I recently listened to an interview that
of The Common Reader Substack conducted with of the Woman of Letters Substack, which was entertaining and energetic. Kanakia, who has written a number of YA novels, one novel for adults, has a book coming out from Princeton University Press in 2025 titled What’s So Great About the Great Books. I can’t wait to read it, but. . .. . .Kanakia says, during the interview, that most books in the canon used to have a certain kind of linear structure. She mentions that writers like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon were writing in a similar style to George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Today, Kanakia says, there are literary novels and commercial novels, the former relying on different kinds of play with time, the latter providing stories that are told in a linear narrative style.
Kanakia has her MFA. I have an MA in literature. I wonder about the difference in what gets studied, and how, in these programs, because many of the texts I studied (and my program, at The University of Virginia, did have requirements about taking courses in different time periods) are highly experimental and play with narrative style and chronological structure. From Rabelais to Chaucer to Sidney on to Wharton and Forster and Rhys, plenty of writers have experimented.
I’m not necessarily trying to argue with Kanakia. I’m trying to argue with the MFA process, which may be failing writers in focusing too closely on modern authors, failing to show them how wildly inventive our forebears were, especially when they weren’t reliant on the modern book-publishing industry. My favorite part of every Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference is the book fair, at which you can see how many writers are attempting to find crooked little paths around the big-publishing machine.
For eight years, I wrote a column for Lit Hub about small- and independent-press (not self-published titles) books that got missed in the previous month’s roundups of much-lauded Big Five titles. I now write a monthly column that focuses on the latter. I believe both are useful, but the former was a lot more work, because many, many people have different ways of telling stories, sometimes in a straightforward way, sometimes not.
If those books are to get attention, what we need is more books coverage in mainstream media and other places, too. However, we can’t ignore the fact that books old—very, very old—and new all vary a great deal in style and structure. What Kanakia has noticed, I think, is that we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Just because a novel has a linear plot doesn’t mean it’s automatically mediocre. Just because a book is complicated and opaque doesn’t mean it’s automatically a must-read.