The Kind of Books There Should Be More (Some) Of
There needs to be more light fiction that’s really good.
When I say ‘light fiction’ I’m referring to tone, not necessarily the weight of themes, etc. Though the weight of particular themes has a necessary impact on the tone of a book.
P.G. Wodehouse is great, but he may be the only great writer to write books that are essentially about nothing. All the important stuff is laid on the skeleton, but there’s no animating breath running through it all. That’s not a criticism. Those books are machines that do their job. But I want books that do a slightly different job.
Douglas Adams is great, or I think I do. I haven’t read HGttG in probably 16 years. Those books are hilarious, but they’re satire, and satire doesn’t feed the soul. Juxtaposed to Wodehouse, Adams is almost all subtext. The form is subject to the whims of the humor, and the core of the story is less important than some pretty snarky jokes. This could be a total mis-rememberance on my part, and again, I’ve got nothing against it. I love those books. They’re just not exactly what I want.
The books I’ve found most satisfying have tended to be literary fiction on a high order. Old School by Tobias Wolff, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, and lots of others. Very satisfying stories told by exceptional writers. But you can’t live on that kind of stuff alone. I don’t think I can, anyway. I need something light to alternate with some of these weightier items. But I don’t think light ought to mean that we skimp on nourishment.
Here’s how I know it: Pixar. The Incredibles, Wall-E, Toy Stories 1 and 3, and to a lesser extent, nearly everything else they’ve done. The stories are light and fun, but they typically attain real thematic weight. The dramatic shape and thematic coherence of The Incredibles are of such a high order of craft as to make the story a perfect sphere of story. Everything locks into place and feels assured without killing the life of the story.
And I can’t think of a single book that does what The Incredibles does. I mean, I can think of lots of books with that kind of shape and coherence, but not with a similarly ‘fun’ tone. I’m not saying that those books don’t exist, just that I haven’t found them. And I’ve been looking.
