Literary and Commercial

More than a year ago I was ranting about the differences in attitudes towards "literary" writing and "commercial" novels. In Fiction Death I wrote:

Is it a range of quality? Some think so. This conflict isn't new, and it isn't limited to the field of creative writing.

I thought I had posted recently on this schism, based on a contribution I made to a Writer's Digest forum thread, but possibly I pulled the post when I got to read Jodi Picoult's This Writer's Life: Jodi Picoult: Going Global. It made me so mad. Why do some people value a book only if it taxes their reasoning capacity and dribbles off into meaningless existentialism? Why is there no value in escape literature, happy endings (or at least a recognizable ending), and fast reads? I think Stephen King knows what I mean, based on his speech at The National Book Foundation:

I salute the National Book Foundation Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack. For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding. This is the way it has always been. Witness my childish resentment of anyone who ever got a Guggenheim.

Despite in my own silly pop quiz, wherein I declared myself to only talk like a snob, a later quiz asking "What Kind of Reader are You? at gotoquiz.com actually declared that I am a Book Snob. This is as puzzling as King listing Piccoult as a writer like himself. Yes, I slogged through all of Gilead recently, and I'm glad I read it, but I would never have chosen it or looked for a copy of the book (it fell into my hands). Yes it did give me lots to think about. And it had no ending. I found that dissatisfying, too much like real life. My real life has always given me way too much to think about. That's why I like sci fi, to take me away, and horror, in which I know the terror isn't real.

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