For the first time in years, I recently read a book that could probably be called pulp fiction. Or maybe bestseller fiction, as pulp fiction may be more specific. The book was Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, a thriller about cryptography. I read plenty of this sort of book in high school — Grisham and Crichton among the top authors — but switched into literary mode during college and never turned back.

While I can’t say that I found Brown’s book especially rewarding to read for its own sake, I am glad I read it because it helped me to see that there’s a huge difference between bestseller fiction and literary fiction. That’s not to say that one is objectively better than the other; they simply serve different purposes. But boy is there a big difference, and reading Brown’s book helped me put my finger on at least a part of what that difference is.

Perhaps the most obvious difference is that bestseller fiction is plot-driven, while literary fiction tends to be style-driven. I think many people tend to view literary fiction as fiction with a message, but that’s not a sufficient demarcation between the two genres. After all, any number of lessons could be taken from Brown’s book without even pulling away too many layers of the onion, and if you peer deeply enough into pretty much any piece of written work, you can interpret it to have some sort of ethical or life lesson. Bestseller fiction almost always has a fast-paced plot, and the writing itself is more or less homogenous among authors. Dan Brown and Michael Crichton are interchangeable. Only their plots differ.

William Gaddis and John Steinbeck (two of my favorites), on the other hand, differ substantially. Their tones and their cadences, the ways they break up their books, their pacing, their diction — all of these things are unmissably different between the two authors. When Gaddis tells a story, you feel as if you’re there amid the cacophony of voices; Steinbeck’s stories feel more narrated and comfortably paced. There’s no mistaking one author for the other because they’re so stylistically different. They woulld tell the same story in vastly different ways, where in bestseller fiction, I suspect the same story would be told in very similar ways among different authors.

Literary fiction also allows authors to experiment more. David Foster Wallace, for example, ends one of his books in the middle of a sentence. And some of Gaddis’s work is almost wholly dialogue. While much recent literary fiction does maintain a semblance of a plot line, it’s often not as linear and clear as what you find in bestseller fiction. Gaddis, DFW, and Thomas Pynchon provide superb examples of this. The effect is that the books are harder to read and that you wind up investing more in the reading of these books; in my experience, the bigger the investment, the bigger the return on investment.

Which is why I prefer literary fiction. I admire things that dazzle me with their complexity and ambitiousness. And so I admire the cleverness that goes into contriving the plots for bestseller fiction, but I admire more the authors who contrive such plots and present them in original and thought-provoking ways. The difference between bestseller fiction and literary fiction might be likened to the difference between a compact car and a luxury car. Both serve very useful purposes; I just happen to prefer the latter because I believe it is of a higher quality, and I derive more satisfaction from its use.

“Do I turn left or right here?” I ask. We’ve been through this intersection a thousand times. It’s within five miles of our home, and we’re usually coming from the same direction. I have already asked whether we turn left or right out of the bookstore, which we’ve also been to a thousand times, and I’m just not oriented yet.

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“da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM,” she says, flapping her hand on her leg on every second beat. “I can hear it if I take a few minutes to really think about it.” Her stumbling block is meter. Though she teaches English and is very good at it, she can’t pick out an iamb from a trochee, a dactyl from an anapest, a pyrrhic from a spondee.

             * * *

It’s strange how our faculties differ. Like a savant child, I can rattle off lines of rolling dactyllic hexameter with hardly a thought:

Tenderly fondling her breast, he assumed she had given permission.

Up in the sky was a man with a plan, a canal, and a country.

Lions and tigers and bears making love to an octogenarian.

And like an explorer or an on-board GPS system, she can decide to turn down a side road she’s never noticed before and find her way home magically in half the time it would otherwise have taken. I don’t understand how she can do it, and she doesn’t understand how I get lost as soon as I leave our driveway. Our handicaps are really very similar in nature, a matter of what we manage to remember, how we process what we perceive.

She asked recently if it would help me to have a little map on the dashboard of the places we frequent, something I could glance at to orient myself, a big X for our house, I can’t help imagining, a book icon for the bookstore, a sitar icon for the Indian restaurant we favor. I couldn’t help picturing also a big map of Knoxville unfolded and taped up to the windshield.

Interstate highways and rivers hung up like a portrait of history.

Navigate poetry navigate, poetry navigate poetry.

I wonder occasionally who got the better deal. It is unsettling to perpetually not know where I am or how to get where I’m trying to go. Hers is certainly the more practical skill, one that I admire and even at times try to cultivate, rather like a blind person trying to cultivate sight. Really, we’ve both fared alright. I, the aimless, have a constant and understanding navigator to keep me ever on course, and she, the meterless lover of words, has her own private poet.

Over lunch yesterday, I dreamed up an April Fool’s prank that I figured would freak my boss out. Some background. My boss left on Wednesday afternoon for a long weekend at Hilton Head. Tuesday evening, we had made some network changes (DNS modifications) that could very realistically, because of the nature of DNS changes, have not caused any problems until yesterday. Like me, he had been a little iffy about pulling the trigger on the changes, but sometimes you’ve just got to plunge in.

The gag, then, is to find a way to use the changes to freak him out, ideally interrupting a restful vacation afternoon. I was going to need help. So I emailed a rough plan to one of the owners of my company, who’s the immediate supervisor of my boss. Essentially, the plan was to have him call my boss on his cell phone and act angry because we had clients and prospects unable to get to our various Web services, presumably because of the DNS change. Further, when he had confronted me about it, we locked horns and I wound up storming off (which is hilarious if you actually know me; my demeanor is rather like that of the mild mannered Clark Kent, and such an outburst from me would have been about as dramatic as the change Kent undergoes when he heads for the phone booth — this was the only weak part of the prank, incidentally; I was afraid my boss would catch on right away because my locking horns with anybody would be so wildly out of character).

Sam (the owner) improved upon the plan by suggesting that we play it as if the other owner, who heads the sales team, had been showing a live demo of our services to a (real) potential high-dollar client and that things had started screwing up left and right. So it’s not even a matter of poor service to existing customers, but of cutting off potential revenue. The sales lead owner called in (so the story goes) livid and demanding an immediate resolution. To round things out, we also brought in our systems guy, who’s the only other IT staffer in the office this week and who doesn’t know much about DNS, etc.

So Sam gets my boss on the phone. He’s on the road, and Sam tells him he might want to pull over for a minute. Then he narrates in sufficiently irritated boss-like tones the scenario we had created. Then he puts my boss on speaker phone so he can bring the systems guy in on the conversation to try to describe the problem. My boss was gracious in that he didn’t badmouth my anomalous behavior, but wanted simply to work toward a resolution of the emergency issue. During the call, which was fraught with puzzlement, Sam gestured at me to run into my office and call his cell phone; when I did so, he pretended he was talking to the other owner, and of course my boss could hear it all. Finally, after some further bewilderment and attempts at remote diagnosis of the problem (my boss no doubt saw my job and his hanging in the balance), Sam busted out laughing and fessed up that we were pranking him.

It went off quite well, and I (who as noted above am thought of as the quiet guy) got comments all day long about the stones it took to pull such a prank. I think I surprised a few people. Of course, it couldn’t have gone off nearly as well if Sam hadn’t played his role perfectly. My boss’s reaction upon learning that we were pranking him was good-naturedly offensive, and I can hardly wait to rib him about it on Monday when he’s back in town.