We’ve written about Jennifer Weiner here at The Stake before. The massively popular author of such books as Good in Bed and The Next Best Thing has carried on a very public crusade to get more respect for herself and writers like her—women working in the generally derided genres of chick lit and women’s fiction.

Yesterday, Weiner’s mission reached what must surely be a major milestone: the first (apparently) serious critical consideration of her body of work in a major media outlet. That the outlet in question wasn’t the New York Times Book Review—a frequent target of Weiner’s complaints—may moderate the accomplishment a bit, but the piece, which ran in Salon and was written by Laura Miller, is really a fair-minded and incisive piece of criticism, and bears reading in its entirety.

Reactions to the piece will vary, of course. Miller’s review of Weiner’s work is largely negative, and some passing around the article seem to be doing so with a bit of schadenfreude—”She wanted serious critical consideration, right? Well, now she’s got it. Blammo!“

My own reaction is a little different, though. When I read the article, what I kept thinking was:

This is fantastic. Why don’t we give popular fiction serious critical consideration more often? It would be good for writers, it would be good for readers, and it would be good for the critical establishment. So why are we so resistant?

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To be sure, the piece isn’t without its flaws. Miller opens the critical portion of her piece with a paragraph that seemed, to me, needlessly personal:

To read Weiner’s novels is to understand why she — of all the many authors of commercial women’s fiction, including several of its more accomplished practitioners — has become the spokesperson for such an apparently self-contradictory cultural petition. She doesn’t need the New York Times; she doesn’t respect its literary standards; her readers don’t care about it; and yet she craves its validation. She sees it as a club, however shabby and down-at-heel, that won’t admit her, and that could well be the reason she wants in. An obsession with prestige and exclusion haunts her characters and her fictional universe, but as much as they (and Weiner herself) resent all the people they imagine to be looking down on them, they can be dismayingly ready to turn the tables and partake of the same arrogance themselves.

Miller’s right to flag this paradox—Weiner and her characters vehemently reject the standards of the clubs that have cruelly excluded them, yet crave validation by those same standards. Yet to read this contradiction as indicative of some personal or artistic failing on Weiner’s part would be wrong. Many of the great male writers of the 20th century—I’m thinking here especially of Malamud, Bellow, and Roth—seem to have been motivated to some extent by their own experiences of exclusion, and their attitudes toward that exclusion and the dominant culture that excluded them was, perhaps, contradictory. But contradictions often make for great literature, and the fact that Miller treats this particular contradiction as a mark against Weiner rather than as a potentially rich thematic vein is unfortunate.

There’s also a bit of genre bias that creeps in from time to time, and I was frequently reminded of how false dichotomies (literary = good, genre = bad) can too easily color even seemingly “objective” critical judgments. Miller casually states that “much (though not all) of [genre fiction] is, by definition, formulaic.” Later, talking about Weiner’s novels, she speaks of a “typical Weiner heroine.” Words like “quintessential” and “usual” also make an appearance. These are loaded terms pretending to be objective—Miller is not merely noting the presence of formulaic elements, but telegraphing her previous bias against the genre. If it was a genre she approved of more, she’d have used a different word like “trope,” which basically means the same thing as “formula,” only in a highbrow context.

Let me be clear about my opinion on this: looking down on “genre” fiction because it’s formulaic or follows strict conventions is bullshit. And here’s why: EVERYTHING IS GENRE. Yes, that includes literary fiction, which has its own conventions and formulas, and subgenres with their own conventions—the campus novel, the family novel, the antihero or antiheroine novel. No matter what kinds of books a writer writes, she is playing a very specific game, and no matter how innovative she is, there are other writers before her who played similar kinds of narrative games. Everyone writes in a genre. Sometimes they bend genres, something they mix genres, and sometimes they flout genres, but the genre is always there.

That’s why I’ll always call bullshit on any suggestion that the presence of genre conventions equals bad, and the lack of genre conventions equals good. What matters is not the presence of convention or formula, but what a writer does with those limitations. *steps off soapbox*

Those minor quibbles aside, Miller’s critical review of Weiner’s work largely seems on to me. The most serious charges Miller makes are that Weiner’s novels “have a lumpiness that testifies to a desire to stretch the boundaries of her chosen form.” That Weiner wants to stretch the bounds of her genre is a positive artistic impulse, though it seems things are going awry in the execution. In response to this critique (and others), Weiner could shrug off the criticism and keep going as she has been; or she could learn from Miller’s critique, and grow as a writer.

Which is, I’m pretty sure, the point of criticism. And the main reason why I absolutely love the fact that Laura Miller wrote the piece for Salon, and why I think that serious critical considerations of popular fiction should be more common in the critical establishment—perhaps outnumbering reviews of deserving but little-read literary fare.

Because, look—isn’t the point of criticism to, like, critique stuff? To move the culture forward by pushing writers to do better work? If the critical establishment really wants to make a difference to a large number of readers, they should be critically reviewing popular fiction all the time. Is the stuff most people read total crap? Well, say so! Read the popular books, push the popular writers to do better work, push the readers to better fare by authors writing comparable work—and maybe, just maybe, we might move closer to a literary world where we don’t have different standards for literary fiction and genre fiction, where all books are expected to be both entertaining and nourishing.

Because what we’ve got right now? Continuing to perpetrate the pernicious lie that when it comes to books, what’s fun is usually bad, and what’s good is usually boring? That’s not helping anyone. It’s not helping writers, it’s not helping readers—and it’s certainly not helping critics.