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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9685641" data-attributes="member: 59">I don't know.  I'm not too worried about classification as far as the literary fiction vs popular fiction split.  It seems useless at the end of the day and gets more than tiresome, and I don't worry about it much in my reading selections aside from sometimes going back to read authors that I've "missed" somewhere along the line in my education.  But I do want novels that think about things and talk about ideas -- one of the big advantages of the long form is to have the space to wander and digress.  My biggest concern with novelists is authenticity.  If I feel like a writer's not putting me on, that they're not trying to wear profundity or whatever as a skinsuit, that they're not too invested in themselves as a public construct, I'm all the way in and will read them with joy regardless of the mode they're operating in.  I think this is why I tend to prefer Pynchon to a lot of his literary contemporaries -- I think his authenticity as a writer is unassailable, largely because he's opted out of the public end of the fiction-industrial complex.  (This is not meant to crap on other writers, as much as praise Pynchon.  And I'll note that his solution is not possible for many other writers, and some writers, like King, can handle being a public figure and still maintain a large degree of authenticity.)Edit: paragraphs are our friends.</blockquote>