Those Annoying Literary Types

Would-be Literary novelists.
I have sat next to these people at writers’ conferences, as I’m sure you all have. They believe that inverted clauses, convoluted sentences turned in on themselves, and piling abstraction on top of abstraction is what makes for literary fiction. They have a half-remembered sense that Henry James was hard to understand, and so straining for a Jamesian strain is the recipe for literary fiction. But James is never anything less than clear in his sentence-level intent and execution (once you get a sense of how those long sentences work). But with these other faux-literary writers, obscurity seems to be the aim. After a reader struggles through a morass of inactive interiority, soggy poeticism, an absence of dialogue or action, a comment like “I don’t get it---I don’t understand this sentence, this page, this scene” might elicit a satisfied “Exactly.” My wife tells me there are other things that are more harmful in the world than self-consciously literary fiction. Like George W. Bush, Fear Factor, and global warming. That’s true. But is there anything more annoying than this combination of self-satisfied smugness and wrong-headedness? Okay: George W., again. I’ll be quiet now.