Thank You, Jennifer Egan

In a discussion with the contributing Rumpus writer Alec Michod, he and the protean fiction writer Jennifer Egan predictably found themselves talking about genre, whether she thinks about genre, what her opinions on genre are if she considers genre at all in her process. After admitting she doesn't gift genre much consideration--as a limiting device--and considers it your standard consumerist selling tool, which she is one hundred percent right in saying, she had this wonderful addition; and if I could shake her hand and say thank you all the way from her native San Francisco I would:

"How about Cervantes? How crazy is Don Quixote? Even nineteenth-century novels, which are supposed to be so staid, they’re actually not. I reread Middlemarch recently. It’s narrated by a really flexible, intrusive, at times quite strange, overbearing, but also very funny and arch narrator, and it’s not even a first-person narrator. Although at times the narrator addresses the reader in the first person. I think if you did that now you’d be perceived as being a little out there. I mean, I do think we’ve gotten really quiet about pushing any limits, all limits, as fiction writers. I would love to see more craziness out there. The novel began as this completely weird outpouring of strangeness. It was there from the beginning. It’s inherent in the form. At least the possibilities are there, but I feel like we’re not exploiting the possibilities as much as we could be. I just want to feel some playfulness happening on the page, and if genre has started to hold people back, then it’s time for genre to disappear. Or change."

Please, please, please, por favor, let there be more craziness out in there in our novelists; let us push the limits a little bit more; let us be brave and write with a little more abandon; let us be a little bit more honest with the very world about which we write: a complex, wild, confusing, messy, terrifying, beautiful, exciting and anything but simplified maelstrom. 

Read the whole interview here. Egan's latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is out now and demands reading. Put down your beach read and get on a different level.