From Steven:

"I've just come back from a job interview where the committee prefaced several questions with "Not to put down mysteries, but will you be writing serious fiction?" I knew I wasn't getting the job the first time this was asked. Are English professors the guardians you're thinking about, or agents, booksellers, editors, reviewers? Or maybe all of the above?"

English professors and some reviewers, Steven. Everyone whose job it is to make sure "popular," otherwise known as "low," culture doesn't leak into and contaminate "high" culture. High culture is what the refined few understand. Low culture is what the unwashed rest of us understand. Sometimes the high culture vultures give some of the lumpenproletariat a pass: everyone knows, for example, that Italian bricklayers love opera (but it can't be that they really understand it), that Jewish cab drivers play the violin (only by instinct, though), that any uneducated black-on-the-street has jazz in his soul (but still, jazz isn't Beethoven). But that the middle-aged female members of Oprah's Book Club could understand THE CORRECTIONS? Not possible. Let them go back to reading detective novels, and leave the Literature to those who are truly superior.

No, really, it's all about class. In the US we don't have social classes, everyone knows that. So we use substitute markers. Only high-class people can understand great art, and there aren't many high-class people. Therefore if something is understood by many people, it can't be great art. I think I said that the other day, but it's worth saying again. Yes, there's a lot of crap published in the genres. There's also a lot of crap published as "literary" fiction. A crappy piece of literary fiction is, say the gatekeepers, a bad book; a crappy crime novel is a typical representative of a bad genre. Me, I hear echoes of "blacks aren't smart enough to be quarterbacks, women are too emotional to be airline pilots" in this kind of thinking. And I don't think it's just me.