A Genre I'd Like to Read More

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "A Genre I'd Like to Read More of in the Coming Year." 

That would be nonfiction.

Nonfiction does not fit into the Book Funnel's marketing mold, which is one great thing in its favor. 

My tastes flipped, during my reading lifetime. As a child I was most interested in fiction, and various adults used to try to push me to read more nonfiction, to which I used to respond by choosing the most frivolous topics available. Books written to teach things to children tended to be dumbed-down and preachy and aimed at boys. Children's novels had a better chance of being interesting and aimed at least partly at girls, and sometimes piqued my interest enough that I even looked up a topic and read nonfiction about the topic, to find out what the characters in a novel were talking about.

As an adult I found it to be the other way round. Novels written for adults can be very good, but are generally pretty bad. In the twentieth century the consensus of literary critics' opinion was that genre fiction--romances, mysteries, "westerns," and many critics added science fiction--was garbage. So what were the rules for novels that were not considered garbage? Some critics liked a lot of travel; some liked a "cross-section of society," with something like DEI in the selection of characters. Depressingly few, and nearly all of them were female, wanted the female characters to be believably human. Serious literary fiction was usually about adultery, or murder when everybody knew who'd done it; it focussed on the male experience and usually involved a lot of alcohol and tobacco, and had the general mood of a dirty ashtray. The critics always paid tribute to authors who could write about war, but they were more interested in authors who, like themselves, had been unfit for service.  \

Cartoon by James Thurber, who was actually one of my favorite twentieth century male writers.

Mostly the male writers and their characters lived in places where women lived too, and had active relationships with women; in the twentieth century any hint of sympathy for homosexuality would cost a book sales, even after the left-wingnuts of then took up homosexuality as a cause and actively marketed it to, e.g., graduate students in literature or psychology. But the successful male writers tended to write about their relationships with women as if they would rather have been homosexual. They wrote like a lot of pathetic aging graduate students, all sitting around in someone's basement wearing black shirts and getting drunk, terrified that marriage would lead to responsibility and gainful employment and would destroy their creativity. In most cases, if they had lost all interest in writing books, from the viewpoint of English Literature that might have been a good thing.

This attitude had, of course, already spawned the beginning of the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of Loony Left feminism, as defined by divorcing men (sometimes they were those male writers, sometimes the audience for the male writers), having abortions, using bad language, wearing polyester leisure suits instead of dresses, not admitting it if they liked children, screaming in the streets at political demonstrations for this and that, picking up disgusting diseases because in the thinking of those days people who weren't married and weren't seriously religion were supposed to summon the stork as soon as they'd shaken hands, writing convoluted arguments about how a sexual act to which they had consented at the time was really a form of rape because male privilege, and sitting around in someone's basement wearing polyester pantsuits and getting drunk. Some women who got into that lifestyle were depressed, for what then seemed the obvious and sufficient reason that it was a depressing lifestyle. Meanwhile women of less extreme views made great progress just by being less depressing to have around than the Loony Left.

One sign of this progress was that literary critics were forced to stop raving about fiction in which male characters' idea of success was to sleep around without ever getting married, and acknowledge the merits of novels in which women achieve what they want to achieve without, or in spite of, men. Literary critics could now celebrate novels like The Color Purple as being much better than novels like I'll Take Manhattan, in which the twenty-something chick saves the family business from her evil uncle by taking a loan from the young Donald Trump. 

What the literary critics carefully avoided saying, Joan Aiken, whose father the literary critics admired, was able to say: Adults writing for adults usually rely on stereotyped characters and predetermined plots. Fiction for adults only occasionally reflects any real "creativity." Adults writing for children often mix up the stereotypes and twist the plots in ways that add humor and freshness to their fiction. As a result a novel for children, about how the protagonist survives the first term at a school with a tradition that nobody speaks to new students, or qualifies to be a prairie schoolteacher at age seventeen, or just wins the championship game, can be more interesting and realistic than a trite tale of adultery and murder for adults. 

Or even a good tale of adultery and murder for adults. Macbeth is a classic fictional reenactment of real history that gave new phrases and even new words to our language, but what it really tells us is that murder is a bad idea. Er, um, we knew that. 

But nonfiction liberates writers from having to worry about making characters recognizably different from stereotypes, and allow them just to describe what happened. Nonfiction written for adults is much more varied, realistic, broad-ranging, etc., than novels written for adults are. Good nonfiction does have a plot; it tells a story about how one unique event happened, or how several similar events have happened, or how a writer set out to find out what happened. Good nonfiction is fun to read even if you're not researching that specific thing that happened. Good nonfiction doesn't have to be as "creative" as James Herriot's veterinarian stories to be well worth reading, for information or for entertainment, and when the information in good nonfiction goes out of date, good nonfiction still has value as history and as entertainment. Good nonfiction is what blogs would like to be when they grow up. All bloggers can benefit from reading good nonfiction books.

Some examples of what I mean, or what I'd like to discover:

Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians

John James Audubon, Birds of America

Sue Bender, Plain and Simple

Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

Booton Herndon, The Seventh Day

Tony Horwitz, One for the Road

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (or The Five Loves)

Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes

Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Dedth

V.S. Naipaul, A Turn Through the South

Kathleen Norris, Dakota

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Vance Packard, The Waste Makers

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad