On Genre and Maximum Velocity (Part Two)

Slow Slow Quick Quick Slow

I’ve been sharply challenged on the Maximum Velocity Theory of Genre.

What do you mean by velocity? What do you mean by genre?

Well, velocity is simple to define. I mean miles per hour. If a named character steals an F-16 fighter jet, flies off at 1,500 mph, and that’s as fast as they go within that novel, then that’s their maximum velocity.

And, according to my logic, they are almost certainly not in a book that would be classified as literary fiction.

Which is where things get sticky, because genre is difficult – and contentious – to define.

But I’m trying to come at things from the other direction. Partly seriously, partly for summer fun. Rather than saying literary fiction has these or those defining features (a central character seeking some form of redemption through reconstitution of their personal and social relations), I’m trying to be more basic, and measurable.

I’m saying that there is a speed limit to literary fiction. It never goes over a certain mph without becoming another genre.

If it makes people happier, I’ll say the genre among genres that is known as literary fiction, and which is often – wrongly – accorded greater cultural kudos. Literary prizes and such.

Because there are clearly a much greater number of different velocities characters can go at than there are genres given shelf space in bookshops, or in online bookstores.

Yesterday, we got down to a named character travelling at 200 mph, on the ground, in a wheeled vehicle they are driving.

If you can think of an example of this happening in literary fiction, so called, let me know.

For myself, I’m wondering whether some out-of-control cokehead heir in a Jonathan Franzen novel takes their Bugatti out on a last chance power drive? Or whether any character written by Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Sarah Bernstein, Teju Cole, or Bernadine Evaristo races even a moderately powerful sports saloon beyond 70 mph?

In fact, knowing that a novel contains a character who reaches but does not break the national speed limit for the UK is probably the least useful max velocity for identifying that book’s genre.

However, I think it’s very easy to identify all the genres that novel is almost certainly not.

It is not hard SF, technothriller, fantasy involving dragons or teleportation, or historical fiction set before approx 1910.

Once we get down to a maximum character velocity of 30 mph, there’s a strong suggestion this novel takes place within a small area — in a country house or a village, on an island or a housing estate — and that none of the characters have any need to fly to another country or even get a lift into town.

Doesn’t that speed limit, in many ways, limit the plot options open to the writer? And doesn’t that, in turn, limit the generic possibilities?

If you want to create excitement with a race against time, a ticking bomb scenario, then having your characters move so relatively slowly might risk making things comic.

(So says the writer who, in Patience, tried to create extreme narrative tension with a main character being gently pushed along a long corridor in a wheelchair.)

Novels in which characters don’t move faster than walking pace are, by default, going to involve a majority of scenes in which the characters talk to one another but are never prompted into hasty physical action.

It’s possible to imagine a cosy crime or a spy novel in which no character travels by car or train. But very often in such plots there comes a point, towards the climax, where an acceleration of plot requires someone to move fast – to avoid capture or to make a capture.

In Mick Heron’s Slough House novels, there’s a lot of fartarsing around at desks early on, but things tend to accelerate toward an explosive ending involving speedy justice.

Maybe I’ve pushed this theory far enough, now.

There are plenty of contemporary literary novels that include what used to be called genre elements. There are plenty of genre novels that contain the slow subtleties of character development associated with literariness.

I’m sure you’ve been thinking of awkward exceptions since I started up the literary speedometer.

Maybe it comes down to what I’ve often said to my students —

The genre has a more powerful gravity than you do. It’s a planet, you’re a satellite. If you put a murder in your novel, then you’re going to be pulled into the orbit of the crime novel — however much you insist that you’re not writing a crime novel. Same thing with putting in a spaceship or a ghost or a thwarted-by-circumstance love affair.

Genre’s gonna get you.

Think fast.