Saturday, I had lunch with Matt Cheney, Tor editor Liz Gorinsky and a guy named Michael who described himself as "just a fan". One thing that became clear to me as we talked is that there's nothing approaching the nature of fandom in the world of literary (or "mainstream" as the SF folks would have it) fiction. Dave Eggars likes to make reference to a literary community or family, but in Eggars' world there isn't close too the active, ongoing conversation between him and the readers in the way there is for almost any writer in the SF scene.
Cheney talked about how the SF fan community really began when Hugo Gernsback introduced a letters page in Amazing Stories in the 1920's. Suddenly the readers could communicate not only with the writers or editors ala fan mail, but with each other. The readers and writers all started getting to know each other and a community was born.
In Literary Fiction, readers and writers can only get to know each other in small settings separate from each other-- readers in, say, book clubs, and writers in writer's workshops. There is no larger dialog between and among the two groups. Today, there are dozens of online message boards devoted to the speculative fiction community, and hardly any devoted to the literary fiction one (certainly none that are particularly high profile). Some time ago I wondered to myself why didn't Eggars, that booster of community spirit, have a message board on McSweeney's Internet Tendency? How does one join Eggars' vaunted community, anyway? Volunteer at his literary magazine or his charity? Do you have to work for Eggars to join his club? Perhaps that's unfair. But I've been to a lot of literary readings, and there were certainly people there who knew each other, but it was all very small and decentralized, and the group from one reading wouldn't know people from another reading, even if the authors in question were quite similar. Cheney suggested it's because literary fiction readers don't see themselves as "fans", but I think there's a much more fundamental problem that the literary fiction people just don't reach out to each other in the way the speculative fiction people do.
In a conversation later by phone with my friend Phil, he said it was like how the SF community referred to itself as a "ghetto". In the ghetto, everyone knows each other, but in a wealthy neighborhood, you don't know the person next door. It is, in other words, a mindset among the SF people that comes directly out of a feeling of being marginalized.
Then again, with the literary fiction world contracting like it is, one wonders if this same feeling shouldn't be setting in for those folks at this point too. I can certainly imagine an ideal online message board where people of all genres could get together and talk about reading and writing and, I don't know, hold hands and sing "This Land is Your Land". I'd even consider starting one myself, but Wet Asphalt is too small a playing field to make a real impact. What we'd really need is someone of the stature of Eggars, Chabon or Lethem to do it, in the way that comics superstar (and novelist) Warren Ellis created his immensely popular Whitechapel message board. And with both Chabon and Lethem's eagerness to reach across genre aisles, someone should really suggest it to them. I might myself, but I don't know how to contact them. They're just not part of my community.