Stewart, I see your point, but I should also say that genre fiction--like screenplays, even by the most gifted screenwriter--has to be weighed on a different set of scales. Pace, beat, revelation and reversal are very key to any work in a genre. We really can't judge a novel by Ian Rankin in the same way we would a work of fiction by Sebald or Javier Marías.
(The book is being adapted by Richard Price, by the way, another literary novelist who very successfully and skillfully turned to genre; some of his work can be seen in the TV series "The Wire" as well as in, for instance, his novel
Clockers. He's good, and he'll do a great job on the script.)
I'm deeply grounded in the classics of literature, have two degrees in it, and have been writing and publishing fiction for thirty years. But I can also appreciate the novels of Raymond Chandler and the works of Jean-Patrick Manchette and Eric Ambler and John Le Carré, because what they do
within their genres is intelligent and often incisive and, yes, sometimes beautifully written.
I don't think one goes to a crime novel or a thriller for the kinds of subtlety we find in Proust (though Proust did recognize that there's more true emotion in the cheap song sung in a smoky cabaret than the aria sung in the opera house--he understood what can be done with what some people might consider the "lower arts", and disdained the price-taggery of high-mindedness), and if we want the obvious, well, we can read Dostoevsky, whose novels are full of outrageous tropes and cheap emotions, as great as they are. But one thing I've learned as a writer is to respect as well as play with the limits and structures of genre.
Yes, I wrote a spy novel, but it's also something more, a study in the nature of creation, and how creation can sometimes overwhelm reality. But my book can be read in a number of different ways.
And, really, isn't
A la Recherche du temps perdu something of a detective novel, the tale of a man seeking something that has been lost? And doesn't he, in the end, find it in the most unexpected way?
Just another kind of detective novel, right?
