Life in the World in Genre
I'm re-reading West of Everything by Jane Tompkins, which I read several years ago and quite liked and which I still like and am getting new things out of since, like the river of Time, I am different than I was back then.
I will probably have several comments to make on it as I go (or then again I could drop out of sight once again and forget to post anything), but here's a good quote from early in the book on living in a Western (or, I would contend, living in a lot of genre worlds):
Ordinary work--in fact, ordinary life--is too much like shopping. It never embodies what the hero's struggle to get out of the blizzard embodies: the fully saturated moment. But this is not because life in the twentieth century involves people in all those transactions the Western hero traditionally rejects--the acquisition of material goods, the desire for social status, the search for luxuries, technology, laws, or institutions per se, but the sense that life under these conditions isn't going anywhere. If Westerns seem to long for the out-of-doors, for a simplified social existence, for blizzards and shoot-outs and fabulous exploits, it isn't because their readers want to give up TV and computers and fast foods and go back to life on the frontier. It's that life on the frontier is a way of imagining the self in a boundary situation--a place that will put you to some kind of ultimate test. What distinguishes the life of the L'Amour hero from that of his readers isn't that he can build a fire in the snow, kill ten bandits with six bullets, or get on his horse and ride out of town whenever he wants to; it is that he never fritters away his time. Whatever he does, he gives it everything he's got because he's always in a situation where everything he's got is the necessary minimum.
I think this gets at the thing (and much better than I've ever said it) that I'm always trying to talk about when I talk about characters who do things that matter (not necessarily 'perfect heroes;" I'm totally in favor of flawed and complex characters). Mainstream and literary fiction, even when well-written, often seem to me about people doing things that make no impact on the world. I live my whole life making no impact on the world--I don't want to spend my precious reading time reading about my boring stupid life. And I think that it may also be related to why I find alot of current F&SF so tedious. There's too much something that feels to me like navel-gazing rather than engaging in doing things that matter (and I'm not going to make a sort of attempt to define 'things that matter' except to say I know it when I see it). I read more non-fiction these days--non-fiction tends to be about people doing things that matter.