Stupidest essay of the week

I forgot to post this before–day job upheaval will do that–but Lev Grossman’s recent essay in TIME about “highbrow fiction being assaulted by lowbrow genre” (the quotes are mine) did not impress me much, to say the least:

In Michael Chabon’s new mystery novel, The Final Solution (Fourth Estate; 131 pages)–hang on, let’s back up. This is Pulitzer prizewinning Michael Chabon? Wonder Boys and Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon? Byronic hair Michael Chabon? Why would an esteemed, respectable literary novelist like Chabon want to sully his fancy-pants reputation with a mystery novel?

One of the interesting things about the present moment in U.S. literary history is that the tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell. And like Chabon, who in addition to writing The Final Solution has edited an anthology of hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tales, McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage; 328 pages). And like Jonathan Lethem, who has just published Men and Cartoons (Doubleday; 160 pages), a collection of highly literary stories about, among other things, superheroes.

Without getting into yet another debate about how the best fiction is simply that, whether it’s rooted in the conventions of literary novels or the convention of genre novels, but it seemed to me rather odd that Grossman neglected to mention anywhere that he was the author of one such “hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tale,” CODEX.  I mean, if a “literary thriller” about a mysterious manuscript doesn’t count as the very thing that puzzles Grossman in his essay, what would?