What’s the difference between literary fiction and commercial fiction? This is the sort of questions we writers obsess about. In fact, a bunch of us were obsessing about just this question the other night, over sandwiches and beer. One of us suggested that commercial fiction fits into a genre, literary fiction doesn’t.

By this definition, a book about somebody’s attempt to unravel a mysterious murder isn’t literature because it can be classified as a murder mystery. We’ve just eliminated Snow Falling on Cedars. Give me your best description of the genre known as romance fiction and I’ll show you how it proves that Pride and Prejudice isn’t literature.

And what about that category of fiction known in the biz as “bestsellers.” Much of it doesn’t necessarily match up to a particular genre, but it’s clearly not “literary fiction.”

Someone else suggested, “Commercial fiction tells a story; literary fiction isn’t concerned with story.”

Phew! That definition certainly succumbs to the blind limitations of present-centered-ness. It’s only in the twentieth century that literary fiction writers tried to break away from storytelling as their central goal–Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Robbe-Grillet, a few others. And all right, maybe it’s hard to discern a story of any kind in the later works of Henry James (but he did live into the 20^th century) and maybe Melville crashed off his story line with that long discourse about whales, but until these guys no self-respecting novelist would have dreamed of renouncing storytelling as central to their ambitions. Listen: Dostoevsky was above all a great storyteller. Dickens, George Elliot, Tolstoy, you name ‘em: they all thought of themselves, first and foremost, as storytellers. Unashamedly.

Several of my friends have proposed that literary fiction reinvents the language, that’s what marks it as “literary.” By contrast, commercial fiction (presumably) merely tries to glue us to an unfolding sequence of events and involve our emotions in the lives of invented characters.

I said to one of my friends who proposed this definition, “What about Robert Louis Stevenson? Sherlock Holmes?”

“Hmm,” she said. “You’re right. Treasure Island isn’t literature, I guess. It’s commercial fiction.”

You know what? Any definition of literature that includes The God of Small Things but excludes Treasure Island is (in my opinion) in need of retooling.

In fact, I once read an earnest essay written by some language-worshipping critic—I forget his name but his essay appeared in Salon—arguing that War and Peace should be considered literary despite its pedestrian language. He quoted several passages of supposedly uninteresting prose to show that Tolstoy’s work had something worthy of serious attention in spite of the poor man’s obvious shortcoming as a literary artist. It was (this critic proposed) Tolstoy’s psychological insight.

As I read the excerpts this fellow had chosen, I couldn’t help but notice the sublime perfection of Tolstoy’s language. Yes, I know, translation throws another monkey wrench into the equation, but this critic was talking about the same text I was looking at. All he could see in Tolstoy’s language was the absence of those self-regarding tricks and fancy mannerisms that win praise in MFA writing workshops (precisely because they can be isolated and discussed). Apparently, he couldn’t see how perfectly and fully these plain words carried us into the experience Tolstoy wanted us to have. And the curious thing is, the critic got the experience. But he thought he got there despite the language. Unable to spot any obvious acrobatics, he thought Tolstoy wasn’t doing anything with linage.

Actually Tolstoy was doing nothing with language except the only thing a literary artist should do with language—get us there.

What distinguishes literary fiction from commercial fiction, it seems to me, is the experience it intends to give you.   When you pick up a work of commercial fiction, you already know what experience you want to have. You read to get to that already-anticipated place, to taste familiar emotions, to feel your existing beliefs confirmed, to revisit insights common to your cultural milieu.

When you enter into a work of literary fiction, you don’t know what experience you will have. The work sets out to get you to a place you’ve never been before, a place you can get to only with this book, not “a book like this one.” There is such a thing as bad literature. There is such a thing as good commercial fiction. The difference between them is not their quality. Fiction is literary if its intended effect on the reader is unique. And it’s good literature if it succeeds.

Whatever language enables the book to achieve its purpose is good language. Sometimes the language will stick out–the de-construction and re-invention of language is central to Joyce’s purpose in Ulysses and he does a virtuoso job of it. But if Vikram Seth had written A Suitable Boy in Joycian language the book would have been crap.