I heard a snippet of an interview with Robert Goorlick on NPR while driving in the car. I heard a portion where Goorlick began to lament how contemporary literary fiction is too cerebral and then started to wax poetic about the physicality of his novel, Reliable Wife. You can listen to the audio by clicking here

His comment about physicality immediately put me on the defensive. He makes a fair enough point, I suppose. I certainly have a knee-jerk tendency to write overly cerebral fiction. My fiction doesn't usually exude physicality. I don't know if this is true of all contemporary fiction. Harry Crews and Charles Bukowski seemed like a couple of writers that had a certain cache in literary circles. I am not sure if I would describe their writing as cerebral.

Of course, I am speaking from a horrifically uninformed viewpoint. I have not read Goorlick, Crews, or Bukowski. (I do have a Crews novel that has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. Maybe, I will pull it out and give it a read.) Do my reading preferences tend to under-emoting fiction? I don't think so. Physical does not necessarily translate into emotional, and cerebral can certainly convey emotion. I can't think of a more cerebral story than 2001 A Space Odyssey or a less physical character than HAL 9000, and I found the sequence where HAL was shut off to be rather poignant.