Over at Hay Marian Keyes is defending chick lit against accusations of being genre crap. For The Guardian Anita Sethi opens her report thus:
Marian Keyes never lets the darker side of her fiction take over. Doesn’t that make her chick-lit blockbusters just as realistic as literary fiction?
So let me see, that would mean that the very definition of “literary” is that it is “realistic”, right? And fiction that isn’t realistic cannot possibly be literary. Thank you for stating your prejudices so clearly.
Don’t you know that literary fiction is about bad things happening to boring people?
No, no, you are confusing literary fiction with academic romance. That’s a story in which a writer who is also an academic has an unhappy marriage, and has an affair with a younger woman that ends badly. It is all very formulaic – sort of a male version of Harlequin. And it can’t possibly be realistic because it all happens in Academia, a fantasy world inhabited only by unhappy writers, their wives (who are disappointed in them) and nubile young students.
Literary fiction is written by people like Lessing, Rushdie, Murakami Eco, Calvino, Borges, Kafka, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare and Homer.