Beach Read as Trojan Horse

In which we consider the modern literary beach read and how it functions as facilitation for hot button issues.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

At the beginning of the year, I read a fun, prickly novel titled How To Sleep At Night by Elizabeth Harris, that follows a gay couple as one of the men decides to run for congress…as a Republican. The book explores this idea of how we can possibly navigate the political divide many of us have with our loved ones, if there’s any way to navigate it at all. While I was initially hesitant to pick it up, I ended up really enjoying it and thought it was both entertaining and thought provoking. It has all of that juicy, “prestige television” melodrama I find enjoyable, and left me wondering if there really was a path forward regarding the people in my life with differing political views.

Beach reads have often been associated with the “white lady discovers herself while on vacation” books, but in more recent years—particularly within the last decade, I feel like we’ve seen a spike in vacation/airplane/beach reads that deal with more topical subject matter—things like politics, racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. I know many people often look down on beach reads because of the Elin Hildebrand of it all, but I do want to make a clarification before we move forward—I’m mostly discussing this more modern interpretation of the ‘literary beach read’, and I don’t want it to be misconstrued as me diminishing these books or putting all of them down in some way for associating them with vacation reading. I genuinely think many literary beach reads are great, and it’s this type of book had me thinking about how they function as a sub-genre, how they may help or hurt in moving certain conversations forward, and the ways different readers engage with these books.

A few summers ago, my in-laws dragged me along on a beach vacation, where I brought my copy of Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid. The book had been all the buzz for months, party due to it being a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, but also because it had just been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Much of the marketing for Such A Fun Age pitched it as a ‘literary beach read’, due to it being such a page-turner, while still having something quote-unquote ‘important’ to say. I remember locking myself in my room for hours, sun drunk (and maybe also actually drunk), gasping as the story unspooled, telling my husband’s family that I could NOT be bothered, because this wild book was too good to put down. I thought it was the perfect book for vacation, or really any moment where you wanted to escape whatever was happening around you, because the drama was unending and it felt like when your friend has that really hot tea to spill, but you don’t have any anxiety because it’s a situation you are in no way involved in. The book seemed to have almost unanimous praise from both critics and readers…until it got longlisted for the Booker. People who encountered it from Reese Witherspoon loved it, with the marketing really leaning into the fact that this was a book you couldn’t put down, that it could make a great vacation read, that it talked about something important in a ‘digestible’ way. This wasn’t a book that seemed to be positioning itself as an awards darling as much as it was a hit summer book. But once people began encountering this novel as a literary prize book, they were much more critical of it—especially in comparison to How Much of These Hills is Gold, Real Life, and Shuggie Bain.

I was partway through Such A Fun Age before the Booker longlist dropped, so I didn’t really approach it through the lens of it being an award contender. I do understand some of the criticism, if only because I’ve had similar issues with other books. Such A Fun Age is very straightforward in its messaging; it’s very clear what is good and what is bad, and while there is nuance, the book takes away much of the moral guesswork.

When I looked at the initial marketing for Such A Fun Age, it made me think of another popular (albeit polarizing) novel from 2020, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Before it’s release, American Dirt was being hailed as “The Grapes of Wrath our times”, with glowing reviews from mostly white critics. Cummins received a seven-figure book deal for the novel, and her publisher, Flatiron, threw a lavish (distasteful) party to celebrate its release. Where Such A Fun Age was mostly being pushed as an Austen-esque novel of manners, American Dirt was advertised as this important, necessary work—a classic on arrival—about a timely issue that had been long overlooked. If you aren’t familiar with the drama surrounding American Dirt, a quick google search will catch you up to speed, but the source of all of this comes from a takedown review by Miriam Gurba released just before the book’s publication. Gurba had many issues with Cummins’s novel, mostly with the Mexican stereotypes and the whitewashing of the overall narrative. I remember listening to a podcast—I believe it was NPR—discussing the novel, where one of the critics said they would have taken less issue with the book, had it just been marketed as a pulpy thriller, instead of this masterwork that was representative of an entire experience, written by a person who seemingly had no idea of how to depict it.

There are a lot of things worth addressing here—many of them have already been addressed by much smarter people than me—but I did want to look at how these two books were situated in the literary conversation. Such A Fun Age was considered, by most, to be a sensitive handling of a difficult conversation around race and class. Yes, at times the book holds the hands of its readers—what I think is one of the bigger points of criticism I’ve seen—but I don’t think that anything the book is saying is wrong. But what’s interesting is that some of the conversations around Such A Fun Age are similar to those of people who loved American Dirt. The audience of mostly white people praised both books for ‘educating’ them on these topical issues. One of the biggest differences here, though, is that American Dirt was heavily criticized for how it situated the narrative to appeal to the white gaze. And I think this is where we see a little bit of a split in some of these ‘literary beach reads’.

When people collectively decided to Christopher Columbus racism and bigotry in 2020, they began reaching for every book they could to ‘educate’ them on these subjects. But the thing is, people don’t always want to do the work. People love books like American Dirt and The Help because it allows you to look at the suffering of another without taking any accountability in how you could be complicit in some of these issues. I do think that books like Such A Fun Age, Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, and Colored Television by Danzy Senna, among others, have found a way to allow nervous readers to consider ideas around identity in a way that feels safe, while also pushing them to think a little more deeply. But I also don’t think fiction is really the place to go to “educate” yourself on these issues. There are non-fiction books that break down these issues in the ways that are necessary for us to unlearn and relearn. I think fiction is the place to be able to witness experiences outside of our own, and if that aids in learning, that’s great. But I also think that fiction as education is also problematic for a few reasons. I don’t really think the function of fiction is to provide us answers to these things—I think fiction is meant to make us question things even more, to consider a situation and engage with it in all of its murkiness.

I think one of the reasons people love these ‘literary beach reads’ is because they often feel safer, more certain, than the world we currently live in. There is a clearer delineation between what’s right and wrong in most of these books, and it takes out the guess work so we aren’t responsible for figuring it out ourselves.

I often see readers criticizing a lot of the literary fiction they read as being problematic when they don’t offer a clear line between right and wrong, but half the time, the book is just depicting a nuanced situation without giving you an easy answer. It sometimes seems like it’s just lazy readership. We have to want to actually engage with the ideas in these books and not just want to be told things. We are smart people, we can figure things out with the context clues provided. Not everything has to be spelled out for us.

While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with these more straightforward books, I have noticed something about the people who only tend to read the book club beach reads. A lot of the times, when I have conversations with these readers, they seem to now expect the world to operate in the same way. There seems to be this inability to engage in more nuanced conversation, to even engage with books that might demand more of the reader, expect them to figure things out on their own. I don’t think this is an issue for every reader who picks up books like this, but I’ve seen the same issue from adults who only read YA. It’s this weird need to just be told things.

I wonder, sometimes, if the books that do all of the handholding are hurting the average readers ability to think critically, to ask questions and to know that just because something happens in a book doesn’t mean the writer condones that behavior or that it’s inherently bad, just because they don’t point specifically to the thing and tell you so. I’m speaking a little too vaguely, but it’s partly because I see this happen with all sorts of books across a variety of subject matter.

I actually love literary beach reads. I think that for many people they’re really enjoyable and harmless. I love that many of them offer up a lot of thought provoking ideas packaged in a really juicy plot with characters I end up loving. My issue is often less with the books themselves and more with the readers who come to depend on every book to operate in the same way. It’s like expecting every movie to be like a Marvel movie or like a romcom. We all know the world doesn’t operate under the law of superheroes. Sometimes a movie has to operate in a more normal register, to be grounded in reality, that we will have to accept the murkiness of it all.

There’s a lot more to say about this, so I will probably continue the conversation in another Substack soon, but until then, I would love to know if y’all have any thoughts on this. Am I being a book snob? Are you seeing some of the same things in the literary landscape? Also, for those who are fans of these books as much as me, let me know what books of these you love, which ones you think are overhyped. When you’re reading these books, what are your expectations around them? Let me know!

Until then,

XOXO