John Updike’s Rabbit Run et al…

So lit fiction does enjoy keeping characters around for more than one book.

(Thanks to the NY Times Crossword Puzzle forum for reminding me)

I think character development only becomes null in open-ended “soap opera” type books. You can’t become invested in a character’s arc if you know things are going to change in the next book, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. I keep thinking about Sweet Valley High, or Gossip Girls, or other YA series, mainly. Or take Nancy Drew–

Does setting a novel in some recognizable historical period automatically make it genre? I’d call Scott literary, just on the strength of his prose. I don’t know what the conventions of the “historical novel genre” are, but to my mind it’s when the novel mostly follows genre conventions that you consider it genre.

I mean, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ by Rushdie had some speculative elements, but most people wouldn’t call it SF.

I wouldn’t say that character development in open-ended series is completely illusory, only that character is secondary to plot and not so much a function of story. Personally, I prefer character driven stories where plot grows out of character.

I’m also tempted to challenge the assertion that the character development in such books is illusory, although I’d only be able to refer to the Roberts mystery series. I don’t follow any of the others.

John Banville wrote a “loose” trilogy: The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena. Edward St. Aubyn has the “Some Hope” trilogy made into a quartet with this recent “Mother’s Milk”. A.S.Byatt did a quartet that started with “The Virgin in the Garden” and ended with “A Whistling Woman”. In general I think people regard Roberto Bolaño’s “Literatura nazi en América”, “Distant start” and “Amulet” as a loose trilogy too.

Can’t think of any more off the top of my head just now. Oh and Undset is a Nobel winner so you can safely put her on the literary shelf.

Terri–weren’t these made into a huge miniseries in the 80s? I’m inclined to call them genre as well, in the category of “historical fiction.” I might have to put Kristin Lavransdatter there, too, Sigrid Undset’s Nobel* notwithstanding.

That really just leaves us with the Deptford Trilogy as the only example of a trilogy within so-called “literary fiction.” There have got to be others, though–right?

*I keep saying Pulitzer, though I know I mean Nobel