Literary fiction needs a dose of entertainment

Much of today’s literary fiction can come across as snooty, self-absorbed, and a bit of a snooze-fest. (Photo via Pixabay/Pexels)

It’s no secret that people are reading less than ever before. When it comes to books, it's literary fiction that's been hit hardest. A few years ago, an Arts Council England report confirmed this disheartening trend: sales have been cratering over the past 15 years.

Nowadays, we're spoiled for choice with streaming services and online games vying for our attention, not to mention social media sites delivering dollops of dopamine. In contrast, much of today’s literary fiction can come across as snooty, self-absorbed, and a bit of a snooze-fest.

This wasn’t always the case. Look at the work of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde, to take just three names at random. Whatever else they delivered, their work provided sheer reading pleasure.

This lesson was not lost on Martin Amis. In Inside Story, his last book, he addresses the reader as an honoured guest, a person who has to be welcomed and made comfortable. He quotes John Dryden, who wrote that the purpose of literature is to give “instruction and delight”.

A writer, says Amis, should keep the pleasure principle in mind: “Instruct in a way that you hope will stimulate the reader’s mind, heart, and, yes, soul, and make the reader’s world fuller and richer.” Note that in this case, “instruction” doesn’t mean hitting people over the head with morals or otherwise being heavy-handed about the purpose of literature.

Let’s take a moment to tease out the meanings of the word “entertainment”. It has its roots in the Latin “inter” and “tenere”, meaning to keep among or hold between, and initially referred to acts such as supporting a household retainer. Over the centuries, it came to mean the act of amusing or diverting someone by capturing their attention or interest. Exactly what novels should aim to do.

In a literary context, entertainment can refer to more than simply a compelling plot and characters, though those are certainly important aspects. It can also be found in fresh and vivid use of language, unusual themes and relevant concerns, humour and suspense, for example.

This isn’t a clarion call for writers to dumb things down or to stay away from Modernist or avant-garde pursuits. It’s simply a reminder that ideal readers, however they’re envisioned, shouldn’t be stifling yawns while flipping the pages. There’s no need for a distinction between entertaining novels and the rest— which are often thought of as highbrow but can be downright dreary.

Crafting an entertaining novel needs equal parts art and craft. Take the case of Graham Greene, who referred to some of his books as “entertainments” to distinguish them from his more serious novels. In the former bracket were thrillers like Our Man in Havana and Stamboul Train, while the latter contained those like The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American. Yet, it can be argued that whether they contain spies or moral quandaries, all of them are entertaining in the sense of containing memorable characters, evocative writing and vivid settings.

In genres like mystery and crime, entertainment is non-negotiable. Perhaps that’s why many writers of literary fiction have borrowed genre conventions for their own ends. These range from postmodernist mysteries like Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy to spy fiction like Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.

In fact, John Banville, who has himself composed crime novels under the name of Benjamin Black, recently wrote in the Financial Times that some of the greatest literature of the 20th century was written in the crime-novel genre. “Think of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, James M Cain, Richard Stark, Pascal Garnier — think of Georges Simenon!” Hard to argue with that.

You don’t have to go back centuries to find examples of fiction that combine the literary and the pleasurable — be it because of style, structure or treatment of their subjects. To take a random sampling, there’s Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for satirical takes on war; and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides for coming-of-age obsessions. Chances are that if you think about your own favourite novels, their entertainment value plays a significant role.

There’s no getting away from it: if literary fiction authors want their works to be picked up, they should consider how to make them enjoyable, without sacrificing intellectual depth. As novelist Simon Mason once put it in a guide to classic novels, their main job is to be “great pleasure-givers”.