Compelling Telling

Here's a theory that's open for debate: there are (at least) two kinds of novels -- literary (did someone groan?) and genre. 'Genre' as in crime and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, historical, Western, and any other way you care to split 'fiction.' For a specific example, just now I'm 191 pages into Stone's Fall by Iain Pears -- a great, wallowing whale of a novel about England at the turn of the 20th century. The book revolves around a mystery: was the death of Industrialist John Stone, aka Lord Ravenscliff, a suicide or a murder?If murder, then who killed him? However, not only is it a murder mystery, but it's also a historical novel, set in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in England. The characters are carefully drawn, if a shade caricaturish -- though isn't that a given of genre fiction? The easily identifiable hero and villain; the body; the stumble and leap from clue to clue till all is revealed?

Yiyun Li's The Vagrants has a similar historical setting -- the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution which brought the Communists to power. There is also death, but it is state-sponsored death, with no mystery about it. Or is there? Maybe the mystery is how such a thing could happen at all. Why does the state have the right to execute a human being, but a single person does not? Why is it called justice if carried out by the government, but murder if by an individual? Is the difference in the two books that one has a plot and the other a theme?

Both of these books excel at the fundamental ground of a novel: tell a story. It doesn't have to be a good story, an original story, but the style of the narrative must be gripping. In fact, the telling of the story is more important than the story itself. Who cares if the mystery is set in Industrial-Revolutionary England or Cultural-Revolutionary China? All that matters is that the telling compels.

On the other hand, isn't there something different in what we the readers take away from each of these books? If so, what is it? Is it mere entertainment or is it something else? A more robust view of the multilayer world we inhabit? Or is each to be judged solely on how well it distracts us from the mundane?