Genre, that charged and cherished notion, is the best narrative show in town when viewed through certain lenses. These lenses aren’t hard to identify. For lovers of speculative fiction, they’re the aviator goggles we pull on when a story lifts us up, on wings of dragon or ornithopter, into bright clouds of wonder and astonished discovery. We’ve loved that ascent since childhood, and rightly so. It’s a gift open to anyone brought into contact with a tale well told.
Choose another pair of lenses, however, and “genre” takes on a shabbier mien. These are the lenses of the conventional literary critic, who may or may not require astigmatic correction, who may or may not be aware that the human eye, like storytelling itself, provides the brain with only a representation of reality, not reality free and clear.
It is rather too easy to make fun of such critics, especially from the cozy campfire-circle of our home genre. But the idea of the “literary” deserves no scorn. At its best, it asks us to reach for transcendence and audacity. It applauds excellence in language, in observation and empathy, in thought. Go further, it dares us. Stretch the limits others cling to. A kindred ambition characterizes speculative fiction, does it not?
The idea of the literary also deserves no obeisance, however. At its worst, it serves to repress audacity, to ascribe innate virtue to arbitrary dominion, to fetishize the diction and preoccupations of a cultural elite. It’s a dress code, a manual of etiquette. This affected notion of the literary wields influence in proportion to the attention we grant it; I suggest we grant it none at all.
Genre and literary purists, however, are another matter. We mongrels do well to challenge their displays of power. They rarely own their prejudices. They don’t march under the banner of LERPS (Literary-Exclusionary Radical Speculators) or SPERLS (Speculative-Exclusionary Radical Litsnobs), but they do their part to keep the literary and genre communities in their silos, watchful and afraid. Some run MFA programs and belittle any stories containing spaceships (unless written by Michael Faber) or giants (unless written by Kazuo Ishiguro). Others create podcasts and belittle any fiction lacking a spaceship or a giant.
In the forever war between genre and literary fiction, I like to think I’m a peacemaker. I have lived on both sides of the frontier. I’ve been urged to fire bullets across it, and lost the trust of some when I declined. No tragedy. Trust isn’t a birthright. And happily, writers and readers are tearing down the border fence even faster than the purists can build it up again.
My purpose today is merely to cut one more hole in that border fence. But to do so I must make an uneasy confession: I am sick to death of high concept.
Immediately, we’re back in definitional quicksand. What is “high concept?” Let’s be clear: it is not fiction containing a good idea. No, it is something far more base and pernicious: a marketing term. “High concept” is the reductionist idea of a good idea, the small gilt coin presumed to denote it, which we circulate in good faith. It is the elevator pitch, the banner on the Facebook ad, the first line of the publisher’s press release. It whets the appetite; it promises the moon. And the truth is it may hand you the moon—or a spoiled lemon. It could be worth ten thousand times its face value, and it could be a thimble of dust. High concept is the cryptocurrency of storytelling.
Reduced to its Wikipedia nutshell, we’re talking about “a type of artistic work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise.” The definition goes on to distinguish high concept from works “more concerned with character development and other subtleties.” That last bit seems to reduce literary merits to something akin to trace gasses in the atmosphere, but no matter. The definition serves.
It follows that the “high” in “high concept” is not that of “high fantasy” or “high ambitions.” It has nothing to do with testing the limits of quality or beauty or vision or craft. Rather, it’s the “high” in “high fat” or “high sodium.” It’s about the ratio of one ingredient (that simple premise) to the whole. It’s about how much you can stuff in.
How’s this book? we ask, nodding at a friend’s well-thumbed paperback.
Oh, that! our friend replies. Let me tell you! It’s about the first workers’ union for shapeshifter assassins.
The reply is understandable; it’s what most people are after. But it is also unfortunate. That one-line summary becomes the calling card, the circulating icon, the little badge denoting awareness of a new book, the thing we pass around. Shapeshifters and union politics! What else does one need to know?
Quite a lot, I would argue. How’s this book? is my way of tiptoeing up to what I really want to ask: Does the book have a soul? Does it leave you haunted, wondering at its paradoxes, hearing the music of its world? Do the characters feel warm-blooded, do they breathe and dream and swear and stumble? Do they notice the world around them, veer from the most efficient path? Are their perceptions convincingly muddled, their ethics believably flawed, their struggles real? Are their personalities fascinating or merely serviceable? Do they have lives of the mind, depth as well as surface; can we feel them thinking; can we love them; can they surprise?
High concept will never tell you these things. High concept cannot conceive of the answers.
This is no plug for bland stories. I’d be the first to reject a gray eternity of middle-class divorce novels, or Slice of Life in Larchmont rocking-chair reads, or Very Sensitive Stories of persons tormented by the fear that their fellow Whole Foods shoppers look down on them. But that is never the choice. We can have both—the good idea, and the deeper achievement. But we will never get both if we neglect to ask.
Once we ask, though, what treasures come our way! Indra Das’ The Devourers is awash in spectacular concepts; David Mitchel’s Cloud Atlas is drunk on them; Aliya Whitely’s harrowing Skyward Inn is jaw-dropping in its inventiveness. Shirley Jackson has rather stunning ideas about home and memory as slow-brewed poison. Tolkien has a nifty idea about a ring.
All of these are conceptual feasts. None are high concept. Try to reduce their concept to a phrase and you’ll miss the book’s heart by a mile. “A ring makes you strong but evil. It’s hard to destroy but some tweedy gnomes pull it off.” That isn’t what readers love in Tolkien. They love the furiously gorgeous Middle Earth; the hard-won trust within the Fellowship, allowing the characters to blossom into better selves; the sudden hilarity; the twilight glimpses of immortal realms; the heartbreak of beauty’s finitude and loss.
I’ll close with a last example. In Sergey and Marina Dyachenko’s riveting The Scar, we spend time with an awful rake. His charisma overwhelms men and women alike; the former fall helplessly into line as his bootlicks; the latter can’t resist his advances. What makes the book unsettling is how thoroughly, mercilessly, meticulously the authors make us believe in his abilities. We inhabit his mind as he plans his conquests; we see him deploy his skills with intelligence and drive; we wince as he exploits the vulnerabilities of others. We’re sold on his power. Almost in agony, we see him move in on his ultimate victim, a heartbroken young widow. The rake springs his trap. And the young woman turns and fixes him with a look of such devastating indifference that the rake’s vanity is shattered, and his journey to decency begun.
This is a concept worth cherishing: the belief that character matters, that the human heart is the light by which other wonders are revealed. This is the token I would have us exchange when we speak of books. This is the well that can’t run dry.
