I’ve been working my way through Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Genre fiction, literature, and pulp fiction all have a tricky relationship to one another.
I have this really bad habit of reading negative reviews on Goodreads while reading a book.
If I love the book, I can make fun of the idiots who “cant even right gud.” If I hate the book, I can commiserate with the brilliant like-minds who saw through the crap.
The negative reviews of this novel got me thinking about a few things related to genre.
Cultural References
Some people claim all the 80’s geek and pop culture references make this a trashy genre novel. Some say it even stoops to pulp fiction levels. Some call it nostalgia.
I want to first show why this isn’t a good argument, but then I want to try to clarify how I define these different types of books.
We start with the excessive references.
I don’t think Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would be considered genre fiction or pulp by anyone. It is a monster of literary fiction if there ever was one, but the novel is full of pop culture references (from a specific period).
The purpose there is not nostalgia or to make it “more entertaining” or whatever else the negative reviews think Cline is doing.
I’ll cover my bases here and say that I don’t think that Cline’s use of pop culture is the same in intent or effect as Pynchon, but the fact that such literature exists shows that one needs a more complete argument than the mere use of pop culture references.
- Is Infinite Jest genre or pulp fiction?
- What about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay?
This technique has been used in literary fiction for a long time with great success.
Genre Fiction
To me, the term “genre fiction” merely refers to a novel that stays strictly within the accepted genre conventions. This means the plot follows a known formula. In modern days, the characters fit into a few tropes, and the tenor of the prose is pitched at a certain level.
This means that something like “romance” genre fiction could be extremely well-written and explore serious literary issues and be worth everyone’s time to read (I’m thinking of something like Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady).
Genre fiction doesn’t automatically mean pure fluff and vacuous entertainment; genre means it follows a formula, and these formulae have a lot of give to them.
I think a lot of people conflate genre fiction with pulp.
Pulp Fiction
Pulp fiction, as I see it, is pure fluff and entertainment. It is often poorly written, not as a matter of definition, but mostly because the authors of this style need to pop out a large number of words per month in order to make a living.
Pulp is pretty much a subset of genre fiction, again, not as a matter of definition, but because it is easiest to write quickly if you follow a formula.
To recap, genre fiction can be literary, but it can also be pulp. Genre fiction doesn’t tell us much about the quality of writing or redeeming characteristics or depth or content. Someone could spend a lifetime reading high-quality genre mysteries without encountering pulp.
And before continuing, I don’t want to place value judgment here.
I’m not saying it’s “bad” to read pulp. You probably won’t contemplate your own mortality, but escapism is healthy in moderation.
No one thinks working sixty hour weeks with no vacation is healthy. It’s sort of weird that people think reading only heavy literary fiction with no fun mixed in is healthy.
So go relax with a fun novel every once in a while when you feel that urge to veg in front of the TV.
Crossover
What I think I’m trying to say is that oftentimes there is a ton of crossover between all of these things, and it isn’t easy to tell.
The one certain takeaway is that pop culture references do not make something pulp. Pulp is pop culture but not the other way around. In fact, if there are lots of references, it is probably a metafictional device, and this pulls you clear out of pulp.
That being said, I think Ready Player One actually is pulp, because the references do seem to be purely nostalgic.
The book has few themes, and all are thin, classic good/evil tropes. I’m not sure I can call it genre fiction, because I can’t pin a genre down. I guess it falls into dystopian fiction.
I don’t often hear this referred to as a specific genre, but it clearly has a form: one person, in a horribly oppressive futuristic world, must fight through a series of trials to take down the oppressor.
This wasn’t meant as a book review, but I’ll end by saying Ready Player One is pure entertainment through and through, and it really works at this level.
I don’t recall the last book I enjoyed this much. It is so much fun for people around my age who grew up the geek.
I highly recommend it if that sounds interesting, but don’t expect anything deep to come from it or you might be leaving one of those one-star reviews.
You might also like my article: Horror: A Genre of Modern Literary Importance.
