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A woman wears a Handmaid’s Tale outfit, May 21, 2019, in solidarity with over 400 demonstrations across the country against the abortion ban.
I get letters. This one came from a couple in a Southern town with a population of around 700. I quote it with permission:
Oh, Rick, you get it … My husband and I are old and sitting right slap dab in the middle of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all around. They try to pull us into their discussions but we change the subject. I stopped going to church because the churches no longer teach Christ’s message, but Trump’s message. We are too old to move but if I was young I’d get out … Even if Trump doesn’t win, his followers will take up arms (Our relatives love to show off their assault rifles) much worse than Jan. 6 so either way we are screwed … Will my son lose his job as a government inspector? Will my black, gay, openly political blue neighbors be imprisoned or simply lynched the way it was done here in the ’50s or ’60s? And if so, how do I stay neutral while horrible things are happening to good people? I have no fight left in me … Sorry to rant on so long so I’ll wrap this up now. I could use your help though. How do we prepare in a practical sense? How will this affect my everyday life? How do people in Russia go on about their lives and jobs? I assume I will have to kiss ass like in North Korea in order to live but then there are some things worse than death!
I have no good immediate answers. All I can do is my best journalism to help others understand what is happening. I expect that a different sort of writer, however, can do better.
How does a small, tight-knit community, absorbing signs and signals emanating from far beyond, descend to the level of the feral? How does a religious congregation once devoted to the Prince of Peace’s call to love one’s neighbor as oneself fall prey to secular calls to make war against neighbors? What does all of this feel like, deep in people’s souls and in their bodies, on every side of this moral collapse? And what sort of things might ordinary people—again, on every side—do?
These are questions best mapped in the medium of fiction.
Think of Melville’s allegory of absolute power corrupting absolutely, within the enclosed specimen bottle of a whaler at sea. Consider Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown watching respectable townspeople gleefully consorting with the devil the minute the threshold of civilization is passed, or Arthur Miller’s Salemites searching out witches to burn. Ruminate on Tolstoy on war and peace, foxes and hedgehogs; Chekhov painting what it felt like for a shabby aristocracy to watch the world pass it by; Kafka on the most solid things one knows about the world melting to nothing, as if in a dream.
Previous generations produced masterpieces about alienated masses falling to the manipulation of demagogues, or just lashing out against their neighbors from rank existential fear and heedless emotional frenzy: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust; films like A Face in the Crowd, Ace in the Hole, 12 Angry Men, and Sweet Smell of Success; episodes of The Twilight Zone.
But what about more recently?
It has always been a colossal frustration of mine. The world all around us falling into an authoritarian maw is one of the greatest, most confounding dramas Americans have ever experienced. But where is the great fiction worthy of these antecedents—allegorical fiction, realistic fiction, fables, romans à clef, coming-of-age sagas, whatever—on that monumental subject?
There may be something conspicuous I’m missing, especially since I’ve never been much of a sci-fi or fantasy fan (maybe it’s Andor?). I don’t keep much abreast with contemporary fiction, but I did a canvass with some good sources, including the head of the book department of the world’s biggest and most prestigious talent agency. He couldn’t think of any, and asking around, didn’t come up with anything, either.
Don’t say Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America; I found it schematic, clunky, and unconvincing. Nor The Man in the High Castle, on Amazon Prime, which was so dumb I regret wasting space on this sentence.
My new friend asks: How do we prepare in a practical sense?
An excellent novel from 2015 by T. Geronimo Johnson called Welcome to Braggsville, about what happens when a woke clique of Berkeley students visits one of their Southern hometowns and stumbles on a pro-Confederate Civil War re-enactment, is excellent, but only covers a small piece of the broader canvas.
The Handmaid’s Tale might be the kind of thing I’m looking for; I couldn’t get into the series and haven’t read the novel. But I’ve always found it telling that Mary McCarthy panned it with extreme prejudice in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, characterizing the notion that the Christian right had in mind turning women into passive vessels for childbirth the ravings of a literary hysteric. I find just that kind of domestication and denial of right-wing threats, Infernal Triangle readers know by now, endemic among America’s establishment elite. Maybe because Margaret Atwood was more politically radical, and a Canadian, that hers was the sounder imagination, when it came to that.
Blurbage on the back of the incomparable Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018) informed me that this was “The first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on.” It isn’t; Trump’s rise is only a vague presence. But I did find it outstandingly illuminating on the theme of American economic precarity and how it is experienced by different generations. Just like I found the series Station Eleven (2021) outstandingly illuminating, and the 2023 The Last of Us good but not quite outstanding, on how future Americans might make sense of the climate and/or pandemic apocalypses on the horizon.
And Demon Copperhead (2022), also by Kingsolver, is superlatively illuminating on what the opioid epidemic feels like in communities, not unlike the one from which my correspondent writes. That is the kind of thing I’m crying out for on the grand subject of conservatism—one not unrelated to the subjects of the aforementioned books, but one which, for some reason, American artists seem to have skipped.
Why is there no great recent fiction about the American right? I have my theories. One is not unrelated to my suspicion that Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code may end up as the death of liberal democracy. Too much of liberal America doesn’t understand, or are bound within institutional confines that don’t allow them to understand, that conservatism is their adversary. Something that must be defeated if the most basic values that sustain a healthy society (whose flourishing too many liberals take for granted, or presume The Grown-Ups have under control) are to survive. For a way too big chunk of Blue America, the answer will always be more affirmations to “going high” when “they go low,” or that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” And from a position like that, the kind of stories that really get inside the ugliness and fright we’re now dealing with may simply sound too “divisive” and “mean,” or hysterical—just like Mary McCarthy said about The Handmaid’s Tale.
Here are more possible reasons: the political and social shallowness or indifference or navel-gazing narrowness, or a shrunken understanding of “market conditions” for this sort of thing—or maybe even a fear of right-wing backlash—among the class of people who write, edit, and publish “literary fiction.” Which are surely why, if you want to study, on the subatomic level, marriage among hyper-educated and affluent Brooklynites, American literary fiction has you thoroughly covered. But if you want to grasp the emotional and social texture of Trumpism and its conditions of possibility, America’s fiction feels to me like Hamlet without the prince.
And, I would argue, that matters. If it’s not a central component of the Infernal Triangle of forces that helped make America what it looks like now, it’s an outlying one.
My new friend asks: How do we prepare in a practical sense? Art isn’t necessarily the kind of help she’s asking for. Although it could be: To feel seen, to know one is not alone when it comes to fears that no one else seems to be adequately articulating, is a powerful fuel for resistance to tyranny and a powerful salve for existential suffering.
More broadly speaking, for the rest of us: Devouring a great novel, film, dramatic play, musical, series, song—or something else—that takes people deep within the skins of people like her and her fearsome neighbors is one of the ways we can prepare in a practical sense, in 2025 and beyond, for when things start getting very, very ugly. That binds people together in a shared understanding of it in the ways only art can. So I sure hope some great artist is sweating out a project right now.
This is the first of another two-part essay. The second will be an analysis of the one novel I’ve read that I feel like actually answers to what I’m looking for. Though it comes from and speaks to a slightly different political moment, and is intended for brows far lower than Mary McCarthy’s. I wonder if anyone writing in with their suggestions will hit on it.
To be continued …
