The Comfortable Reader: Romantic Bestsellers and Critical Disdain

Abstract

In France ‘immersive’ storytelling in the novel has long been associated with lowbrow fiction, and critically disparaged in favour of more self-reflexive, experimental forms. Recently, however, not only have critical debates begun to question the equation of literary value with the text’s ‘intransitivity’ (Barthes), but the massive success of certain contemporary novels has suggested a sharp divergence between critical orthodoxy and readers’ literary values. Critics’ responses to the runaway success of novels by Marc Levy, Anna Gavalda and others have hesitated between bemusement and contempt, while readers express the intense pleasure they find in these optimistic, absorbing stories. This article contends that the critically discredited art of mimetic (and, worse still, romantic) storytelling provides valuable pleasures, and that readers’ responses deserve to be taken seriously. With the emphasis on novels by Levy and Gavalda, the article interrogates the relationship between literary and popular taste.