Ben Marcus has an interesting piece in Harpers this month with the rather long but accurately descriptive title, “Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it.” Marcus argues that the Franzens of the world, and a preponderance of stick-in-the-mud critics, hold that realism can be achieved only through traditional narrative forms, marginalizing any fiction that doesn’t fit the traditional mold as “experimental.” He notes that Franzen has even gone so far as to say that James Joyce has very little to offer, and quotes an earlier essay of Franzen’s in which the populist author tramples a very respectable and innovative small press, FC2, the same press that was attacked by Congressional Republicans for publishing immoral content. Marcus makes a pretty strong case that Franzen, in an effort to build a mass readership, not only abandoned his own ambitions to be an artist but also chose to become an aggressive voice against anyone who dared challenge traditional narrative.

I think Marcus makes a very valid point when he writes that writers such as George Saunders and Joy Williams have done far more to earn the “realist” label than some of the more celebrated practitioners of the form. Marcus posits that difficult language, risk-taking language, unusual narrative forms, can all illuminate the world, which is, in his opinion, what realism is all about. Personally, an early encounter with the work of Joy Williams had significant influence on my own desire to write fiction, as did the work of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Grace Paley. But so did Richard Yates and, yes, even John Cheever and Hemingway. Which is to say there is room for all kinds of writing in this big, bad, beautiful world of fiction, and to dismiss entire libraries of literature as too realistic, or not realistic enough, or too experimental, or not experimental enough, signals a lack of creativity and, perhaps, a lack of genuine love for the written word.