“You can’t live on Doritos.” That’s what one writer told me, his bow tie incongruent in the hazy atmosphere of the dive bar. “Sure,” he added, “those chips deliver a powerful crunch and a pop of flavor, but they won’t satisfy for the long haul.” He wasn’t talking about Doritos. He was talking about commercial fiction.

If you cornered three successful authors in that same dive bar without a publicist or agent or critic in hearing distance and asked if they wrote literary or commercial fiction, I bet a beer they’d say they don’t know and don’t care as long as the royalty checks keep coming.   And if you pressed, maybe plied them with a free round to explain the difference between the types, they’d probably fall back on the circular argument that literary fiction has literary merit.

Let’s say you pushed for more, beyond the tautology. Then you’d hear words like “serious” and “layered” and “elegant,” as if fiction were some ruffled gown at an ingénue’s first ball.  You’d undoubtedly also hear that the literary work is critically acclaimed and can withstand the test of time.  Beyond my suspicion that literary fiction is largely in the eye of the beholder, I start to itch at the smugness and vagueness of these definitions.

Here’s an attempt to clarify. If NPR reviews a book, it’s literary fiction. If it’s on a list of beach reads, it’s commercial.

If characters are goal-oriented and things actually happen in the novel, it’s commercial fiction. If, instead, things happen, but most of the book focuses on how the characters feel about it, not just in passing, but page after page, it’s literary fiction. And if things happen, but characters rehash what happened for only a paragraph or so, it’s upmarket.

For example, remember the miasma that emanated from the infectious tarn in Poe’s Usher story? Well, if a character notes said miasma or tarn in passing, perhaps at the beginning of a chapter as the author establishes setting, then it’s commercial. But if the character actually stops and gazes pensively into that tarn and then reflects on the deep well of despair within his own poor, aching bosom, well, that’s literary. It’s upmarket if the tarn is somehow linked to an overarching theme, such as still waters run deep.

The reader could skim the description in the first example and lose little of the plot, which would still advance apace. Not so in literary fiction. Skimming the description would be an exercise in futility, for the story is the description.  Readers are invited to “linger”—another watchword for the literary genre. Plot is incidental.

There are limpid pools I’d gladly linger in, lolling about the chapters like a tot on an inner tube. I’ll admit to diving deep and losing myself in the flow of a well-written passage. And yet I’m unconvinced such a thing as literary fiction exists.  Nooks and Kindles glow with good writing and mediocre writing and god-awful bad writing. The good writing is well paced, coherent, inventive, and compelling. It keeps the reader engaged. Now, I can be just as engaged by a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos as I can by tofu and asparagus Pad Thai. I just don’t think I’d want a steady diet of either.