![]() True, much of commercial fiction, including some of the most successful titles, is gimcrack palaver. It’s difficult to talk about how good a novelist Liane Moriarty is because she’s especially adept at aspects of the novel that are viewed as trivial even by many of the readers who enjoy them. There’s something facile about the notion that the mere confrontation of a troubling social issue automatically gives a book greater weight, while meticulously observed depictions of middle-class social life and manners or intricate, acrobatic storytelling constitute airy nothings. Even Janet Maslin, the New York Times’ designated genre-fiction reviewer, described Big Little Lies as “fluffy” while praising Moriarty’s ability, in the novel’s darker moments, to touch base “with vicious reality.” As viewers of the HBO series quickly learn, that darkness involves domestic violence. This, naturally, precludes any consideration of it as art, at least in the eyes of critics. ![]() Moriarty writes “commercial fiction,” a hazy category that can include everything from The Help to The Da Vinci Code, but everyone agrees that it’s a genre that foregrounds plot over prose style. ![]()
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