Yesterday the inventive, genre-bending writer John Crowley died. An acclaimed author of fantasy and science fiction and teacher of creative writing at Yale, Crowley published more than a dozen novels, several essay collections, and multiple film scripts—as well as more than twenty essays with Boston Review since his first, on Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo, in 2004.
Ursula K. Le Guin called Crowley’s 1981 novel Little, Big “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” Harold Bloom named it a “neglected masterpiece.” Thomas M. Disch wrote that it was “the best fantasy novel, ever. Period.” Yet critics often kept a strange distance from Crowley’s work. In an essay we published in 2000, fellow novelist James Hynes lamented the “the curious logic of our commercially driven literary culture,” wherein “the most mediocre graduate of an academic writing workshop automatically receives the official imprimatur of ‘literary writer’ along with his or her MFA, while John Crowley’s lushly written and vastly more intellectually satisfying books are shelved, if they are in print at all, with nth-generation cyberpunks, vampire novelists, and Tolkien wannabees.”
But Little, Big is an “Important American Novel,” Hynes insists, “that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.”
A good novel must be note-perfect to succeed, but a great one can sprawl—must sprawl—if it is to encompass all the unseemly and unrestrained passion of its own ambition. The craftsmanlike novel is read the way an onion is peeled, one layer at a time, until you have nothing left; but with a John Crowley novel—well, the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Granted, half a million words on hippies and alchemists probably seems pretty big to begin with, but where Crowley’s work does show its genre roots—what he does share with the best of modern fantasists and fabulists (Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, John Cowper Powys), apart from sheer determination in the face of critical and sometimes commercial neglect, simply to persevere—is a sense of spaciousness, of depth, of the boundlessness of his imagination. What he also shares with these writers is the ability to give the reader the feeling that at any point in these novels you could make a sharp left turn from the narrative and just keep going—there’s that much world and story and mystery out there that he’s simply not bothering to show you.
Read Hynes’s whole essay, “Genre Trouble,” here, and browse Crowley’s work for BR here.
Thanks for remembering my article on John Crowley! It was the best of the articles I wrote for you guys back in the day. After it came out, I emailed back and forth a bit with Crowley. In addition to being a great writer, he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy, which is not always the case with great writers. I highly recommend the audiobook of Little, Big, by the way, which Crowley reads himself, beautifully. I'm very sad he's gone, but he's left behind an astonishing body of work which I'm looking forward to rereading. Cheers from Austin, Texas--James Hynes
John and I worked together with Carma Hinton on the narration of “The Gate of Heavenly Peace” (Boston: Long Bow Group, 1995), a three-hour documentary film about the 1989 Beijing Protest Movement. He was an extraordinary talent. Geremie Barmé