Fiction for the indigent

Here is something else I do while I’m waiting: I read books about writing.

Currently I’m reading Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein. I have never heard of Mr. Stein; according to himself, he’s a big name in publishing. As I don’t know any names in publishing, big or small, that’s fine by me. He uses a phrase that I have never heard before: “transient fiction.”

He never defines this phrase, but it’s obvious from the usage - especially when he says “whether it is transient or literary fiction.” Ah. Transient fiction, then, is the opposite of literary. It’s throw-away fiction; his first example of it is The Firm. It’s fiction that just passes through, never to be remembered again.

Most romance fiction, in terms of time, is transient fiction. Series fiction is only on the shelf a month; single-title gets a slightly longer sales period before going out of print. This makes “transient” a pretty accurate term for the genre, in the literal sense.

But what about the psychological sense? There are hundreds of romances that we still love, so many years later. Everywhere I go I read about Keepers – we love our copy of Anya Seton’s Katharine, or The Windflower; we have our copy of All Through the Night till death do us part. Prices for Mary Balogh’s early Regencies on Ebay give the big lie to the word “transient”. In fact, it’s amazing that Balogh’s books – which had only a one-month shelf life over ten years ago – are so astoundingly well-known, well-studied, and well-loved. Word of mouth in this genre is phenomenal, isn’t it? Ulysses has had a shelf life of over half a century – but who clutches their copy close to their heart and won’t lend it to another living soul? Who avidly searches out Sartre on Ebay? Who remembers what they were doing, where they were the first time they read Saul Bellow? I remember exactly where I was the first time I read Flowers From the Storm. To me, that book is anything but transient.

Kinsale’s out of print books are slowly being reissued; so are Balogh’s Regencies, starting with The Secret Pearl, which I read for the first time last month. A decade later, a new generation of readers want to read the books they’ve heard so much about from their peers. I guess transient fiction isn’t so transient after all.