Connelly gets his due

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jonathan Yardley reviewed Michael Connelly's latest novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, in the Washington Post. Here is the last line of his critique:

"Michael Connelly [is] not a 'genre' novelist but the real thing, taking us into parts of the real America that most of our novelists never visit because they don't even know where, or what, they are."

Amen.

Comments

[Aldo]

Its a great review. And people wonder why he is so good.

[JA Konrath]

So genre novels aren't the 'real thing'?

A genre novel is only worthwhile if it transcends the genre?

Am I the only onw who has a problem with this?

[David J. Montgomery]

I think you might be reading more into it than he's saying. I can see how one might interpret it that way, but I prefer to view it in a more complimentary light.

[Andi]

Here we go again with the "transcends the genre" routine. He's not really just one of THOSE, he's BIGGER, he's BETTER. I know it's meant as compliment, David, but it's tedious and insulting to the genre. And it won't ever stop - i've heard that same stuff for what - 30 years? Every time a mainstream reviewer LIKES a mystery or a fantasy or a work of solid science fiction, it can't BE genre, it has to have transcended the genre otherwise s/he wouldn't like it. I've heard it about Ursula Le Guin, I've heard it about Walter Mosley, I've heard it about Jonathan Lethem. They all "transcend the genre" when clearly they are writing from deep within their genre. Feh. Pooey. It is intended as complimentary but I hear it on the same level as "I don't think of you as disabled". Which I hear a lot. But I AM.

[Guyot]

So Chandler wasn't the "real thing?" Or Hammett? Or Cain?

Or Elmore Leonard? You know, before his books started to suck.

I don't think we're reading too much into it when the quote is "..is not a genre novelist, but the real thing."

I know the point the reviewer is attempting to make is that there are lots of "genre" books out there are just by the numbers. Some are bestsellers, some sell 1500 copies.

But the thing they never mention is that the same thing occurs in the "non-genre" books - I won't say literary fiction (sic). There are books that are great and bestsellers, and there are non-gnere books that suck and don't sell at all.

When someone writes THE KITE RUNNER, do the reviews say "He transcends the non-genre, literary category" ???

[Fiona]

Well, he IS a genre novelist, whatever Jonathan Yardley says... (every novelist is a genre novelist). It doesn't mean he isn't an excellent writer.

[Robert W. Walker]

Regarding Yardkley's being overwhelmed by Connelly's book, we can only applaud for Michael Connelly, but I have to agree with Joe Konrath and Andi on the issue raised like a serpent's head that slots all mystery authors into a ghetto or rahter a snakepit, and when one crawls out of the pit? What are we to call it? We must needs a label man! Where is our label? A more serious question is this: Who created the pit? What makes the word "genre" or "category" fiction a dirty word? In large part is is due to we authors ourselves, as much as anyone. BAD writing and inadequte writing and crummy writing that "floods" into a category, so that when a title stands out, well damn, someone noticed! So what am I saying? Publishers of science fiction, mystery, romance, and horror in particular have flooded their respective fields wtih a whole, whole lotta schlock due to overworked hype, and editors who are only too happy to pass on a half-baked horror novel for instance, or a disjointed mystery, or a MS riddled with passive constructions, little dialogue, and no forward movement. Bookstores, agents, and reviewers buy into the notion of categories as "fan clubs", and once a book is slotted in say horror, suddenly everyone knows it is "oh yeah, that kind of book" without even cracking it open....or bothering to read it. Publishers ghettoize books with marketing campaigns and artwork, and so it goes. So when a novel does "transcend" the crap pile that goes on smoldering daily, weekly, monthly to fill publishing quotas and that have somehow gotten past agent, past editor, past publisher, past reviewer and are still hailed as magnificent works of art, the opposite occurs to me. How does X become a bestseller? When it clearly belongs in the crap heap? Rather than ask how a book can transcend category or cross over, whatever, ask how can a good book be found in all the chaff? And also ask are there any truly discerning readers out in the "real world"?

Just some random thughts on said subject -- but again give Connelley his due. One day someone will "discover" yet another flame wallowing in the dung heap of publishing and pluck it onto a pedastal. By the same token, without the envelope and particulars of what makes a mystery a mystery, Mr. Connelly would not have gotten past go. Say if he had not mastered the "ART" of dialouge, and the "ART" of setting, and the "ART" of plotting, etc. The man has reached that level in his career--note career--in which he is like the trick cyclist able to keep nine or ten plates in the air spinning atop rods while he pedals about in a circle. Yeah...writing is easy, just open a vein.

In my own work, I prize the envelope and I pry it apart, but I know the rules of it...and there are definite rules to it all. If Connelly and LeHane and others have transcended the rules, they had to have worked many long years to do so. A little luck thrown in and who knows the next author to "break out" and become bigger, better, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, and dredge himself or herself from the quagmire of floating debris and wasted paper.

Rob