It’s not that I didn’t enjoy The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I did. It was perfectly good. In places, it was absolutely knock-your-socks-off good. I just didn’t think the ending was knock-your-socks-off good, and ultimately I finished the book feeling let-down.
Oddly enough, though, in an interview with George Saunders (who wrote it), Gavin J. Grant implies that he thinks the book is slipstream, in a manner which makes it clear that he defines the term as stuff that makes it difficult for a bookseller to decide what shelf to put it on. As a bookseller, or at least as a representative of booksellers, I understand that perspective. Actually, since I think of genre as dealing mainly with the question of selling books, and secondarily with the question of shelving books, and only tertiarily with the question of reading or writing, I think that definition is probably the best, particularly as if used by writers and editors it is instructively self-mocking. The problem, though, is that infernokrush, although of course the same thing, is not well-served by a definition that makes it such a passive object of a booksellers decision.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Kayla and I saw the play based on the story, and thought it was cute, as I recall.
I bought Gappers on seeing it in a bookstore a few years back, ’cause it looked like fun; I don’t remember it very clearly at this point, but I do remember being kinda disappointed by it, perhaps for the same reason you mentioned.
I had no idea until now that it was by the George Saunders. Fascinating. I’ve had mixed reactions to the Saunders stories I’ve read, but rather liked “CommComm,” which was reprinted in one of the latest crop of year’s-bests.
The issue of “slipstream” referring to bookseller shelves has been around from the start; the original Sterling essay made the distinction between “category” (marketing category — bookstore-shelf category, basically) and “genre” (“a spectrum of work united by an inner identity”), and said that slipstream “seems to me to be a new, emergent ‘genre,’ which has not yet become a ‘category.'”