do so seems close to racism: prejudging books by their packaging.

I’m also not someone who disdains genre because I don’t know where to draw the line. Is “The Road” a horror novel, a science fiction novel, or literature? (All three.) How about some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories? Was Edgar Allan Poe a “genre” writer? And wasn’t “The Turn of the Screw” a gothic horror novella?

Toward the end of his lifetime, Philip K. Dick found the mainstream — i.e., the mainstream of popular readers. He found it because the film version of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (“Blade Runner”) brought attention to his work. What he didn’t find was literary acclamation, and the people who hold the reins on that call it “mainstream.” It isn’t. It is the niche (literary readers) of a niche (book readers). (Proof is the LA Times’ lack of a link to the Book Review section.)

Today’s L.A. Times includes a fine review of Dick’s recently published but 54-year-old novel “Voices From the Street.” (The link may require registration.) Reading between the lines, the book doesn’t sound particularly well-written or well-paced. (Years ago I blithely commented to good friend and mentor Rich Roesberg that “nobody reads Philip K. Dick for the prose.” Rich later told me he didn’t know what I meant until the next time he picked up a Dick novel and saw exactly what I meant.) As a longtime admirer of Dick’s themes and obsessions (if not always the word choices in its execution) I will probably read this book; I doubt it is the masterpiece that I still believe “Confessions of a Crap Artist” to be, but I hope it’s at least as entertaining as the meandering but nonetheless gripping “Mary and the Giant,” long out of print and which I was fortunate to discover in a second-hand book shop in Utah (!) for eight dollars.

The photo in today’s Book Review shows Dick seated cross-legged holding a copy of “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,” not one of his best novels. The front of each of his shoes reveals a wide hole along the bottom. I think Dick’s attraction to the literary mainstream was one of class, but also one of cash. (There is an apocryphal story of Dick ordering horsemeat for his dog only to ingest it himself.) We live in an age of wonderful irony, only the latest being this: In 2007, it is overall the genre writers with lucrative writing careers and the literary writers who scrabble to make ends meet. Philip K. Dick, in being ahead of so many in his own time, died too soon to enjoy the benefits of the true mainstream.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.