The prejudice is familiar enough to recite. Literary fiction is art; genre is product. The literary novel is read; the genre novel is merely consumed. Romance is a guilty pleasure, thrillers are airport fodder, fantasy is for people who never grew up, and the truly serious reader graduates from all of it. This hierarchy is asserted constantly and defended almost never, which is usually the sign of a belief that cannot survive examination.

Let me examine it. The claim rests on the idea that literary merit and genre convention are opposed, that a book which delivers the pleasures readers came for has thereby forfeited its claim to seriousness. But this is nonsense the moment you look at the actual books. The conventions of genre are not shackles; they are forms, no more limiting than the sonnet was to the poets who chose it. A great thriller is not a lesser thing than a great literary novel. It is a different achievement, and often a harder one, because it must satisfy on more axes at once.

The criticism is lazy

Good criticism judges a book against its own ambitions, not against a foreign standard imported to make it fail. To fault a romance for being romantic is not insight; it is a category error dressed as discernment. The critic who dismisses an entire genre has not made a judgment. They have declined to make one, and disguised the refusal as taste. The hard, interesting work is to ask whether this particular book does, superbly, the thing it set out to do. That question does not respect the hierarchy at all.

And the economics are worse

Here is where the snobbery becomes actively self-defeating, and it is the part I most enjoy pointing out. The genres the hierarchy disdains are the genres that carry the industry. Romance alone accounts for a staggering share of fiction sales. Thriller, fantasy, and their neighbors command the readerships that keep publishing solvent enough to afford the literary titles that win the prizes. The snob looks down on the very readers whose enthusiasm funds the whole enterprise. It is difficult to imagine a more expensive way to feel superior.

The consequence of the prejudice is that genre books are too often marketed and covered without seriousness, as if the readers were not discerning, as if craft did not matter, as if a knowing wink would do where genuine editorial attention was required. This underestimates the audience badly. Romance readers are among the most sophisticated in publishing, fluent in the conventions, ruthless about quality within them, and entirely capable of telling the difference between a book that respects the form and one that condescends to it. Cover their books lazily and they will notice, and they will not forgive it.

So I will state the position plainly. The hierarchy is a failure of criticism and a failure of commerce at once. The serious response to any book, in any genre, is to take its ambitions seriously and judge how well it meets them. That is better criticism. It is also, not coincidentally, better business, because it is the only approach that respects the reader, and the reader, in the end, is the only judge whose verdict pays.