Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper addresses two related questions. First, whether the New Orleans novel – or any cluster of novels brought together by a shared city setting – might be usefully understood as a ‘genre’ in its own right. The New Orleans novel, I argue, is a fertile object of study here, given the city’s unique place in American history and culture. The well-known if often misunderstood particularities of its identity as a multicultural, musical, and culinary centre; its hot climate and watery landscape, its histories of collective/cultural trauma and systemic violence, have translated to repeated iterations of themes, tropes and formal features that cut across established generic frameworks. That is to say, we might understand a formally diverse set of texts that despite divergent narrative strategies and stylistic features, share affective qualities and thematic preoccupations: these are sweaty, liquid, vivid, and hybrid fictions that deal with death and desire in unique ways. Second, given that New Orleans fiction has well-known genre associations (particularly crime, gothic and various subgenres) that have sometimes reinforced racist stereotypes, but elsewhere have meaningfully engaged with systemic malaise, and given that it is also a city associated with a set of canonical ‘literary’ texts and authors, the New Orleans novel is also a rich body of work in the context of persistent debates about the relations between popular genres and ‘the literary’.
I seek to make some provisional claims about the contemporary New Orleans novel’s relationships with genre via short close readings of James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown (2007), Margeret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom (2017), and Jami Attenberg’s All This Could be Yours (2019) – three very different novels that nevertheless might be said to exemplify contemporary New Orleans fiction. My readings draw on Theodore Martin’s intervention in the study of genre and ‘the contemporary’, which works via watery metaphors of ‘drag’ and ‘drift’. In Martin’s influential theorisation, the drag of genre sheds light on the drift of the contemporary, aiding consideration of relations between past and present. For Martin ‘genres live distinctly double lives, with one foot in the past and one in the present’ (2017: 6). Drawing on Martin, I ultimately consider the benefits of reading these three divergent fictional texts as part of a contemporary New Orleans novel ‘genre’.