Mainstream Tropes

Reading the Observer's so-called 25 best novels, I'm reminded how I've always though that the modern literary novel is as much a genre as so-called 'Genre Fiction' like SF, Romance, Crime or Thrillers. Ken Hite seems to agree.

I really wish I could remember where I read the following immensely insightful piece of criticism:

The modern novel is merely a narrow subgenre of the Gothic.

It's true, ennit? The 20th century novelist (paradigmatically, say, Updike) writes only about the emotional lives of his characters, and such conflict as there is is in their inability to adequately or fully or (and here's what Updike has in common with Radcliffe) authentically feel or express those emotions. That's the Gothic conflict -- Authentic Love Thwarted -- and usually presented in about as tedious a fashion as you can imagine. Modern novels even symbolize the various blocks and obstacles and expressions of emotion in baldly obvious emblems, just like the Gothics with their storms and dungeons.

If it's genre, it must have tropes. Ken Hite has already identified an important one, about the primacy of the characters emotional lives. Other tropes must be that the story must be set in the present day or the recent past, and the characters and situations must be as mundane as possible. There must be little or no action, otherwise people might start calling it a Thriller, and we can't have that....

Se we get 400 pages of beautifully-written prose about the central character contemplating his or her navel. Or semi-autobiographical stories of the protagonist growing up in some complete dump (which may be a third-world slum or may be Birmingham in the 1970s). Or, worst of the lot, tiresome stories about college lecturers having mid-life crises starting affairs.

I'm convinced that the artificial divide between 'high art' represented by the Serious Literary Novel and 'popular culture' represented by 'trashy genre fiction' is and has always been nonsense, and there are good and bad in all genres. While I read relatively little modern mainstream fiction, what little I have read doesn't give me any impression that the actual writing is any better than a lot of SF I've read.