What literary fiction means to me

In the style of the novelist Rick Moody, answering the Paris Review’s question, “What does American mean to you? Do you consider yourself an American writer?” (h/t: Mark Athitakis).

Q.: What does literary fiction mean to you? Do you consider yourself a reader of literary fiction?

A.: What other kind of fiction would I read? (Can you read something that is not written?) I guess to read literary fiction means, you know, that I have winced routinely at midlife crises and that I have the limitless free­dom to be ashamed of shameless adulterers, and that I am proud of a country that I don’t recognize in its pages, and that there must be some­thing wrong with me because my political conscience is not swollen like a goiter, and that baseball is an occasion for gloppy sentimentalism and total ignorance, and it means that I must listen to men who are so sensitive they’ve never shown any courage in their lives, and it means that I am a stranger to transcendence, and it means that I am familiar with artificial word-order and outlandish yokings of verb and adverb or adjective and noun, and it means, let’s see, that I am not embarrassed by another person’s sexual expe­rience, just need to know the stuff that some guy does in bed, and it means one place is pretty much like another place and not worth paying much attention to at any rate, and it means sentences are really, really well-crafted (even if the craft is more readily apparent than their meaning, which sometimes is not apparent at all), and it means that I don’t mind listening to people yapping incessantly about how terrible America is, and how terrible Bush is, and did you know America was once a slave-holding nation, and O what about the Native Americans, don’t forget them, and it means that radical personal autonomy is the only possible mode of life worth pursuing, even though most of the people I know derive most of their happiness from their families, and it means that I ought to covet urban apartments filled with fine objects and cool gadgets and unusual cookbooks that I won’t find on Amazon and no children, and it means that the best people know nothing whatever about cars or guns or tools or how to fix anything, and it means that I hear a lot of opinions but very little knowledge, and it means I can’t possibly imagine what men and women do all day at work when they’re not reading literary fiction. Wow, it really means a lot of really good things, doesn’t it?