Charles Taylor of Salon is a great example; Charles' tastes couldn't have been more different from mine, but his reviews were thorough enough, and his taste consistent enough, that I could almost always guess which movies I would enjoy by reading his reviews.  Plus, they were almost always enjoyable to read.  What more could you ask from a reviewer?

In books, though, it's tougher.  For one thing, reading a book is a much more involved committment; after 2-3 hours, the movie is over, but you're just barely getting started on a book.  (Unless you're like my friends Jessica or Michael, and zip through one a day.)  So it's not like you can review multiple books a day.  Or even per week.

Also, the types of books I tend to read--SF genre fiction mostly, with some adventure books and mysteries thrown in, as well as a passle of non-fiction--usually don't get reviewed except by genre reviewers.  And all too often, said reviewers are inclined by default to give a positive review--fanboyish, in some cases.  (Not all, mind you, but 'way too many, in my opinion.)  While I'm as a much a sucker as anyone for wanting to sink into the warm bath of opinions that validate my own tastes, that's no help when it comes to finding new authors and books to read, alas.  So I need a little challenging here and there.

Which brings me around to the lede of my post, which I have completely buried:  a Tweet I read recently from Laura Miller, one of my favorite writers on Salon:

Ordinarily I'm not much interested in unfinished work but THE PALE KING is brilliant: http://bit.ly/eqzcAN

Miller tends to review "literary fiction."  One of her recent reviews, for example, was of a book she clearly loved: The Illumination.  Even though I know from experience that her tastes and mine differ wildly, it really sounded quite wonderful.  So--and thank goodness for Amazon and iBook's "download a sample" functionality--I downloaded a sample.

And couldn't even get through the sample.

It wasn't that it was badly written; quite the contrary.  But it was too precious by half, as far as I was concerned.  Over-written to the point of tediousness, with a wonderful idea buried under over-descriptive prose.  When I see a line like

An image of her father came suddenly to mind:  the sun was brighht and the sky was clear and he was kneeling beside a stream in a state park, making a newst of his own good hands to give her a sip of water, and she paused and frowned, staring into the tiny pool he had created, transfixed by the way the light sent gray blooms of shadows gusting over his palms, and when she pointed it out to him, he laughed and called her his little Impressionist.

my brain simply balks.  My willing suspension of disbelief insists on unsuspending itself.  I simply can't swallow someone having a thought at once so poetic, completely formed, and at the same time totally unlike anything I have ever thought.  I don't know about you, but while I get thought flashes, sensation flashes, they're just that:  flashes. And when I was on morphine?  All I could think was, "What do I have to do to get this friggin' needle out of my arm?", not memories of my Dad from my childhood.

 So when I saw Miller praise David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King (in her review, and in that tweet), my first snarky thought was, "Yeah, that's nice, but does it have, ya know, a plot?"  Because that's the attitude us genre readers tend to have about literary fiction, unfair though it may be.  (The contrary complaint by literary fiction readers is often, "Those are cardboard characters!"  I find both complaints true all too often.)

At least I thought I was being snarky, but then there in the third paragraph of the review, Miller notes, "Wallace never envisioned this novel as observing a conventional plot."  So the answer is, well, no, it doesn't.

And that's my problem in a nutshell.  Yes, maybe the characters in genre fiction aren't well drawn; maybe the language isn't the best; but jeez, at least the vast majority of genre fiction has a plot.  And my feeling is, if you're telling a story, shouldn't the story have, well, a narrative arc?  i.e., a plot?

I'm not running down Miller, or people who enjoy plotless novels, or folks who only read genre fiction.  Not at all.  Indeed, I think Miller herself hit the nail on the head in a comment she made in the "New Yorker Out Loud" podcast when speaking of the new TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin's fantasy book series:

I think that often literary novelists do not pay attention to the craft of storytelling that maybe they might have in the past.  And that as a result, they just don't necessarily have the skills or even the framework to think about a serial narrative. But I think it would be kind of great if some did.

I just wish the genre writers (who get "plot") and literary fiction writers (who get "character") could get together and write real fiction.  And if Miller's any indication, I ain't alone.

So I say to you writers: c'mon, genre people, work on your characters; c'mon, literary folks, have an actual honest-to-God plot!  And most of all, c'mon you critics: you're spending more time reviewing an incomplete novel by a dead author than you do reviewing any of the hundreds of genre novels that come out every year, that will have have 'way more readers.  Sure, 90 percent of them are crap, but remember Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.

And he was a genre fiction writer.