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" I don&amp;#039;t know when, exactly, pulpy novels became the only books that I wanted to read. Though high-low fiction, literary works with genre elements, has become commonplace now \u2014 with books like Colson Whitehead&amp;#039;s Zone One or Cormac McCarthy&amp;#039;s The Road \u2014 my attraction started much earlier, probably when Margaret Atwood&amp;#039;s The Handmaid&amp;#039;s Tale was the only book in high school everybody managed to finish. These books were once fraught with their hybrid status \u2014 wow, a real writer like Atwood playing around with science fiction. Fortunately that stigma has almost entirely passed. Pulp lit today is almost always far more pleasurable and far more interesting than standard literary fiction.  This month that reality has become particularly obvious. Two great pulp lit books have come out within a couple of weeks: Chang-rae Lee&amp;#039;s On Such a Full Sea, and Adam Sternbergh&amp;#039;s Shovel Ready. (Full disclosure: I know Sternbergh. I have slept on his couch.) Read together, these two books show not only that pulp books are more fun to read, but also that the pulpier they are the better. In Chang-rae Lee&amp;#039;s On Such a Full Sea, the dystopic world, and the picaresque journey of the heroine Fan through it, are fun. The literary parts \u2014 the ramblings about the nature of identity, the use of &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; \u2014 are distractions. More to the point, they are the derivative parts of the book. I kept wondering if there was any way to get the &amp;quot;deliteratured&amp;quot; version. Shovel Ready fits that description nicely. It&amp;#039;s a novel with just the fun parts, all the boring parts removed. The plot follows the career of a hitman who wanders post-apocalyptic New York City falling into various dark corners of what remains of the material world, while the wealthy live mostly on a tanning-bed version of the Internet that allows its users full-immersion digital experiences. What do they do with them? Well, they use them to create a variety of bizarre and idiosyncratic realities, the most memorable of which is sex with Chewbacca. This brief aside in the book \u2014 literally five words \u2014 has been mentioned by everyone I&amp;#039;ve talked to about Shovel Ready. I think it may actually become the &amp;quot;fucking Chewbacca&amp;quot; novel. As in: &amp;quot;Have you read Sternbergh&amp;#039;s book? The one where they fuck Chewbacca.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s a good reason for that. It&amp;#039;s so perfectly apt. Does anyone doubt that if there were some way for people to simulate sex with Chewbacca online, huge numbers would sign up for the service?  Sternbergh had an interesting conversation with his editor on Slate, in which they discuss the last lingering snobbery about pulp: &amp;quot;Shovel Ready was born from the ashes of trying to write another kind of book. That other book was entirely lifeless, for a million reasons, the first of which being that I was writing it to write it, rather than to read it \u2014 which is to say it was born from some other less noble instinct than providing maximum pleasure to a reader (recognizing that readerly pleasures come in many, many forms). Which sent me into a creative tailspin. Which sent me into a long period of redevouring many of the books and movies and other cultural morsels I&amp;#039;d most enjoyed in my life. Which reminded me how much I like things like dystopias and speculative scenarios and noir and twisty plots and scenes in which someone says something really cool or creepy or funny right before they kill a bad guy. Those are fun! Why resist them?&amp;quot; Two movements have happened simultaneously, I think. Pulp fiction has become a lot better, or much more varied anyway, and literary fiction has become much more boring. Jonathan Franzen&amp;#039;s Freedom was a masterpiece, but did anyone read the whole thing? I mean, you had to at least skip the diary parts, right? I recently finished Meg Wolitzer&amp;#039;s The Interestings, which is perfectly constructed, and quite frankly dull. &amp;quot;On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time,&amp;quot; the book begins. &amp;quot;They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony.&amp;quot; Does that really make it seem like the next twenty hours of your life are worth spending with the next 10,000 sentences? Realist fiction has become airy, dry, resistance-free, like swimming in a pool without water. The ideal of spare elegance has become bloodless.  Pulp fiction has become far more connected to reality. Fucking Chewbacca is a metaphor for our current technologically mediated, pop culture-obsessed lives. There are no Chewbaccas in Alice Munro stories; there are no smartphones either. Literary fiction, outside of pulp variants, has refused to deal with anything other than the close observation of minute social interactions. The situation of fifty years ago, when pulp fiction was synonymous with the restrictions of genre, while literary fiction was the place for open expression, has now been reversed. Literary fiction has become a narrow passageway that few can pass through even if they wished. Pulp has become the way for writers to become unconventional.  Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a26905/the-rise-of-pulp/>