Starling House and Unattractive Male Leads

This week I finished "Starling House," a novel by Alix Harrow about a spooky house in a dying Kentucky town. 

There's a lot to love here.  The prose is gorgeous and evocative.  The history of the house is presented through several different versions of the story of Eleanor Starling, the builder of the house.  The differences in the stories depending on who's telling them tell a lot about the biases in the small town and how those biases are still around to affect out main character.  The similarities in the stories give credence to which might be the "true" story.  And you know I like that kind of thing--how stories are told and retold, how they change both in their telling and in their meaning.  

Also, a large part of the story is about cleaning up a haunted house.  Down to the nitty-gritty of wiping the base boards and Windex-ing the windows.  I've been kicking around a story about cleaning up a hoarder wizard's mansion for years, so I love stories like this.

But the thing I found myself thinking about the most with this story is how the male lead is ugly.  The main character, who has a first person point of view in this story, describes him in very unattractive terms, and then straight up calls him ugly multiple times.  This does not stop him from being the love interest.  And every time it came up, I thought, "If this was a genre story, he would be hot."  You see, even though this book has magic, with nightmare beasts and a bewitched sword and dream logic and a house magical enough to change and defend itself, I wouldn't call it a fantasy novel.  

It's a literary novel.  You can tell from the slower pacing.  (The slow pacing really did slow me down.  I've had this book checked out for a while even though I enjoyed reading it.) You can tell from the rich prose.  You can tell, because the love interest in unattractive.

I think it has something to do with how this novel isn't trying to whisk the reader away.  It's not trying to be escapism.  A hot guy is escapism.  An ugly guy is realism.  Even though this book has nightmare monsters and a magic house, those are tools to tell the story of a woman on the outskirts of society in a dying town in Kentucky where the coal is drying up and classism and old prejudices run as deep as the muddy river.  I don't want to go there.  I don't want to be any of the characters.  It hurts to hear about their struggles.

In my ongoing quest to talk about literary fiction and genre fiction, I'm not strictly saying that literary fiction is "realistic" and genre fiction is "escapism."  But I would say that the two genres emphasize different goals.  And a hot love interest is a data point to think about.