Fiction as Social Criticism? What a Novel Idea...

Newsday's Aileen Jacobson discovers crime novelists who write about "issues". "As a literary subset, it's not exactly brand-new," she quips, "Writers tackled social issues in the 1930s, too." Not to mention the 1830s, and the 1730s, and... Anyway, some of the examples she offers seem hilariously forced, and her academic comes off a bit simplistic, but certain writers (Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosley) fare well...maybe because they don't confuse "having something to say" with "telling an entertaining story." As Andrew Vachss points out, "I know if I can't engage you, I can't get you to read to the end. Then what good is the message?" Laura Lippman adds, "Eventually, we should see really good novels out of Enron, WorldCom and other white-collar crime. Just add a murder."

Because Lord knows, a novel about white-collar crime just wouldn't be sufficiently gripping unless there was a murder involved.

But, come on, this is news? I mean, hadn't we already established that a genre which takes as its main subject crime itself is either an implicit criticism of the social order that produces such crime or a validation of the social order against the occasional aberration? By the way, here's my favorite cry for copyediting in a while:

Kathryn Harrison, who wrote about an incestuous relationship, [Karin] Slaughter says, led her to see the importance of having women write about assault.

Do we only have Karin Slaughter's word that Kathryn Harrison wrote about an incestuous relationship? I think not!