Marlon James and Viet Thanh Nguyen: Why is one's work considered crime fiction and the other's not?

I recently read two novels that won big literary awards, and I thought highly of both. One of the books is very much a crime novel, the other is not, yet it was the non-crime novel that won this year's Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

That novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, I wrote:

"includes two killings of the kind that presumably would be investigated by local authorities if they happened in the real rather than a fictional California, but there is no such investigation in The Sympathizer. Nor do the protagonist's reaction to and thoughts about those crimes constitute a major component of the narrative. Significant, yes. Thematically dominant, no.

"Rather, the novel's generic affinities are from the very first sentence with the espionage novel, which has long led a comfortable co-existence with crime fiction. Still, I suspect that few readers will regard The Sympathizer as a spy story. Indeed, the subject does not come up in an interview with Nguyen included as an appendix to the Grove Press trade paperback edition of the novel. Rather, the book is a political novel, a novel of immigration, a novel about Vietnam, a novel about the United States, about the perils and exigencies of moving between the two, about the equivocal (at best) nature of revolutions, and, most important, about the illusory nature of binary opposition, whether between American and Vietnamese, European and Asian, communist and its opposite, or what have you."

Yet the MWA gave the novel an Edgar Award that the author can hang on his wall next to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The action of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, on the other hand, is set in motion by a real-life crime reimagined: the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley. It includes scenes of gang and drug violence in Jamaica and New York, and its story of a crime's ripple effects is something like that told in James Ellroy's A Cold Six Thousand or perhaps Don Winslow's Savages, yet James has no Edgar or Dagger Awards to hang next to the 2015 Man Booker Prize he won for A Brief History ...

I don't suppose it matters much in which category one places these two fine books, but I wonder why Nguyen's achieved purchase in the crime fiction world while James' achieved none, at least in that part of the crime fiction world that gives out awards. Did Nguyen's publishers make a conscious decision to promote the book as crime? Did James' make a conscious decision not to do so? And does it matter?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Marlon James knows the difference between adjectives and nouns

I'm still loving Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings 232 pages in, not least because in a passage meant to make fun of bad, overheated writing, a character singles out the phrase "unending vortex of ugly" for special scorn. James knows the difference between adjectives and nouns. He also knows that that piece of poolside furniture on which people stretch out and relax at this time of year is a chaise longue, not a chaise lounge or a chase lounge.

On the other hand, he does have a character think that someone has "another fucking thing coming." The expression is "another think coming," not "thing." But James has two possible outs: One of the book's delights is the multiplicity of its narrative voices, and many of the characters, including this one, do not speak the King's English. The other is that the book is so good that one such lapse, if it is that, doesn't bother me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Charles Willeford's noir profiles, plus more stupid critical descriptions

In a different time, under different circumstances, Charles Willeford might have written lifestyle profiles for the New York Times rather than crime novels.

High Priest of California is the first of Willeford's early noir novels I've read, and it's less an unfolding plot than it is a grittier, funnier version of those retch-making Times pieces about where young urbanites like to do their produce shopping on a weekend.

The urbanite in this case is Russell Haxby, and the premise is the simplest of any novel I've ever read: Haxby, who likes to seduce married women, seduces a married woman.

And that's it.  But the details are so perfect, and, occasionally, so surprising, and they are so deftly revealed and at just the right time, and Haxby's cruelties so casual, and the simplicity of the plot and the brevity of the book (fewer than 100 pages) enable so tight a focus on Haxby that I felt as if I'd come to know the man and his world. Maybe High Priest of California is more like those book-length profiles by John McPhee, notably A Sense of Where You Are.

Some of Haxby's observations are hysterically funny, which reminds me one again how undervalued humor is in popular fiction. My current reading, Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, contains some excellent satirical gibes, but the review snippets quoted on the front and back covers ignore these and instead include such descriptions as "A prismatic story ...,"  "Epic," and, inevitably, a "tour de force."

Do these reviewers look down on humor? Are their solemnity and reverence signs of their own security about popular fiction's behavior in the company of its literary betters?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016