Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Haddon

"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

About this Quote

Haddon slips a shiv into one of publishing’s most tired bar fights - “literary” versus “genre” - and then immediately refuses to play the part either side wants. The opening feint (“I don’t mean... On the contrary”) is a classic disarming move: he anticipates the charge of snobbery and neutralizes it before it can land. That’s not just politeness; it’s strategy. He’s trying to relocate the conversation from status to function.

The provocative hinge is his claim that “novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.” He doesn’t name the two, which is the point: it forces the reader to supply them, revealing their own assumptions. One function is almost certainly narrative propulsion - the page-turning satisfactions genre fiction has long been proud of. The other is the thing “literary” is supposed to deliver: stylistic risk, psychological depth, formal invention, a widening of how we see. Haddon's subtext is less “genre can be great” than “why accept the false scarcity model?” Why should a book choose between being absorbing and being ambitious?

Context matters because Haddon’s career sits exactly on that fault line. The Curious Incident moved like a mystery while operating as a cognitive and emotional experiment; it sold like “genre” and was reviewed like “literature.” He’s defending hybridity, but also issuing a quiet critique of the marketplace: categories train writers and readers to settle for half a novel. His heresy is not that one camp is superior, but that we’ve normalized novels that do only one job when the form, at its best, can multitask.

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About the Author

Mark Haddon (born September 26, 1962) is a Novelist from England.

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