What Is Absurdist Fiction?

One of my favorite experiences as a reader is when I recognize elements of various genres in a book that I’m reading. We often talk about the importance of reading widely, and one benefit of that is seeing how genres can bend to create even more genres.

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One example of that is absurdist fiction. Absurdist fiction is a genre of novel that explores existential themes, where the meaning of life is explored, often nihilistically, leading to feelings of meaninglessness.

Absurdism in literature became popular in the mid-20th century, predominantly in Europe, as a response to post-WWII sentiments and a reaction against romanticism. A society in dissolution after immense loss, contemplating the meaning of life. I promise it’s more fun than it sounds.

In fact, it’s actually really fun, because contemporary absurdist fiction almost always blends various genres, making it a diverse genre in and of itself.

To illustrate that fact, here are five absurdist novels that lean into different genres.*

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

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Leans: Magical Realism

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

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Leans: Satire

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: “I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since ’68 quake.” Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

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Leans: Psychological

A classic of the genre, The Stranger gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd” and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.

Severance by Ling Ma

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Leans: Post-Apocalyptic

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

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Leans: Humorous

I’m sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune.

*Descriptions provided by Bookshop and Amazon.

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