Who reads this stuff?

So I'm at the airport waiting for some friends coming back from Vancouver and their flight is late. So I go over to the magazine stand and check out the novels. Most of it was the usual flashy stuff you'd expect to find at an airport.

Two novels stood out because they are clearly been designed to look "literary". Their publishers had decided to consciously distance themselves from the impulse buy marketing that was pushing all the other novels. So I checked out to see what the marketing department thinks will appeal to serous-minded travelers. Reading the descriptions, something jumped out at me.

The Hungry Season by Tammy Greenwood
It's been five years since the Mason family vacationed at the lakeside cottage in northeastern Vermont, close to where prize-winning novelist Samuel Mason grew up. The summers that Sam, his wife, Mena, and their twins Franny and Finn spent at Lake Gormlaith were noisy, chaotic, and nearly perfect. But since Franny's death, the Masons have been flailing, one step away from falling apart. Lake Gormlaith is Sam's last, best hope of rescuing his son from a destructive path and salvaging what's left of his family.

The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar
When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. But an unexpected job half a world away offers them an opportunity to start again. Life in Girbaug, India, holds promise—and peril—when Frank befriends Ramesh, a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of the grieving man's attentions. Haunted by memories of his dead son, Frank is consumed with making his family right—a quest that will lead him down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.

Wow, two novels about families in danger of coming apart over their grief at the loss of a child. Two "best-selling" novels—and not just because its says so on the cover, they don't let just anything into airport shops you know.

I'll be honest, I'd rather pull my own fingernails out with pliers than read either of these books. Perhaps I'm too cynical but I sense a category mistake: I think the writers have decided that writing about serious subjects amounts to serious writing. You can tell it isn't in Greenwood's case because she has made one of her characters a novelist. A prize-winning novelist no less. (Is there a writer anywhere who isn't award-winning?)

Alternatively, both writers know better than to think this is serious fiction but are cynically exploiting the vanity of their target market. I'd think better of both of them if that were the case.