Let it be said that I spent the weekend reading Brandon Sanderson's epic, 592-page tome "Warbreaker" -- because it was fun, interesting and well-written. It's also found in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of your local library or bookseller.
Point in your favor, Lev Grossman.
Grossman (thanks for the tip, Boing Boing), writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggests that among the reasons Young Adult novels (like "Twilight") are so popular is the simple fact good, easy stories are hard to find. (Another reason to hate Modernism and its over-complication of all that is good about the world. Sort of.)
They wrote great novels, Grossman admits, but they raised the bar exceptionally high for the future writers of the world. And they broke plot. They killed the novel.
But the novel is making the comeback, Grossman says:
All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in "Inherent Vice" he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.
This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.
Thank God.
I've been tired of skulking in the Young Adult and Science Fiction aisles.
In the meantime, a new Star Wars novel has just come out...
