If, as practically every commentator in the western world is rushing to assure us, we live in an age of rampant political uncertainty, then the view from one particular part of contemporary culture could hardly be more predictable.
All over America, now and for several years hence, from the campus classrooms of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the lofts of Manhattan, several hundred novelists—actual and aspiring—will be sitting down to work out what they think about Donald Trump, the political explosion that brought him to the White House and how those thoughts might eventually be accommodated in works of fiction.
For some of those writers, the challenge will be a matter of regretful necessity. For others it will be a heaven-sent opportunity. From his current eyrie in Chicago, the Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Porno etc) has already remarked that “Brexit and Trump is a cloud, but it’s a silver lining if you’re an artist. It becomes more interesting and galvanizing, and for me it’s going to be fascinating.”
The political turmoil that gave rise to Trump is already the subject of what looks set to be one of 2017’s bestsellers, Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House, advertised as an Obama-era thriller and dwelling on such subjects as political correctness and featuring a ruthless, narcissistic and media-savvy villain topped off with make-up and dyed hair.
How will that novelist from Iowa, Manhattan or anywhere else be shaping up? What exactly will he or she be writing about? And what about the publishers who support their endeavors?
Will they be joining the ‘resistance’ to these new-fangled political arrangements or simply getting on with the job of putting good books into print?
To answer questions three and four first, apart from an inevitable clamor from the radical fringe, publishers, if they have any sense, will carry on judging the manuscripts they receive on their merits. After all, a right-winger is just as capable of writing a good novel as a paid-up liberal. As for questions one and two, here anyone who has read at all widely among English and American novels of the past hundred years will want to sound a desperate note of caution.
There have been several excellent novels about the political process, but as a general rule the novelist who writes about practical politics and, in addition, depicts actual politicians (real and imaginary) going about their business is liable to fall flat on his, or her, face. So, too, is the novelist who tries to confront major political events head on.
Among the raft of post-9/11 novels, for example—these included works by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jay McInerney—the best tended to be those that dealt with consequences and by-blows—McEwan’s Saturday, for instance, set on the day of the London anti-Iraq war march. But many novels centered around 9/11 underwhelmed.
One of the explanations for this failure, naturally enough, is that, with a few prominent exceptions, the average writer has very little idea of how power works at its uppermost level. But another is that from the angle of that notional man in the street, any discussion of ‘politics’ is nearly always more effective if it approaches the subject obliquely rather than confronting it face to face.
Two of my favorite American novels of the inter-war period, for example, are James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1929-1935) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Both are highly political books—Studs is the doomed offspring of a failing Chicago house decorator; Steinbeck’s Joad family are dispossessed Oklahoma sharecroppers fleeing to the orange groves of Depression-era California—but in both cases politics itself is barely mentioned.
To young Lonigan, the sound of Jew-baiting Father Coughlin ranting on the radio or his father’s complaints at how the Irish are losing control of the city’s Democrat machine are at best incidental: as with the Joads, bullied and brutalized by a negligent state, it is left to the reader to acknowledge just how much the system is grinding Farrell’s hero down.
And for confirmation of the merits of keeping both politicians and head-on ideological assaults out of political novels, you need only to turn to the substantial collection of English fiction written either directly or indirectly about Mrs. Thatcher, during and after her long tenure (1979-1990) as Prime Minister of the UK.
With a very few exceptions, British writers and cultural figures abominated Mrs. Thatcher. They saw her as the embodiment of all the worst reactionary tendencies of the late-twentieth century, and their contempt for her very soon descended into snobbishness about her social origins (her nickname, after all, was ‘The Grocer’s Daughter’) and her supposed philistinism.
Inevitably, this dislike fed into fictional representations of ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, which are above all stagey and loaded and implausible and feature members of a ground-down underclass left stranded by her social policies sitting in front of televisions on which right-wing politicians are making speeches about free-market economics.
It’s epitomized by Michael Dibdin’s Dirty Tricks (1991) imagining the Prime Minister herself addressing her dim-witted supporters: ‘And don’t for Christ’s sake talk to me about culture. You don’t give a toss about culture. All you want to do is sit at home and watch TV. It’s no use protesting. I know you. You’re selfish, ignorant, greedy and complacent. So vote for me!’
As it happens, my parents voted for Mrs. Thatcher, and to have them marked down as selfish, ignorant, greedy and complacent by a writer who had never bothered to investigate the nature of her appeal seemed to me patronizing in the extreme.
Demonized, mythologized and rendered entirely unreal, Mrs. Thatcher is at her best in fiction when she is allowed tiny yet revealing cameos—striding the Westminster corridors in Philip Hensher’s Kitchen Venom (1997), as if stamping out imaginary cigarettes, or walking into the Notting Hill party in Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker prize-winning The Line of Beauty (2004) with what is memorably described as a ‘gracious scuttle.’
With these warnings behind them, the novelists who imagine that they could write wonderful satirical panoramas of modern American life, aggrandized over by some caricature tyrant with strange hair and several ex-wives in train, should instantly stay their hands.
My own prediction is that many of the best novels about Fortress America 2017-2021 will not be written for the next ten or twenty years. Like good wine, good books take a long time to mature.
The best ones will probably not take place in New York or DC or at the Iowa caucuses and will almost certainly not feature major-league politicians. They are more likely to be set in flyover towns in the rust-belt or forgotten valleys in Wyoming where the frackers’ drills are hard at work despoiling the water supply.
And they will probably not mention Donald Trump, Mike Pence or Sean Spicer by name.
