There is a scene in Michael Harvey’s novel, Pulse, in which a cop torments a racist in a bar. The racist is only onstage for a brief time, so brief he has no name, simply designated Salt and Pepper. This references the gray in his hair so you would think he’d be old enough to know better than to make racist comments to this white cop’s Black partner, but he does anyway. The white cop puts a switchblade up his nose in a similar fashion to the way Roman Polanski’s thug treats Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974), severing the nostril. Although we, the readers, aren’t psychotic, many of us will probably get some pleasure out of this racist Cro-Mag being made to whimper and scream after so arrogantly flaunting his white supremacist bonafides to a Black man. 

The setting is 1976, Boston, near the beginning of the racial unrest during desegregation of public schools with consequent bussing so this kind of ugliness in public wouldn’t have been that uncommon. The scene is told from the perspective of the Black police officer, Barkley Jones. He’s a good cop, dedicated, probably a workaholic—like most cops in crime stories—and many of the chapters are told from his perspective. Most of the others are told from the perspective of the teenager Daniel Fitzsimmons. Racial strife, a city in decline, noir-like settings connect both perspectives. Yet Daniel’s chapters are different for two main reasons. First, the fantastic is an element of these chapters. Daniel knows things he shouldn’t—other people’s thoughts, their histories, where they are when they’re out of sight. He may also have the ability to “push” people, to get them to do things that he wants them to do, even to kill themselves. And he can metamorphose into animals. Incidentally, he has just gone off his meds, so all of these fantastic elements could be explained away if you’re the type of reader to do so. Second, there is a tint of nostalgia in Daniel’s chapters, the nostalgia for being young and in love for the first time, the nostalgia for hanging out with friends and doing nothing, the nostalgia for skipping school and browsing records when you have no money to buy them, even the nostalgia of fighting. When we’re in Barkley’s perspective, we see that he is inclined to disbelieve anything he can’t explain with his senses. And there is no nostalgia, only a sense of pessimism drifting toward the cynical. 

This combination of the gritty, the fantastic, and the nostalgic seems to be permeating the culture now. Netflix’s Stranger Things, about 80s-era Dungeons & Dragons-playing pre-teens, psychic powers, monsters, and government conspiracies has recently released its fourth season. In addition to the creepy nature of the series, it’s very much nostalgic for a youth playing role and video games, the movies of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter, and the books of Steven King. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the film adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s collections of eerie children’s stories opened not long ago and, in a limited run, grossed over twenty million dollars in North America in its first weeks. The film takes several of the disparate stories from the three collections and creates a central narrative set in a small Pennsylvania town on Halloween, 1968. The Vietnam War and the election of Nixon hover in the background, but the nostalgia seems to shift toward the source material more than anything else with many of the film’s monsters based on the original creepy drawings by Stephen Gammell. Again, as with Stranger Things and Pulse, the central characters—the only ones who seem to get that the supernatural is real—are young people. 

I get why these stories are so popular—and not just, or even mainly, with young people. When I lie down to sleep, even just to take a nap, I’m not only trying to recharge my batteries, but I’m hoping to venture into a world where the fantastic is comfortable taking place side-by-side with the pedestrian. In Pulse, the clairvoyant Daniel is visited by himself from the future. Future Daniel tells his younger self, “deep [geologic] time doesn’t just stretch back into history…I believe it can also drill down into each passing moment, freezing reality and peeling it back, exposing all its dimensions and all its layers. Kind of like when you dream.” Dreams, like many of these narratives, can be scary. It’s always scary when you look closely at anything. But even the more workaday dreams can approach terror and the sublime when we try to remember them, bring them into our waking lives, letting their fragmented narratives play over in our minds. From just a few months ago in my dream journal:

I dream I’m having a party. My friend’s husband tells me I need to get oranges to slice and float in a punch bowl of water for the non-drinkers. Other people from my life are there and they drift in and out of recognition and anonymity in my peripheral vision. The chaos of the party becomes too much at some point and I lie down on my bed for a nap, something I often do when stressed. Do I dream inside this dream in my dream? I don’t know, but when I awake everyone is gone except for a half-dozen cats. It’s also been raining during my sleep and the apartment is flooded to my ankles. Toy trucks and tractors float in the dirty water. My wife is going to be upset when she gets home to find this mess and all of these cats…

Nostalgia, like our dreams, is inexact. Even when we place our nostalgic narratives in real, historical time, the characters all have the fuzzy outlines of dream figures. Those people look like people we know, but there’s something off about them. I walked across the room, but somehow my body moving through space and time didn’t follow my usual understanding of physics. I’m both here and there, conscious of things happening in other places simultaneously. 

Another recent novel, Xiao Bai’s French Concession, set in the titular province of 1931 Shanghai, like many noirs, is nostalgic for a world that no longer exists. In this case, it’s a Chinese metropolitan city before communism, a colonial property which, despite the oppression, the crooked cops and politicians, the drugs and crime, is also an international hub of freedom—mostly of the sexual and criminal type, but also a breeding ground for leftist politics and art. I imagine Xiao Bai’s nostalgia for this lost territory is similar to native New Yorker’s feelings about pre-Giuliani Times Square with its peep shows and hookers and drug dealers—but also its writers and artists, filmmakers and drag shows. The good old days weren’t really “good,” but something’s been lost. The new version—rampant capitalism, state party control—leaves a dull craving behind. 

Genre is the perfect delivery system for nostalgia. When we watch a contemporary narrative with the instant-read icons of the horror movie or the sci-fi TV show, we’re always already channeling the genre texts of our childhood or early adulthood. In my case, Star Trek (both original and STNG), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Shining, The Twilight Zone, The Exorcist, Alien, The Terminator, Halloween, The Thing (’82), Blade Runner and so on. Likewise, when I read noir: Chandler and Hammett, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy, all the way back to Hemmingway’s “The Killers.” I’m sure the same goes for others when they recognize the tropes of the romance, the western, the screwball comedy. 

When I was in college and then later in graduate school and learning to write, before I learned that we’re always learning to write, professors would say on the first day of creative writing workshops, “In this class, we won’t write genre fiction. We’re writing literary fiction.” They would say this without ever interrogating that term, “literary fiction,” with no sense that if we can call something an example of “literary fiction,” then we’re tacitly agreeing in advance that that thing is part of a genre. In fact, although the word “literary” is hundreds of years old, the OED’s earliest example of this particular use of the word is from 1982 which strikes me as just about right, more a marketing ploy than any kind of statement about quality, a way of categorizing the type of writing all those graduates from writing programs were supposed to be producing. I’m sure nearly everyone will agree that they’ve read at least as many lousy literary novels as they have sci-fi or mystery or whatever other type of genre writing they occasionally slum through. Except for the case of highly experimental writing (and sometimes not even then), literary fiction is attempting to be genre-less, a land without precursors, except for maybe the best, i.e. Literature with a big “L.” One thing, though, I was struck by when I read French Concession earlier this year: Amidst the foggy, noir settings, Xiao Bai is attempting to capture a level of exactitude and precision that you seldom see in noir or, really, in any kind of fiction. During the first murder of the novel, we know where all the characters are standing, not just where they are in relation to each other, but where they are in relation to historically real locations down to cross streets. There is even a map with dots indicating characters. This obsession with exactness approaches the avant-garde constructions of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, novels like Jealousy, The Voyeur, and The Erasers, all of which make use of noir tropes. We often think of nostalgia and the avant-garde as opposites, just as many think of the literary (or high art) as opposed to genre (or low). It seems much more likely that this distinction is a way of thinking that is stuck in an era of a hundred years ago. Which is not to argue that all narrative is good or all genres equal, but just to say that all stories are a tug of war between what came before and what hasn’t happened yet, between the subconscious and conscious, between realism and the unexplainable. Anytime we have a narrative with a beginning and an end, anytime we map out the boundaries of a world and try to convince readers or viewers that this place is real, we’re engaging in necromancy and turning base metals into gold.

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