"‘I can’t do thrillers or spy novels or genre fiction. I just get bored'" His full comment was in response to the interviewer's question, "Which books do you feel are most overrated?" To which Tóbín replied, "I can’t do thrillers and I can’t do spy novels. I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them. I just get bored with the prose. I don’t find any rhythm in it. It’s blank, it’s nothing; it’s like watching TV."(1)
On the very same day that the interview appeared on The Irish Times website, less than five hours later, a second article appeared on the same website, "Literary author’s dismissal of genre fiction provokes backlash," that singled out Tóibín's comment about "genre fiction" in general - not "crime fiction" alone. "Tóibín’s criticism prompted an immediate backlash on social media from some high-profile fellow writers."(2) The writers included Marian Keyes, Liz Nugent, and Laura Lippman. Stephen Fry, who doesn't write fiction but is an authority on everything else under the sun, wrote: “I love you Colm, but really? Try @LeeChildReacher (and James Lee Burke as @PhilipPullman suggests). And John Le Carré, Len Deighton, Mick Herron and … Graham Greene? A major minor writer is usually so much more rewarding than a minor major one...” (Yes, but isn't the goal to read a major major writer [like Colm Tóibín]?)
The article's author even solicted reactions from several other Irish authors, whose responses were defensive, insulting, and/or threatening. And all because of a single remark in an otherwise skimpy interview. It wasn't as if Tóibín had written a treatise against crime fiction, as Edmund Wilson had done in 1944-45. In two famous essays, "Why Do People Read Detective Stories" and "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?", Wilson demolished the genre and its most famous practitioners. He even pointed out an unfair advantage that such writers enjoy: "Detective stories in general are able to profit by an unfair advantage in the code which forbids the reviewer to give away the secret to the public—a custom which results in the concealment of the pointlessness of a good deal of this fiction and affords a protection to the authors which no other department of writing enjoys."
While admitting that Arthur Conan Doyle established the genre at a high level of inventiveness, Wilson noticed what a falling off there was between Conan Doyle and Rex Stout ("the real secret that Author Rex Stout had been screening by his false scents and interminable divagations was a meagerness of imagination of which one only came to realize the full ghastliness when the last chapter had left one blank."), Agatha Christie ("Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read." "...you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry."), Dashiell Hammett ("As a writer, he is surely almost as far below the rank of Rex Stout as Rex Stout is below that of James Cain."), Dorothy L. Sayers ("she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all."), and even Raymond Chandler ("he is a long way below Graham Greene.").
Just like Tóibín 75 years later, Wilson aroused ample outrage for his dismissal of detective fiction, and the advice he received sounds familiar: "Of the thirty-nine letters that have reached me, only seven approve my strictures. The writers of almost all the others seem deeply offended and shocked, and they all say almost exactly the same thing: that I had simply not read the right novels and that I would surely have a different opinion if I would only try this or that author recommended by the correspondent." Well, he tried some of them and found them equally lacking.
The exercise of personal taste isn't a science. However much some critics would like their opinions to be definitive, criticism remains utterly subjective. Every critical opinion starts out as an emotional response which then gets elaborated in objective terms. A good critic has the ability to not just express his opinion convincingly, but to demonstrate to the reader why a book or a film is good or bad. But it is still, and will always be, a purely subjective statement. Even when a critic appeals to an aesthetic standard, which is nothing more than an aggregate of subjectivities, the only real proof of the artistic worth of creative effort is its longevity - how long it will last. Over the centuries, some critical opinions have been confirmed and others repudiated. Just because we recognize Moby Dick, which sold only 500 copies in Herman Melville's lifetime, as one of the great American novels doesn't make us any more enlightened than 19th century readers. (But it does make us luckier.)
So why was the reaction to Colm Tóibín's expression of personal taste so disproportionate? He didn't express scepticism about climate change or the Holocaust. Those are inarguable facts. Dwight Macdonald once argued that the old Latin maxim, De gustibus non est disputandum was baloney - that, unlike facts, matters of taste are eminently disputable. So there is an accounting for taste after all. I think Colm Tóibín was expressing his impatience with a kind of writing that is only interested in presenting puzzles of varying degrees of intricacy and then solving them. Three dimensional characters with convincing motivations whose actions illuminate the bottoms of one another's souls is immaterial. As for television, I think Tóibín was expressing his distaste for the medium itself - not its programming. It is, indeed, a Golden Age for television writers and technicians and actors. But the great increase in the amount of work has shown no increase in the quality of the work.
(1) It's nothing.
(2) Backlash.
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