Getting serious about genre

And when this happens, when a writer of unassailable literary reputation, like McCarthy, does produce a work of genre fiction, under his own name, unlike say John Banville, the critical machine prints out and issues a pass to a writer: "This isn't science fiction, because it was written by Cormac McCarthy." Or, "We think all science fiction is bad, unless it's written by a Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy."

In some ways the book may be closer to a work of prophecy, biblical prophecy, than anything else, and that's what we're responding to.

Ultimately with any great work of art, whether it was written by a Ray Bradbury or a Philip K. Dick or Cormac McCarthy, it's really the intensity with which it's been imagined and been brought into language.

The conventional argument is that the literary writer's work is well imagined, well written, and the genre author can't write. Every so often a writer hacks and crawls out of the brambles of genre. Somebody like Philip K. Dick clearly began in the pulps, writing mass commercial fiction.

Almost by dint of the passion of his fans, and the intensity of his vision, and all of that stuff, eventually he ends up getting canonized in Library of America. But those are much more the exceptions.

Dick made that transition in a big way. He had intelligence, vision and so on -- without ever becoming what you'd traditionally call a good writer.

He wrote much too quickly, there's no doubt about that. The pressure to write quickly is not good for any writer, no matter how gifted and intelligent, and it wasn't good for him.

I wonder if Philip Pullman's tendency to fall between categories with the "His Dark Materials" books -- they're kind of kids books, kind of for adults, kind of fantasy, kind of literary -- made it hard for the movie of "The Golden Compass" to find an audience.

Maybe, but maybe it's that the movie wasn't that great. To me that's what makes a writer interesting: When a writer is sort of like a ball bearing caught between the magnetic fields, all positioned just right so the ball bearing floats in the air, wobbling because it's in this highly excited position, barely holding its place. You see that in Pullman at his best.

Pullman sort of, in a sense, may come back to the idea of pressure to publish frequently. He's written other good books, for young readers, but he was on a more traditional publishing schedule, turning out books very regularly, in series.