A book by any other name

When you get a big bunch of anything collected, anyone, except the most compulsive pack rat, will find a way to sort it to make it possible to find things. Libraries collect books. Lots and lots of books.

Thanks to Mr. Dewey, public libraries have developed an easy way to make it possible to find particular books. And in sorting them out, it’s also possible to put similar things together. Bookstores do this too, in a less precise way.

The first step is to separate fiction (made-up stories) from nonfiction (true stories). Nonfiction books are sorted according to subject. All the science books are placed together, not jumbled in with the travel books and the cookbooks.

Fiction has its categories too. Frequently libraries will give some of these categories a separate location or a sticker indicating what type of fiction it is.

Just as books are divided between fiction and nonfiction, fiction is generally divided between what they call literary fiction and genre fiction. Ph.D. dissertations have been written discussing what the difference is because it is very hazy and, truth be told, a little bit snobbish. It rubs Americans the wrong way to say that someone is better than someone else. So it’s sometimes hard to understand why one book is literature and another is popular fiction.

One way to make the distinction is to think of literary fiction as being character- and style-driven, whereas genre fiction is more plot-driven. This, of course, leads to another category that publishers call crossover. A potboiler detective novel is a genre book. An extremely well-written book that is as much about character as about who did the dirty deed (like Ian Rankin’s “Knots and Crosses”) is a crossover novel.

It is easier to separate the groups if you look at the extremes. Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez writes literature. Joan Collins writes genre (in this case, romance) fiction. But the joke is that most books that we now refer to as classic literature fell into a genre category at one time or even became the prototype for a genre.

Scott’s “Ivanhoe” is a historical novel. Dostoyevky’s “Crime and Punishment” is a psychological thriller. Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” is a historical detective story. Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” is a western. Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” are science fiction. Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera” is a horror story. And, of course, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is the romance novel to beat all romance novels.

So there is nothing wrong with reading popular (or genre) fiction. There is something very pleasurable about reading a book that has definite conventions and seeing how the author uses them to bring the lovers together or to find out how the vicar was killed in the study with a candlestick. And if the books are written in series, it’s great fun to pick up a book and meet an old friend in a new situation.

Which brings to mind the library customer who, when asked by the reference desk what they could do for her, replied, “Call Dick Francis and tell him to publish another one soon. I can’t wait.”