Globe and Mail film critic Rick Groen had a feature essay in the weekend paper arguing that books are better than movies or TV. It seems to be a numbers game for Groen: “Over any given year in the movies, when the likes of a Pan’s Labyrinth or a Capote graces the screen, I can maybe see 10 films good enough to qualify as – I’m sorry to have to use the word – art.” Literary fiction, though, apparently produces as many as 20 books per year that deserve the “art” tag.

Groen attributes this to a number of things. First, he argues that the relatively low financial stakes of publishing encourage experimentation (though many experimental writers would probably debate that one). Groen then touches briefly on what really distinguishes literary fiction from all other storytelling – the use of language to mediate experience – but he’s more interested in content, arguing that fiction conveys “a discernible undercurrent of sadness, a recognition that the human heart is always in conflict with itself.”

Of course, that “undercurrent of sadness” should theoretically be capturable in any storytelling medium. And there are plenty of literary novels about a heart in conflict not with itself but with other people’s mean or insensitive hearts. Quillblog agrees with much of what Groen has to say, but wishes he’d focused more on the language thing.