Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

to gray to black. Publishers want to understand why readers read the books they do. Marketers give tests, conduct surveys, consult oracles, etc., and constantly rediscover a simple fact: people read fiction that reinforces their often inarticulate beliefs about society, life, and fate.
    People who believe that life’s problems can be solved through intelligence and effort are often attracted to crime fiction, which centers around the logical solution of various problems. People who believe along with Shakespeare that there are more things on heaven and earth than we dream, are attracted to science fiction of various kinds.
    People who believe that a good relationship between a man and a woman can be the core of life are attracted to romances.
    People who believe that absolute evil lurks just beneath the surface of the ordinary are attracted to horror. And so on.
    Think about that the next time you hear someone dismiss what they (or usually other folks!) read as “escapism.” Existentialists escape into their fictional world. We escape into ours. The fact that our world feels good and theirs feels bad doesn’t mean theirs is always more valuable, much less more intelligent: I have known many intelligent people who need to be reminded of the possibility of joy; I have known no intelligent people who need to be reminded of the reality of despair.
    Some things are worth escaping from. Despair is definitely one of them.
    So much for escapism. What about the charge that popular fiction is formulaic?
    The concept of formula has an interesting history as first a literary device and then a literary putdown. The Greeks divided literature into tragedy and comedy. A tragedy had a political, masculine theme and ended in death. A comedy had a social, often feminine theme and ended in marriage, the union of male and female from which all life comes. We have kept the scope of tragedy, of death and despair, but we have reduced the concept of comedy to a potty-mouthed nightclub act. Perhaps that is why critics of popular fiction reserve their most priapic scorn for the stories called romances. Romances follow the ancient Greek formula for comedy: they celebrate life rather than anticipate death. In addition to being almost exclusively female in their audience and authorship, romances address timeless female concerns of union and regeneration. The demand for romances is feminine, deep, and apparently universal. Harlequin/Silhouette has an enormously profitable romance publishing empire in which the majority of the money
is earned outside of the American market, in more countries and languages than I can name.
    Even worse than their roots in ancient feminine concerns, romances irritate critics because they often have a subtext of mythic archetypes rather than modernist, smaller-than-life characters.
    I have heard mystery authors complain that they don’t get any respect from critics. As a mystery author, I agree. I have heard science fiction authors complain that they don’t get any respect. As a science fiction author, I agree. But as a romance author, I have experienced amazing intellectual bigotry.
    For example, mysteries, like romances, were once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. Then, about seventy years ago, the idea of class warfare came into intellectual vogue. Mysteries, particularly American mysteries, came to be viewed as politically correct (and therefore) well-written metaphors of class warfare: the down-and-out detective bringing justice to the little guy in a society that cares only for privilege and wealth.
    That’s a pretty heavy load to lay on Lew Archer’s modernist shoulders, but I suspect the male academic types were tired of getting their thrills reading by flashlight in a closet. The fact that mysteries at the time were written by men for men did not hurt the genre’s status at all.
    Yet many authors continued to write mysteries in which brains, bravery and brawn mattered more than political commentary; these books were roundly disdained by critics... and avidly bought by readers. The division between mythic and politically correct mysteries still exists. You can usually tell which is which by the tone of the review.
    Science fiction, like romance, was once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. Then, in the nineteen fifties, there was a rash of After-the-Bomb science fiction books. Either directly or indirectly, these