There is a shelf labelled “plotless fiction” in the bookstore where I work. It is an object of endless fascination. It jokes, but it’s dead serious. We love it neurotically. A box arrives, a book is released, and a bookseller says to herself: “It’s fiction, but is it plotless?” Customers often ask me what it means, but I never get it right. It has something to do with language, place, sensibility; nothing needs to happen per se, so long as you’re immersed, charmed, consumed. Of late, this shelf has been home to an array of novels by lesbian writers—books that ace this nebulous quality and experiment with language as they consider queerness as a literary and life form, landing on the shortlists for awards, like the International Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and receiving high critical acclaim.
Queer fiction is having something of a moment. Publications like the New York Times and the Guardian have been covering the rise and proliferation of the queer romance genre in particular, with op-eds praising “much needed representation” and happy endings that refute the all-too-common twentieth-century literary trope of coupling queer love with psychosocial ruin. Alongside the boom of more formulaic queer romances, I’ve been noticing a shadow boom in the paperbacked realm of plotless fiction: a weird, cerebral counterpart to this more mainstream trend. Those queer plotless books I loved most this year—a sample size to be sure, but a memorable one—are not engaged, as the romances are, in reimagining queer endings. Instead, they speak to queer ongoingness. Awake to the ways in which queer people have long carved new models for conducting life outside of heterosexual narratives, these books are invested in the ways one flips the script on the page, imposes one’s will, creates something new.
