One might expect that I would be in full agreement with Melvin Jules Bukiet’s essay “Wonder Bread” in American Scholar. Bukiet takes on the current crop of Brooklyn-based writers who use fantastical elements in their fiction to achieve a certain style of happy resolution. Among these writers he includes Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, who hail from Brooklyn, and expands his net to include non-Brooklyn writers such as Michael Chabon from San Francisco Bay and Sue Monk Kidd from South Carolina. “Brooklyn is a psychic rather than a geographic designation,” he tells us, at least for the purposes of his literary analysis.

I too have written an essay condemning the lazy use of fantastical plot resolutions. It’s called “The Curse of the Transcendental Happy Ending” and it is due to appear in the next issue of Borderlands. But I am not in the least bit in sympathy with Bukiet. Allow me to explain. My antagonism to the Transcendental Happy Ending is due to it being a lazy cop-out in most instances. The full argument can be read when Borderlands comes out. But this is not to say that all writers and all books that use a Transcendental Happy Ending are lazy cop-outs. If the ending is a natural resolution that follows the logic and tone of the book that leads up to it, then there is nothing wrong with ending this way. I went to great pains in my essay to explain why this distinction is important, but to Bukiet there is no real distinction. Happy endings arrived at by fantastical events are, to Bukiet, bad endings by definition.

Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

But people do find growth in tragedy. They do it all the time. I speak to people every day of my working life who find ways of growing past traumatic events. I also know as a clinician that pain is not tautological and that the biological and emotional purpose of suffering is to teach us to avoid injury. The reason why lepers and diabetics lose toes is that they lose their sense of pain and are unable to prevent injury, which leads to necrosis. That is to say, the very function of pain is learning and self-protection.

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality.

To which I say: who made Mr Bukiet the Pope of Literature? On this score, we can exclude Pynchon, Vonnegut, Carter, Le Guin, Sterne, Cervantes, Ballard, Borges, Calvino, and many other great writers from “serious” fiction.

That’s precisely why their books are more insidious than simpler genre novels wherein people manage to triumph over trauma.

There is no correlation between “simpler” novels, “genre” novels, and triumph over trauma. Some of the simplest genre story forms are apocalyptic and unredemptive — consider post-Romero zombie plots or Planet of the Apes. And on the other hand, many of the canonical works in Western literature resolve on a triumph over trauma. The Odyssey springs to mind. Even Macbeth, one of the most bloodthirsty pieces of melancholia in the Western canon, ends with the restoration of the moral order.

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it. Your father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.

No, that is not the definition of trauma, and exactly which of these authors have gone so far as to resurrect their dead characters, unkill the Jews of Europe, or restore the World Trade Centre? These stories, even with fantastical help, never go so far as to undo trauma. What they are about is coming to terms with it. This does not put these books above criticism. They can still be mawkish and I for one could never bring myself to read The Lovely Bones based purely on its form and subject matter (accordingly, I offer no opinion on its actual qualities as a novel).

Bukiet has praise for only one of the modern wunderkind: Jonathan Lethem. Can’t fault him for that. The problem with Bukiet’s piece is not his choices or the problems he identifies in the novels he discusses, but in the prescriptive way he generates rules for what is good writing and what is bad writing — rules that are even more egregious than the offences he means to condemn. Bukiet’s rules suggest that the best literature is soaked in gloom, the sort of story where everyone is miserable and nobody ever feels better. Nothing on the radio but late Shostakovich and nothing on Broadway but Eugene O’Neill revivals.

The real is real, all right, but what we think is real is not so steadfast; misery and emotional stasis is not the default setting for good fiction; and there is nothing intrinsically simplistic or generic or wrong in stories that end with redemption, peace, or reconciliation.