Trigger warning: This newsletter discusses two novels that contain portrayals of abuse/sexual abuse of adults and minors. While it contains no spoilers and does not go into specifics, if these are sensitive topics for you, you may consider skipping this letter. If you would like to partially engage, there is a second trigger warning in the letter prior to the mention of SA.
Hey everyone!
As we near the end of the year (wild), everyone is compiling end of year lists and eagerly awaiting the release of Spotify Wrapped (not just me, right?), so naturally it’s awards season in the literary world. Two major awards just announced their winners, the Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Other things we have to look forward to before the end of the year are the New York Times 100 Notable Books and 10 Best Books lists, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and of course the inevitable sprint to reach our yearly reading goals (I’m 11 books away).
In the face of so much literature being noticed and awarded for exceptionality, I’m diving a little deeper into the question I posed in my last post about A Little Life, namely: When did we stop letting fiction be fictional?
As a disclaimer, like I mentioned last time this is a highly nuanced topic, and so I am largely going to gloss over some of the semantics that would make this newsletter an entire think piece. A big nuance here is subjectivity - of course our thoughts about books will always boil down to individual preferences and reading experience, so I’m setting this particular aspect somewhat aside, though not entirely (don’t worry, I’ll explain).
Overall, though, I’ve been getting the sense that in recent years we’ve begun to have the expectation that fiction should represent a more idealistic version of the world we are living in, and I’m curious as to why that is and whether or not it’s wholly warranted.
Now, what exactly do I mean by that? I mean that I’ve noticed books being given a value judgement as a whole for specific moments or characters or premises that readers find undesirable and/or outside of the realm of what they consider to be plausible. I think much of this judgment is subconscious, but I’ve often found myself wondering whether our current cultural climate is causing us to judge literature in ways that are detrimental to fiction as a whole.
Some of my favorite books heavily feature messy and deeply flawed characters, even going so far as to reach toxic and unlikable. I consider myself to be a deeply flawed individual, so these characters resonate with me in a way that makes the story relatable and realistic, and allows me to cultivate my empathy for these characters. That doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize their shortcomings, but it does mean that I don’t judge the entire work based solely on their presence in the story and I can still root for them to grow in their character arc.
But I’ve noticed an uptick in people completely writing off a book because there’s some aspect that they don’t like, such as they feel that one or more characters are toxic and/or lack accountability, or because they take fault with premises based on characters getting themselves into situations that the reader feels is unrealistic for one reason or another. To me, this feels different than disliking a book because you feel it doesn’t have overall literary merit (according to your standards), it’s dismissing a book because there’s some aspect of it that isn’t palatable to you.
Here’s the second disclaimer: in no way am I advocating for us to set accountability aside and go haywire in real life. Do I want to encounter a narcissist in my day to day? Absolutely not. But do I want to encounter a narcissist in my fiction? Well…kinda, yeah. An important — in fact, critical — aspect of a good story is conflict, and conflict does not naturally stem from open communication, healthy boundaries, and extremely well-adjusted individuals. In order to have the story we also need to have the mess, but my hypothesis is that we’ve gotten to a place in our society where accountability rules all and that means there is no tolerance for any type of bad behavior, even in our fictional worlds. The thing is, what would novels look like without bad behavior? And why do we expect them to reject bad behavior when we see it all around us in real life? Whether or not I want to encounter narcissists in my day to day is kind of beside the point - they exist and so I’ll encounter them. So I feel that the same should be able to hold true for novels - that we should be able to identify problematic characters and situations and still hold the truth that novels are not supposed to present us with perfect characters with zero flaws. While I’m very on board with our aim to grow as real people in the world and strive for healthy communication and boundaries, I’m actually on board for us to leave these things behind in fiction. When picking up a novel, I’ve already bought in on the promise that I’m ready to suspend my disbelief and exit reality and our societal norms along with it.
It’s also not just bad behavior. I’ve seen this dismissal extend even to minute details, like in the review I mentioned for A Little Life that includes this tidbit:
“And I just can’t let it go: lunch at obviously Le Bernardin, Willem without a jacket. No way. No man dines there who is not wearing a jacket.”
In the realm of a fictional novel, why is that detail not something you can let go? Why are we so firmly set on limiting authors to the realm of what we believe is plausible, or the rules that are set in real life? While I understand that A Little Life is taking place in a realistic world, this feels to me like we’re being overly critical of where fiction is allowed bend the rules, and if we’re starting at attire, where does it end?
It feels like this general attitude is creating an unspoken set of rules for writers to hit in order to have their books accepted without criticism of the minutiae. There is always discourse that can and should exist with any and every book, but I think that once we’re starting to judge a book because we don’t believe that a (fictional) character should have been allowed to enter a (again, fictional) restaurant when they were underdressed, we’re actually doing a disservice to our ability to accept works of literature as they are and to the writers creating them.
*The next book mentioned comes with a major trigger warning and is highly controversial.*
Now, here’s the thing: I’m not calling for a complete and total abandon of social norms and reason, so I do think authors have a certain amount of responsibility when it comes to their stories, but this is also an area where I think an author’s background certainly comes into play. All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood is a prime example of that. This is a heavy book and one that is certainly quick to draw criticism for its subject matter and its portrayal of a relationship between a minor and an adult. However, the subject matter also directly reflects the author’s lived experience. In the writing world where “write what you know” is often the gold standard, where does that leave this author if we outright reject fiction that deals with darker/illegal/taboo subject matter and deem it unacceptable? Does it mean that this author isn’t acceptably allowed to explore themes relevant to her own life and upbringing through fiction? Where does an author’s responsibility end and a reader’s responsibility begin when it comes to these topics? It’s a hazy question to begin with, but right now it feels like we’re burdening authors with 100% of that responsibility, and I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.
Another book I happen to love, The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukovsky is a modern retelling of the myth of Narcissus, and a prime candidate for harsh ratings because it gets a bad rap for being overly pretentious. My take? It’s clever, smart, and yes, very pretentious - because that’s the point. The author is taking us into a world that is inherently superficial, hypocritical, and somewhat insufferable and using that as a canvas to highlight these very same themes in the myth she’s exploring. Are her characters highly flawed and unlikable? Yes. Am I still rooting for them? At times, yes. And through it all I think her writing is intelligent, evocative, and perfectly fits the tone of the book. If we write off this book because we don’t like pretentious characters, are we then setting the expectation for writers to not depict the upper echelons of society simply because we find their existence to be problematic? If so, I believe we miss out on seeing how these aspects are deliberate choices the author made to get a point across, and then we miss out on the analysis we get to do of how that relates to our current world.
The thing is, pretty much all books (and I would venture so far as to say all good ones) are the creative products of an author’s obsessions. And creativity and obsessions are both highly subjective, so what will land for one person will be a wild miss for another. There’s no way to write a book that is true to oneself and have everybody love it. There’s no way to write a book that is untrue to oneself and have everybody love it. I feel that sometimes people miss the point that novels are as much an artistic exploration of an idea or preoccupation as the fairly bizarre album that your favorite singer puts out that is a stark departure from their previous work. Writers are making sense of the world in a way that they get to control. They are the gods of their own pages. And why shouldn’t they get to be?
I’m also not saying that we should have to blindly accept every book just because there’s some undesirable aspect in it and that makes them untouchable. Earlier this year I read Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. It’s got all kinds of undesirable aspects to it - messy characters, messy situations - and unfortunately I also think it’s just a downright pretty bad book, so much so that I gave it one star on Goodreads and I genuinely never do that. But the writing isn’t great, the dialogue is horrendous, the entire plot felt forced, and the sex scenes were juvenile in the most cringeworthy ways. That’s a book that I feel didn’t have any literary merit, not because of the characters and their shortcomings, but simply because the story itself didn’t hold up.
On my end, in order to avoid writing off a book outright because there was something about it that isn’t to my liking, something that I’m trying to keep in mind when reviewing/talking about books is setting aside all of the tiny nuances of my preferences and considering whether I believe the author successfully achieved the goal they set out to achieve when writing the book. Of course, I’m not the author, so some of this is going to be my subjective interpretation of the goal of the story, but on the whole I think it’s fairly clear to assess what kind of book you’re reading and whether you think it was successful beyond just whether or not the characters were the type of people you would want to spend time with. But that’s not to say that I do that for 100% of my review - my subjective opinion still counts for how I experienced the story, and as an individual my specific tastes will always heavily influence that. That’s useful information for someone else who knows they have similar tastes to me, and it’s also just valid because they’re my thoughts. But I think a healthy mix of trying to look at a book objectively and then mixing that with your personal opinion can be a helpful framework for assessing whether you didn’t like a book because you judged it based on a single component, or if you feel it overall has no merit and there were things you didn’t like.
If ever there was a time I wanted to hear your opinions, it’s definitely now (though truly it’s actually always!) so feel free to hit! me! up! with your thoughts on the matter as well. I’ll be back next month with a wrap-up of 2024 reading, so stay tuned!
live your best fictional life,
s
Currently reading: Autumn by Ali Smith (but I just finished Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan and I highly recommend!)