On May 15, the Commonwealth Foundation awarded prizes to five emerging writers — four of whom (named above) have so little by way of an online or print papertrail, someone hip to artificial intelligence might wonder if they even exist. Commonwealth has a partnership with the prestigious literary magazine Granta, based in Britain, which promptly published the stories on its website. Just as promptly, a college professor at Wharton, Ethan Mollick, suspected machine prose. Mollick ran one of the incoherently metaphored stories — “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir — through an AI-detection software and found that it was a 100% match for AI-generated text. 

Granta’s presumably human staff, the magazine says in a statement provided to UnHerd, did not read the stories beyond a copyedit. Though accusations have so far fallen on the shoulders of the unfortunate Nazir, my investigation into the similar schlock of three other finalists and their odd online histories raises discomfiting questions, as well.

For two of the finalists, DeMicoli and Miller, this contest marked practically their first hint of an internet footprint. Of course, as the traceless 20-year-old would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks proved two years ago, young people are abandoning the internet in droves. And we can all agree it’s likely that social media are on their way out. Besides, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize discovers emerging writers, and is it not brave to choose writers so emergent that there is hardly any evidence they exist, such as previous fiction available to Google, or social-media presences before 2025? No, so far this all marks a healthy, understandable civilizational development. But there are other reasons for concern.

How about that two of the pieces were graded 100% AI-generated on AI-detection software Pangram, and a third was graded 92% AI-generated? Is it possible that Commonwealth has spent nearly a week praising the literary value of AI slop, while Granta threw its brand behind the same? 

Commonwealth’s website leaves no room for doubt: these finalists were chosen from nearly 8,000 painstakingly sorted entries. The judging process was “robust,” the organization wrote in a statement provided to UnHerd: “Each story is assessed through a thorough process which involves multiple rounds of readers before progressing to the final judging panel. We select our judges for their expertise, passion for the literary community and strong backgrounds in writing.” 

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Round after round of scrupulous literary appraisal narrowed down to a select few writers of staggering talent. “Here are five writers who share an immense confidence of tone, announcing themselves from the very first line,” says jury chairwoman Louise Doughty, a novelist whose forthcoming memoir, On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love, bears the sort of title that hints at the faux-profound style the jury was keen to sniff out across the globe. 

“The style and content of each work may vary,” her statement goes on, “but what all our winning authors have in common is an ability to take their readers by the hand and lead them into a world where the characters are utterly believable, the prose assured, and the author has something important to say.” In other words, according to Doughty, the finalists are all doughty. Among these doughty and diverse voices are “a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer.” Bahhh, get me to that sheep farm!

Doughty did not return UnHerd’s request for comment.

Contrary to her claims of utter believability, many non-professional readers found the assurance that these stories were written by humans utterly and immediately unbelievable. It was not a gambol through the sheepfolds that kicked off accusations about AI, but scenes in a room where the air “clung thick as porridge skin. […] No fan, no bulb, no hum — only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”

That’s a passage from Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” and it has the unmistakable cadence of AI slop: not W, not X, not Y — but, poignantly, Z. Anyone who has ever read a news tweet by Mario Nawfal knows this style instantly. If you want to understand why Caribbean Region Commonwealth judge Sharma Taylor calls this writing “sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy,” let’s tip the scale with a further sampling of Nazir’s prose. “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.” Ah yes, a quandary I can relate to: am I really Vincenzo, or did rain take a shape and decide to keep it? This is one of those Ocean Vuong-styled metaphors that sound like they mean something. Here’s another: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a metaphor so incomprehensible you know it’s profound.

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According to the prize-winners’ page, Nazir hopes readers walk away from his tale “reflecting on the quiet consequences of choices we normalize.” A sentence that also means something, I think. Next to what many speculated was an AI-generated photo in his bio on Granta’s website, we learn that Nazir is a “prolific poet … particularly known for his love of poetry.” However, he’s taken an eight-year hiatus between publications, in which time he’s written pro-AI posts on Facebook, as well as LinkedIn. His last and only other literary footprint is a 2018 self-published collection of love poems, Night Moon Love. Of the eight enthusiastic reviews this book has received on Amazon, four reviewers had never reviewed another product, and the ones who had left reviews usually did so for items such as a junk game or cheap sneakers.   

Nazir did not return UnHerd’s request for comment, sent through Facebook. 

As for the other winners, Aruparayil has an Instagram account that was launched five weeks ago and a LinkedIn profile that had its first human interaction in 2025 and asks in its bio, beginning in lowercase, “what happens when a psychologist learns to zoom out, studies international relations, and adopts a fascination with startup ecosystems, public health, and venture capital?” Literary gold, apparently. 

Aruparayil’s LinkedIn profile may, of course, be real. The sentences in the profile frequently begin in lower case, yet her winning story, “Mehendi Nights,” was written in English (and not translated from a foreign language), and is flawlessly grammatical, nonsensically slop-ridden, and riddled with semicolons — another hallmark of machine prose. Like Nazir and DeMicoli’s stories, which are based on the personification of cities and landmarks (“the limestone remembers” and all that tripe), Aruparayil’s fictional city is one where “even the shadows seemed tired,” and the city itself “had a way of setting things ablaze when it could not understand.” The kind of writing one finds in self-published Romantasy smut on Amazon.

Nonetheless, Aruparayil’s online presence is the most robust of the four prize winners. She was a finalist for two literary prizes for Indian citizens in 2025 (the Deodar Prize and the Toto Awards; her name is on both of these organizations’ websites), and her bio on the Granta website notes that she was nominated for a prestigious PEN/Dau Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. These last honors, however, may be misleading. Any publication can nominate a writer for a Pushcart Prize or a PEN/Dau Prize. Neither organization announces short lists or long lists, so the real honor is in winning the award, and the nomination in itself is nearly meaningless. Bill Henderson, the founder of the Pushcart Prize, told UnHerd that the organization does not keep records of the “thousands” of nominations it receives each year.

John Edward DeMicoli is the winner from Malta. His bio on the Granta site says that he has published “essays on Maltese culture and heritage” that have appeared in print and online publications. These publications are not named, and no other writing of his comes up in an internet search, either in English or the Maltese language. The bio also mentions a forthcoming novel to be published by Maltese small press Midsea Books, which did not return a request for comment by press time. Holly Ann Miller, on the other hand, has a private Instagram account, and only has one publicly accessible comment on an obscure photographer’s page, rubykawitiphotography. The rest of the comments on the photographer’s photos are generic-seeming comments from other private Instagram pages. Miller, for what it’s worth, was also apparently a runner-up for the 2025 NYC Midnight Short Story Competition and the AAASL Short Story Competition. 

In an e-mail to UnHerd, a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation said that it had “confirmed that the writers do indeed exist! They are real people. The Foundation has had discussions with each author.” 

Again, this may be so. In a sense, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. Let us not repine, but instead laud Nazir, Aruparayil, DeMicoli, and Miller. Recall that I began by calling these personages heroes. Let me amend that a little. What’s possibly happened here is that someone has pulled off a brilliant hoax on the literary establishment — and that person is a hero. He or she has shown the arbiters of taste in the publishing-industrial complex to be frauds, and out of touch with the average reader, who is still able to tell the difference between slop and organic human voice, and who sides with the human, too. Hopefully, it is dawning just about now on the judges of Commonwealth that they can’t tell real writing from AI not because AI is so good at writing, but because they themselves are talentless hacks and slop addicts. 

But mark my words, besides hand-washing and under-the-bus-throwing — the second sentence of Granta’s prepared news release is “Granta editors have no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories, and nor are they involved in choosing the jury” — we are going to start seeing a lot of pieces about how this scandal proves not that the literary gatekeepers are mindless cogs in the publishing-industrial complex, but that AI is so scarily good, it will soon replace all creative jobs anyways. After all, many professional writers have been striding to center stage as of late to declare themselves proud queryers of robots, such as the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, who has shared that she she uses AI to “generate pushback on my column thesis, suggest trims when I’m over my word count, sharpen podcast interview questions.” Nobel Prize winner Olga Togarczuk recently admitted to using AI in her writing. Just imagine, how much better would Shakespeare have been if he had had a robot to turn to in creative crises?

What we actually have here is the final cloaca from the merging of two rivulets of spume and drool: the eradication of human literary voice via the publishing-industrial complex, and the three-decade-long imposition of the algorithmic voice of tech conglomerates on human writing and sensibility. In the early aughts, Google co-opted the main profit-stream of publishing: ad revenue. It became much cheaper for companies to advertise on Google search-result pages than in newspapers and magazines. Thus, with ad revenue slashed, such outlets had to start ranking high on Google through a practice called search-engine optimization to stay afloat and be read. 

The writer was not hooking a reader anymore with an anecdotal lede, but hooking Google’s algorithm, which prioritizes algorithmic styles of writing, styles of writing that a computer can understand and parse. We have been reading and writing in this medium for three decades, watching the birth of the one-sentence opening paragraph — a contradiction in terms — in journalism, and the extinction of voice and style across all genres. AI writing itself has been trained predominantly on this dumbed-down anti-style, which is why it strains so comically hard for metaphor. In the 1960s, when the inevitability of this future became clear to cultural commentators, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that technology itself had become a medium of perception. After three decades of surveillance capitalism we can conclude that we have entered an environment in which the concept of the “audience” as we know it is no longer made up of humans, but of technology itself. 

The only reason AI has a chance of replacing mainstream writing (and hoodwinking “professionals”) is because for the last 30 years, algorithmic rules of writing have devolved the style and quality of most mainstream prose so as to be near indistinguishable from computer-generated writing. It has lowered us to such a point that the gap between man and machine is no longer so far to leap. Thus, in the “post-colonial” endeavor to pick diverse voices, the Commonwealth judges may have picked fabrications of the most malignant, surveillance capitalistic technology the West has ever conceived of. The medium is the message, and in this sense, the judges may have picked the only thing they can understand: the industrial rules of surveillance capitalism. Their cage.

And if all of these finalists are real, and their work is their own, their writing operates by the same rules, and is still trash. Of the five finalists — one of whom is the verifiably real Lisa-Anne Julien, who has been published since 2021 and appears animated and otherwise alert and not-computer-generated in videos — the overall winner will be announced on June 30. For my money, I like Nazir’s work the best.

I try to book a walking tour online. But it will only take bookings for two — so technically Jane Austen wouldn’t get on her own walking tour. I book another and, by the Pulteney Bridge, I meet a young American woman who is impersonating the heroine of a Netflix Christmas film. She bounces up in curls and bobble hat and duffle coat and announces she has just finished Pride and Prejudice. Her praise, though, is understated, baffled even. She understands that Austen is a brand now and Bath is a city of brands: Cos; Mountain Warehouse; the Romans. But my Netflix friend is still a seeking woman: an Austen heroine. We all are, and that’s the game. Austen offers not a portrait but a mirror, and a woman reads Austen not to find Austen, but herself.

The tour is guided by an ancient German émigré who lives in Chippenham and is also, I think, in his Sunday best. As he takes us round — the house in Sydney Place, which is in denial about being Austen-related, almost sulking; Trim Street, which was too rough for Austen; the house in Gay Street — he treats her like another edifice of the city. In his words, she might be an abbey or a Roman bath: you can just get in her.

He is filled with detail, not sensibility. I think of Charlotte Brontë’s criticism of Emma: “anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works”. But Austen was English, and she spoke to the speechlessness of the English: Brontë was half Cornish and half Irish. So we stare at the house on Gay Street, and we do not talk about whether Mr Darcy would be a hot fuck, though I think he wouldn’t. All Austen’s heroes are duds, except Captain Wentworth of Persuasion (“you pierce my soul”) but it doesn’t matter what I think, because Austen wrote someone for everyone. Hilary Mantel was writing a novel about Mary Bennet when she died.

Austen had stupid children in novel form: the Bridgerton siblings of the novels, now a Netflix juggernaut. The Bridgerton tour is led by an angry man from Surrey who I doubt has read all six novels. This is testament to Austen’s reinvention as theme park: anyone can have a go on her. The Bridgerton novels take the Austen aesthetic and run wild, mostly with lilac. They are pleasing and mindless and they speak to those who travel to their idea of Regency England for the clothes, and the comforting truism that, here, women do not work. Empire line is easy to replicate and flattering. A big girl — Penelope Featherington, who featured in the TV version — can look as good as a slender one, or better. Bridgerton also gives us the sex Austen denies us. Martin Amis, who wrote that he “wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion [to Pride and Prejudice] — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well”, would have liked Bridgerton.

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We fight our way through the Christmas market and our guide has a stand-off with carolers by the Colombian Coffee Company. We do a quiz as we follow him up Pulteney Street and the winner gets three out of 20 right and wins a bar of chocolate. This is Janeland as numbing out.

The true addicts are at the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, which has quotations from the novels on the back of the toilet doors. Austen lived a few doors up the hill at No 25, but when the centre tried to move to that house, the dentist tenant resisted them, which means people with toothache are stared hard at by Janeites, who then move on to the exhibition here. The door to the centre is manned by Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey, who I always liked because he is funny. There is a male cast roving around the centre — Mr Bennet, Willoughby, Wickham — but they don’t dare have Mr Darcy for fear he might be groped by Janeites.

The gift shop sells a Pride and Prejudice photo casebook featuring hamsters in bonnets. Even hamsters can’t resist Jane. Or you can buy an Elizabeth Bennet bath duck or a Captain Wentworth Christmas decoration. Or Jane Austen bingo. Or, elsewhere in Bath, Jane Austen’s Christmas. Or Jane Austen’s Wardrobe. I meet a woman who has an Austen tattoo and another who reads Sense and Sensibility when, and only when, she is unhappy. Austen isn’t just an analgesic, of course, but she’s the best. Amis complains that she sets her bad girls loose, and this is “the limitations of her art” — Lydia Wickham, only 15, who believed in Wickham just as Lizzy did, is exiled without a tear — but you can hardly tell a (female) national novelist who to love, and who to push off the page.

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The Janeites pass through in a reverential hush because they are communing with a god. I meet young women who bonded through a shared love of the novels — she guided their friendship— women who go to Austen for her feminism and women who go to her for her femininity. This is Jane Austen as life coach. At the town bookshop, I find a compendium of her wisdom called Janesplains. All her writing is how-to-be-a-girl, among the things girls want — houses, clothes, and love. And they send letters of thanks: “Dear Jane, thank you for your writing”; “I’ve found my Mr Darcy! Thanks for sharing the blueprint”; “You’re the best!”

Of the true addicts, the very truest have tickets to the Yuletide Ball at the Pump Room: I heard the tickets sold out in eight minutes. I get there early and stand outside — no press is allowed; press is a modern intrusion — and stare through the window at women setting up the ballroom in a kind of trance. Their movements are over-deliberate, and over-graceful: they would pull the curtains on the world if they could. Soon, the guests gather outside in the mandatory Regency costume, alongside the drunks in Christmas sweaters, and when Christmas drunks approach them to ask them to take photographs for them the Janeites look astonished. It’s the intrusion. These women — all women, a few with hostage husbands — are clearly, though temporarily, not living in this world. The Janeites are the most functional of all obsessives and so, like her, are the most socially acceptable. They are racing back in time to 1812, but they pause to tell me that, “her stories relate to women even now”, or “I am here for the sarcasm”, or “She was a Feminist!” or “the characters learn from their mistakes”. The older ones love Persuasion, the purist’s favorite, because it gives a woman love late in life, and that is incomparable solace. (Anne was 27.)

As I leave, a round young woman in a red cape runs past me, ducks round the Christmas tree and sprints into the ball. She has flushed cheeks, is laughing with happiness and for some reason she reminds me of the woman dressed as an owl I met a furry convention many years ago. As a woman she was ordinary. But then I saw her as an owl with vast eyes — from a Coca-Cola bottle, she told me happily, which she painted — and, as an owl, she was a god. Both owl and Janeite in red cape have the same quality of power found and held. And I think that is Austen’s essential message: not love, not by itself, but self-possession.

Today, one distinctive kind of bullshit is generated when a leading literary luminary (usually a novelist) is commissioned by a high-minded magazine (usually American) to pontificate at length on a political issue, or worse, cultural “moment”. The genre showcases the novelistic treatment of contemporary politics. And though the sentences are usually syntactically clear, and the articles, at first sight, apparently thesis-driven, the reader quickly remembers that appearances can be deceptive. The characteristic sleight-of-hand of this brand of bullshit is, under the pretense of heading toward a sophisticated conclusion, to assert virtually nothing at all. If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights, usually by burying them under a heap of diversionary material.

Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, exemplifies the genre to a tee. It is a well-packed flower press of literary bull pats. Though better known as the award-winning writer of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith has found a new groove — or rut, depending on your point of view — in churning out think pieces for high-minded longform publications, on everything from the Middle East, to the 2024 presidential election, the immigration crisis, Stormzy, Tár, and the wayward political influence of Silicon Valley. Reading them is enough to make me wonder whether English students should not be educated in the style of firearms officers: provided with the basic skills of the trade only under the heavy proviso that they will hopefully never have to make use of them outside the classroom.

Dead and Alive? Even the title is faintly annoying. But Smith’s passing over the more naturally disjunctive “dead or alive” in preference for a title that needlessly flirts with inconsistency is wholly in keeping with the spirit of her essays. These, she admits, “tend to employ a lengthy and sometimes oblique way of thinking”. Smith is by her own admission suspicious of the kind of “clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences” she associates dismissively with social media, certain styles of politics and journalism, and academic writing. She admires prose that is “serpentine, hard to parse”.

Of course to the uninitiated reader the effort to valorize unclarity and circumlocution might look like just that: the attempt to present as a stylistic virtue what is in fact a literary defect. And it’s an approach that’s got Smith into trouble before, most notoriously in March last year, when a New Yorker essay of hers, “Shibboleths” (re-collected here), seemed to many to draw several shaky moral equivalences between the norms appropriate to warfare and those appropriate to campus politics.

But that essay is a much more confused object than that parsing of it suggests, and quite representative of the collection in that respect. To her, Columbia University’s anti-Israeli protestors were both “heroic” and in the grip of motivations that were “cynical and unworthy”. In one critical posture, Smith finds the arguments of both sides vapid and politically impotent: “All of that was just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.” Then, taking up another diametrically opposed stance within the space of a few paragraphs, she grandiosely reminds her reader that, in this political arena, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”. What, then, the reader is left thinking, does Smith think words are? “Unreal” and “meaningless”, or WMDs? They can’t be both, surely? Most likely, they are neither.

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Smith is in fact a talented draftsman of tendentious moral equivalences and assorted analogical relations of doubtful standing. Aren’t the “parallels between twenty-first-century climate denialism and nineteenth-century rationalizations of plantation slavery” vivid? Isn’t Elon Musk’s twitter algorithm a bit like Nazi propaganda, only more effective? Participating in the celebrations of England fans at the World Cup, Smith is reminded of “Nazi delirium” yet again. Uncontrolled immigration may seem to be a political problem, but aren’t “all human social arrangements… inherently problematic”? Almost always, these wild inter-connections serve to obstruct, rather than clear the way for, a developing line of thought. In fact, Smith is disarmingly upfront about her lack of argumentative ambition in Dead and Alive. “All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like”: that kind presumably being vaguely paranoid, flighty, and easily morally distracted.

Sometimes, the intellectual morasses Smith traps herself in concern her own specialism — language itself. Possessed of the writer’s occupational hazard, she overestimates how many political and social problems are fundamentally linguistic in nature. On cultural appropriation, she writes: “What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not ‘cultural appropriation’ but rather ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ or ‘profound other-fascination’ or even ‘cross-epidermal reanimation’? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even furious – but I’m certain they would not be the same.” To give Smith credit where it’s due, a world in which a phrase like “cross-epidermal reanimation” had successfully entered the popular lexicon would indeed be a very different one, perhaps unrecognizable.

When prompted, perhaps by an editor, or her own residual nagging sense that something recognizable as a conclusion is owed to the readers of her meandering think pieces, Smith’s response can be a superior kind of outrage that she should be called upon to affirm anything as vulgar as a settled position. She huffily concludes her Gaza piece: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” With the possible exception of “useful”, the risk is that the reader will take Smith up on her thoughtful invitation, and apply all of these, not exactly mutually exclusive, labels to her in light of her painful, self-regarding style of equivocation.

Smith isn’t even very consistent on the question of whether everything is complicated. You see, some things, according to her, are shockingly simple. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong things. Addressing a crowd of Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered on Tufton Street, London’s home of free-market think tanks, Smith denounces “common sense fiscal conservatives” (to her mind, apparently, anyone who thinks environmental factors should be balanced against economic interests in determining climate change policy) as unequivocally “evil”. Moreover, those “tech” bros who believe climate change should be met with technological innovations are “purely sociopathic and ideological”. The various protestors committing criminal offenses under the aegis of Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, are bravely taking on a “level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us”.

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Unimaginable, that is, including to Smith. She is quite adept at pulling off selective failures of imagination when the moment calls for them. When invited to commit “an arrestable offense” by her fellow protestors, Smith has, hilariously, to decline. Risking arrest or conviction, you see, would make flying to New York so much trickier, perhaps even “impossible”. In fact, despite declaring that she is “trying to fly less”, scattered clues in Dead and Alive suggest that Smith spends a lot of time in the air, suspended midway across the Atlantic. London, New York, Germany — then off to Austria to collect a literary prize and make some more remarks about the alarming “rightward turn” of politics. The metaphorical richness of this repeated image — the celebrity novelist, entirely ungrounded, resolutely detached from reality — seems not to register with her.

Those cascading frequent flyer points are not the only respect in which Smith fails to live up to her own evaluative ideals, nor in the end the most damning either. As she indicates in an early essay, the simple heuristic by which she is disposed to assess artistic work is the simple question, “Is it interesting?”. Yet, time and again, Smith falls hopelessly short of that standard. Should the reader go to the sometimes considerable effort of extracting her background political positions from the thicket of evasion and complication, virtually nothing beyond the boilerplate, politically preening and utterly unserious is to be discovered. Her incidental political remarks are sub-Guardian-esque.

The Tories “want us to return to a medieval feudal state” and are only interested in “making millionaires billionaires”. Stormzy is what a real “leader looks like”. Smith is bemused to see shoplifters on British high streets: “people seizing their reparations from global capitalism and walking straight out the door.” She lambasts Boris Johnson for “partying” while people’s “relatives died of Covid”. She uses the phrase “differently abled”, apparently without irony. Once or twice, she accurately senses that she is “irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present”. She longs for the “glory days” of the NHS in the late Nineties. She is a sentimental pessimist about AI. She shuns social media — the glow of the iPhone screen is to her a “deathly Palo-Alto-late-capitalist-consciousness-colonizing-sickly-blueish-light”. Perhaps she is also vaguely aware that in the straight-shooting discursive world of online commentary, the wilfully “oblique” takes of literary luminaries might be more easily unmasked as the often irrelevant contributions they are.

As the reader may have come to anticipate, Smith can’t make her mind up on the question of whether artists and writers ought, actually, to be interesting. (One “myth” she suddenly seeks to puncture is that “the great writer is somehow inherently more interesting than other people. He has a unique consciousness, a special way of seeing. We reward him with a book contract. I don’t buy any of that.”) Unfortunately, simply releasing oneself, however contradictorily, from the obligation of being interesting is not a way of becoming so. In fact, it is a way of being quite dull. You can see why magazine editors might see it as an inspired commission to have a prized writer weigh in on current events: the promise that the drab materials of workaday journalism will be elevated under the novelist’s unpredictable, imaginative gaze. Of course, a danger is that the process leaves you with the vices of both genres, and the virtues of neither.

The ambivalent, paranoid John le Carré vibe is well suited to the present moment in a multipolar world — the feeling that previous certainties can’t be relied upon, and everything is slowly going to the dogs. The narrator in the Smiley books isn’t sure that the two sides fighting the Cold War are so very different: the West is capable of atrocities, betrayals, and fumbling cock-ups, just as its enemies are. These days, the logic works in reverse: maybe the West isn’t as bad as we thought; or maybe the alternative is worse. Either way, there is moral ambiguity and decay everywhere we look.

Like me, it seems that le Carré’s youngest son likes to live in the downbeat world his father created, and now hewants more people to join him there. Last year, Nick Harkaway – already a successful science fiction writer – published what is known in the trade as a “continuation novel” called Karla’s Choice. This filled in some of what George Smiley and other members of the Circus were getting up to in the mid-Sixties, between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This week, it was reported that Harkaway is encouraging other writers to bring “new stories into this same world”; for, he says, “the world of Smiley is richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show”.

Harkaway’s invitation is to be found in a book accompanying a new exhibition about his father, which opened this week at the Bodleian library. Oxford is the obvious place for such an event: Smiley’s “spiritual home”, as le Carré put it; the city where he himself spied on far-Left groups as a student, and where his double agent, Bill Haydon, first turned towards communism. Former intelligence officer Connie Sachs still sits there in her shabby front room, offering reminiscences of Moscow in exchange for whiskey. Harkaway says he is trying to “open the gates” to such cloistered places, adding that since he has already “claimed the Smiley universe, the next person doesn’t have to be so afraid”.

In the original Smiley universe, barriers to entry — social, political, physical — loomed large. At the end of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, protagonist Alec Leamas dies trying to climb over the Berlin wall. A psychoanalyst would presumably have a field day with a son who jumps over the wall of the story-world belonging to his celebrated father, then opens the gates from inside to invaders — albeit that Harkaway says le Carré “implicitly” authorized him to do so before he died. Or maybe it’s just an extension of the passionate anti-Brexit stance Harkaway has taken elsewhere, again echoing concerns of his famous parent. No literary landscape is really an island; incomers can only do good; there is enough land here for all.

Karla’s Choice is certainly an entertaining ventriloquist act. There’s a familiar sort of plot, prioritizing individual loyalty to people rather than to nations. There are the trademark bits of compressed dialog, heavy with inhouse spy jargon, bluff schoolboy jokes, and English self-consciousness: what William Boyd has called the “Pall Mall clubman’s patois”. And there are also the weirdly emotional monologues, during which otherwise repressed characters suddenly unburden themselves inexplicably upon their embarrassed confessor, Smiley, who simply blinks a lot and purses his lips sepulchrally in return.

But there are also differences. I spotted a few anachronisms when I read Harkaway’s book: a reference to someone “feeling his religion”, and to the state exercising “coercive control”. More importantly, as others have noted, there is an absence of the biographical preoccupations that keep bubbling under in actual le Carré plotlines: real-life fury towards a feckless conman father, a mother who abandoned him at the age of five, humiliations wrought by the English public school system. In Harkaway’s telling, for instance, Smiley’s wife, Ann, is comprehensible and even sympathetic. She is not acting as she does in the original books, like a sadistic nymphomaniac cartoon. Smiley’s stuffed shirt colleagues are not slyly goading him about the state of his marriage on a daily basis. There isn’t the same feeling that the people around you could maliciously betray you at any time.

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The God complex of Muriel Spark

By Kathleen Stock

In short: without his father’s simmering psychological intensity to justify the latent melodrama, Harkaway’s book at times gets perilously close to camp pastiche. The son may have his own Oedipal issues — and don’t we all — but they are different from the father’s. And they make for a different sort of imaginary landscape, even if Cambridge Circus and the Bodleian are still present in both.

You might say: so what? New Miss Marple or James Bond books come out all the time. Continuation novels are just a lucrative version of fan-fiction, and many readers enjoy the results. And anyway, hasn’t le Carré’s vision been reinterpreted by the performances of Alec Guiness and his fellow actors in the masterly TV series from the Seventies and Eighties? Indeed, isn’t the writing of a continuation novel just another kind of adaptation? According to Harkaway, le Carré himself found Guinness’s performance “so overwhelming that he could no longer hear the character, only the actor”. Why then worry about new versions of old characters on the page?

But it’s one thing to interpret a character made of words for a visual medium; or even just to imaginatively slot the presence of George Smiley into your afternoon walk on Hampstead Heath. In both cases, you are making the original creation more vivid, and paying proper tribute to its owner. In contrast, by treating literary characters as things to be passed around to other writers and placed in interesting new positions, effectively you are implying their creator’s achievement was pretty limited to start with: most of the aesthetic value concentrated in parts to be extracted, and not in the unique and irreplaceable whole.

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The lost New York of Henry James

By Colm Toibin

Naturally enough, Harkaway doesn’t see it this way. He gives us a vision of a fictional universe that is concrete and specific like the real one, containing “richer and wider” detail than his father could ever have conveyed on his own; as if both authors were like historians, giving their readers a partial glimpse of people and events already in existence. But in fact, a better analogy for what he is doing is with the forging of oral folk tales, each new teller adding to a collectively wrought world. The characters in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy now have personal histories that include the embellishments of Harkaway, albeit that le Carré wrote that book shortly after Harkaway was born. If additional authors take up the invitation and place Smiley, Guillam, and co in fresh predicaments, their versions too will retrospectively inflect the narrative whole. And in theory, the contribution of the very latest skillful tale-teller might conceivably be as great as that of the first one — assuming you can even remember his name.

In practice, of course, it is unlikely to go this way. Not feeling a baleful parental eye upon them, other writers are less likely to be as fastidious as Harkaway in trying to get the characters right — though of course, AI will always be there to help. But in any case, what is “getting the characters right” once you have downgraded the originator to a mere collaborator in a shared project? In opening wide the gates of his father’s creation, Harkaway has invited potential vandalism, by people who don’t properly understand the culture there. Poor Smiley — it seems he really can’t rely on anything staying the same.

It’s hard to quantify what a bad book is but you know one when you read it. Frey was smart enough to avoid some of the self-pitying clichés of the form but not the swamp of sentimental gloop that underlies every fallen tough-guy act on the page. The book is histrionic to the point where the only enjoyment I could salvage was to hear the clipped portentous sentences (“I am blinded by blackness. I am gone […] My eyelids fall”) in the voice of Charlton Heston’s incarnation of Moses in The Ten Commandments. It is resplendent in self-absorption yet bereft of self-awareness. Above all, there is something about the tone, or the voice that doesn’t ring true, especially if you have some knowledge of those junk-sick netherworlds. The implausibilities begin from the first paragraph with Frey, confused and clattered in various bodily fluids, making it through the check-in queue with no knowledge of doing so, only to awake on the flight with this suspect peach of an opener, “How did I get here?” It’s all too neat, convenient, theatrical, and reads like how someone would imagine a drug story to be. The publishers fell for it, maybe because this is how, from a safe and insulated distance, they imagine that lifestyle to be.

The Smoking Gun had suspicions and published the article “A Million Little Lies”, claiming a great deal of the fearlessly verité nonfiction account was fabricated. Having been exalted on Oprah’s show, Frey was all of a sudden rumbled a la Eyes Wide Shut and ominously summoned back, a different kind of gaze now upon him. “I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you,” Oprah began, “because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” Much of what follows is painful to watch, though also far more compelling and hilarious than A Million Little Pieces.

The most astonishing comments, though, came not from the author but his publisher Nan A. Talese, who cited the book’s “authenticity” as the reason she bought the manuscript. Authenticity was the very quality that it lacked. However, its phoniness went undetected. Another revelatory line came courtesy of Oprah who was aghast that the collapse in ethics might facilitate, god forbid, the dystopian scenario that “anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say this is my story”. The reality is that stories from the edges of obliteration are by their nature chaotic, compromised, and rife with lies and indignities, all of which would be infinitely more “authentic” than the abject display of false virtue witnessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in the performative book it first championed and later denounced.

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Make Catholicism weird again

By Darran Anderson

“This is my truth,” Nye Bevan used to say, “tell me yours.” This points to the crucial subjectivity of memory, the very basis of memoir, but also demonstrates an openness and unwillingness to police others, acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions with which we each imbue our real stories of the past, frailties that we do not afford others. Interviewing two of my aunts while researching an event they experienced during the Irish Troubles, I watched a spirited conversation erupt about the veracity of a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, a detail so slight I cannot recall what it was. Each swore her version was true. And at no point did I believe either was lying. This kind of honest ambivalence is normally unwelcome in literary circles, where authenticity is not something you embody; instead, it is something you sell. What is required by the industry (for it is more industry now than art) is agony followed by redemption. The deeper and more salacious the turmoil experienced, the greater the pleasure aroused in a voyeuristic reader.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn might seem to be at the other end of the spectrum from the detumescent machismo of A Million Little Pieces. Yet they share more than the disgrace in which they are mired. The Salt Path is a more agreeable elegiac read, mainly because nature is an endless repository of poetry and can be leaned on when talent or vision is wanting. The book about a middle-aged couple, one with a terminal diagnosis, who are evicted from their Arcadian home and then take to the road, sold over two million copies and has recently been adapted as a movie.

Again, success brought unwanted attention. Self-regard and an inclination towards pomposity are not unusual to memoirs, but using the opening lines of The Odyssey as an epigraph is inviting trouble. The book is touching at times but cloying at others. It wobbles in its encounters with others that feel unlikely, the language and sentiments unnatural. As in Frey’s book, there’s a lot of occasionally ludicrous self-mythologizing. Where his was mock-infernal, hers is mock-Edenic. Its arc, like Frey’s, is one of formulaic redemption, despite both feigning to deny it. Is this the message required by a publishing industry whose design is to entertainingly soothe or even sedate, rather than genuinely illuminate?

A newspaper investigation, by Chloe Hadjimatheou for The Observer, has questioned numerous aspects of Winn’s story, from their financial conduct to the gravity of Moth’s illness. Winn has denied the accusations, and defended the veracity of the “physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives”. We may never know what is true and false. Intriguing, though, is the sense of betrayal currently reverberating through the literary establishment, a grievance that perhaps tells us more about the aggrieved than anything else.

The affront Frey and Winn seem to have caused among the literati is not merely that they may have told half-truths. On the surface, there are genuine and well-placed concerns that nonfiction must be objective and verifiable. Memoir is, however, reliant on memory, which is subjective and unreliable. And they have exposed the whole misery memoir genre for what it is: a money-spinning opportunity and an exercise in trauma porn. The outrage is partly down to the fact publishers paid for the tender delicacy of suffering and were cheated out of it. The gladiatorial battle they were baying for was only a rigged wrestling match. The authors in question will be treated as aberrations, in order that the publishing industry, which has courted and encouraged tall tales, continue to appear noble. Yet the adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” remains evergreen. There will be PR motivated calls for due diligence, of course. But will there be any calls for a vampiric industry to examine its own motives?

I know the publishing game fairly well, having written a memoir several years ago about growing up during the Troubles. It was based around an Oulipo idea of Georges Perec, whereby stories are told via objects. I called the book Inventory after the list of objects that made up my chapters — a deliberate double meaning, an admission that there was always going to be some degree of invention to the creative process. I would be an unreliable narrator, even to myself. Objective facts were sacrosanct, especially the dead, but interpretations and recollections inevitably varied. Leaning into this uncertain complexity felt more truly representative of the political and social fabrications that surround us. A memoir does not and cannot recreate the past but instead creates a simulacrum of it. “Memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.”

In writing about Northern Ireland, I was quite aware of what I was undertaking. There is a cultural omertà there (“the tight gag of place,” as Seamus Heaney called it); writers are regarded as something between a spokesperson, a thief, a liar and a snitch. And every time I tried to approach the topics of conflict, division, poverty etc, people (including family members) would become understandably protective, territorial and evasive. So I braced myself for the inevitable backlash after it was published, which of course occurred. The last lines of “24 Hours from Tulsa” regularly replay in my head: “I can never, never, never go home again.” And it was my own fault for stirring up what had been laid to rest stirred and for piercing coping mechanisms. After a year of barely speaking to my father because of my book, no sooner had I helped to place his coffin in the hearse than I felt a tap on the shoulder from someone who wanted to discuss something I’d written in it. And it struck me how unprepared most writers are, how little counsel the industry gives, and how many of my writer friends have been encouraged to tell a certain exposing type of story, to publish and be damned. And, sure enough, they have been damned.

It fits with a wider trend whereby working-class, ethnic minority, gay, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent writers are expected to write (and sometimes only permitted to write) about those “issues”, while those higher up the social hierarchy are allowed free rein to write about anything. Marginalized identity and trauma are currency. In my case, I’d ended up writing Inventory after my previous book Imaginary Cities had caught the attention of mainstream publishers. Many were keen to listen to my ideas for half a dozen books in that spirit. Nevertheless, virtually all came to the conclusion that the Troubles were all I was fit to write about. It didn’t matter if I had an audience or a voice for something entirely different. I had to stay in the box assigned to me. My compromise was to try and expand the box as much as possible — hence the Oulipo approach — but the box remains and has ever since. So long as the desires for comfort, virtue, redemption, consolation and the status quo prevail, actual authenticity will always be of secondary importance. This is primarily because truth isn’t pretty or palatable. Orwell was onto something when he wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

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Joan Didion's insufferable disciples

By John Maier

No one has done more to establish that redemption-fixated literature which clogs up the bestseller lists than Oprah Winfrey. How appropriate to see her at the wedding of Jeff Bezos, whose company has caused the extinction of countless independent bookshops. It made me realize that the televised struggle session between Oprah and Frey had not been about justice. It was a humiliation ritual, and a cleansing on behalf of an exploitative cultural establishment.

For it’s one thing to lie in a book, it’s quite another to sustain an industry on untruths. And the deception reaches all the way down the food chain to the bookshops Amazon hasn’t yet managed to wipe out. Having worked at a succession of them over the years, I know that the more corporate and mainstream they are, the more corrupt they tend to be. Only one example of this is handselling, whereby a customer would ask booksellers for personalized recommendations. At stores across the nation, there were tally sheets hidden below the counter, encouraging us to sell one of a handful of preordained titles from on high. Deals had been struck with publishers for discounts and favorable terms, if we pushed these orchestrated “word-of-mouth” successes: targets had to be hit.

All of the chosen books were on characteristically middlebrow themes, to the point it felt like social engineering. Each store competed with others to sell the most and managers would drag booksellers over the coals for not hitting quotas. In this way, aided by a cliquish literary criticism industry, the success of certain books has been astroturfed, and an orthodoxy is implanted where characters are always good at heart, life is some centrist fantasy, and narrators find the flattering lessons they want to find — with some quarantined space set aside for the more uncouth writers to flog their trauma and identities. This is what the audience wants, publishers claim, despite the fact that the entire scenario has been covertly manufactured and readers have been duped.

In such an environment you will always get grifters and the sloppy ones will be scapegoated to legitimize it all. Pearls will be clutched over deceptive practices but the appetite and the grift will remain, for as long as publishing remains so unrepresentative of how most people live in this country. Until that hermetically sealed publishing world democratizes, fictional nonfiction will always be incentivized and will always reappear. And readers will be forced to be voyeurs and then jurors rather than being allowed the freedom of reading writers who are allowed to be writers.

In their memoirs, almost all of which read like giddy schoolboy confessions, the accent has always lain on personal experience, but what they describe is in fact a broader social change. “You’re not special,” they make one want to scribble in the margins. Indeed, the move from Left to Right is, in a nutshell, the story of the 20th century. It may well be an iron law of history that no society emerged more Left-wing from it. The change in meaning of the words “social democracy” is a reliable index of this world-historical shift: in the first third of the century, a social democrat was practically a communist; in the second, something of a Keynesian; in the final third, a brazen Blairite.

What sets apart Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel-winning novelist who died on Sunday, aged 89, from his Left-leaving peers is the completeness of his transformation. While he shared some vestigial commitment to democracy and equality — both of a piece with the general repertoire of Cold War liberalism — for most of his post-conversion life, he began to rapidly slough off these wimpy beliefs towards the end of his days. By then he was a poster-boy of the hard Right.

In his youth, Left sympathies came naturally to Vargas Llosa. While he was a member of the mezzanine class, an untypical upbringing in Arequipa, Peru precluded any simple identification with the bourgeoisie. His father was a martinet, who abandoned young Mario and his mother, only to brutally reinstate himself 10 years later. The return was not a happy one. A macho type, Mario’s father had him sent off to a military academy to become a man; the son’s bookishness apparently was taken as “proof of homosexuality”. The experience left him scarred and hostile to all manner of authority, parental and state included. Democratic Marxism, rejecting both the patriarchal family and military authoritarianism, was of obvious appeal.

A trio of novels followed, cementing his reputation as a communist writer of promise in Lima’s Left circles. Their presiding spirit appears to be the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who welded the class struggle with indigenous millenarianism. Vargas Llosa’s debut, The Time of the Hero (1963), took aim at the military academy, depicting a dark world of racism and casual violence. In it, the scions of the ruling class murder a hapless cadet and gang-rape a chicken. The book enjoyed a succès de scandale when Peruvian nationalists burned it as a work of Ecuadorian propaganda; the two countries had fought a war in the Forties, and any domestic criticism in Lima was taken to be malicious disinformation emanating from Quito. The Green House (1966), too, served up a small fresco, this time taking in a worm’s-eye view of the Church, military, and political class during the dictatorship of the US-backed Manuel Odría from the bowels of a brothel. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) complicated that picture with an upstairs-downstairs dynamic worthy of Joseph Losey; the title was a misnomer, referring to a bar-brothel of that name, where an upper-class hack converses a chauffeur. Along the way, Vargas Llosa bitingly takes in the snobbery and corruption of Lima’s rulers.

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By Pratinav Anil

The Seventies saw Vargas Llosa turn his back on communism, though this was no Damascene conversion. Events chipped away at his beliefs. The twin shocks of 1956 — the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising — had birthed a generation of Western Leftists who swore by “neither Washington nor Moscow”. Something similar transpired in Latin America in the mid- and late-Sixties. Thanks to the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the Brazilian military coup d’état with American support three years later, identification with the US had never been a realistic option for any self-respecting Latin American. Vargas Llosa, for one, had cheered Castro, for standing up to the gringo coup-makers.

Equally, there were reasons for disillusionment with communism. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Vargas Llosa became convinced that here was another imperial power, only one which flew a red flag. The priggish censorship of the sex scenes in his debut novel by La Joven Guardia, his Russian publisher, likewise confirmed the impression that the Soviets weren’t exactly free speech crusaders. To Vargas Llosa, they were no different from Franco’s blue pencilers, who had scrubbed unflattering references to authoritarianism from the Spanish edition. Castro’s support for the crushing of the Prague Spring was another blow. The final straw was the humbling of the Cuban poet Heberto Juan Padilla, who had to grovel before Castro for his “Right deviation”. Padilla’s eventual arrest in 1971 made a mockery of Castro’s claim to represent some kind of happy medium, reconciling state ownership and intellectual freedom.

The ideological quandary, the erasure of old certainties, must have been difficult to process. Vargas Llosa busied himself with two comic turns, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), the latter on which his Western reputation stands. A work of autofiction with baroque touches of Iris Murdoch, it sends up his liaison with his vivacious and ribald Bolivian aunt, Julia Urquidi, 13 years his senior. “To have an affair with an older woman was very exciting,” Vargas Llosa later said. No doubt it was, for it appears to have equipped the 19-year-old with the precociousness that typically comes from such entanglements. He emerged from the affair a prose stylist with enormous reserves of sensitivity — literary assets that would for long allow him to get a free pass from the press, no matter how odious his politics became.

Thereafter, his writings took an overt political turn. A pivotal episode was an English encounter — a dinner party in 1980 attended by Margaret Thatcher, Philip Larkin, and Isaiah Berlin. By then, Vargas Llosa was already an Anglophile, having taught Latin American literature at KCL. Now, he reinvented himself as a tribune of “Andean Thatcherism” — his words. Reading Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Adam Smith, and Berlin — lodestars he later eulogized in The Call of the Tribe (2018) — he developed a deeply English skepticism of utopianism. Perfectibility was the creed of fools, he argued. Man’s fallibility demanded realism. Accordingly, he would never have any truck with magical realism, which he would equate with pie-in-the-sky utopian socialism. He was on to something: the doyens and doyennes of magical realism — the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Isabel Allende — were all unreconstructed Leftists. Vargas Llosa, however, was cut from a different cloth. Even his early communism had been a practical, nuts-and-bolts affair, no dreamy exercise in worldmaking. “I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism,” he would declare in his memoir A Fish in the Water (1993). A decade later, he had this to say to The Guardian: “that idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban.” Thus, with a single invidious comparison, he discarded any association with the Left.

The new embrace of neoliberalism rested on a casuistic logic. In his discussions of the Left, it was always its actually existing deficiencies that Vargas Llosa paraded before his readers: curbs on free speech, arbitrary arrest, and so on. Neoliberalism, by contrast, was an entirely theoretic possibility for him. Vargas Llosa spoke of the free market and free speech as belonging to a single package. It’s a quaint view, given how rarely the two have gone hand in hand in the Latin American setting. More often than not, elections there have pitched markets against democracy, the former usually with foreign (read: US) and military backing, the latter defended by the socialist Left.

Tellingly, Vargas Llosa praised Pinochet’s dictatorship for his dalliance with the Chicago Boys but upbraided him for violent suppression of labor and civil society — all without pausing to consider that Chile’s neoliberal growth had precisely been made possible by violence against the unions and wage suppression. Likewise, there was no reckoning with the practice of Anglo-American neoliberalism — reliant on an ever-expanding warfare state, public contracts, coups d’état, and prison labor. In later years, as a columnist for El País, he would pillory Leftist intellectuals for their economic illiteracy, though, on the strength of his own economic writings, the charge could easily be reversed.

A collaboration with the economist Hernando de Soto, Peru’s Hayek, resulted in a pamphlet calling for the transfer of property rights to the poor, who, with adequate credit, were to set about forming petit-bourgeois businesses. The magic bullet theory, however, failed to account for the fact that Peru’s problems were structural — that overnight, an exporter of raw materials could hardly rival the Asian Tigers, all of which had benefited from colossal state intervention. Indeed, it was only in the absence of state intervention that Peru brought about its worst nightmare. When, in 1980, the newly elected Fernando Belaúnde abandoned the land reforms of the previous government, he effectively set the stage for Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist militia that murdered some 30,000 people in the Eighties.

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By Colm Toibin

In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president on a neoliberal ticket — austerity, privatization — losing to Alberto Fujimori in the second round. Still, it could be said that he won the argument. In the “Fujishock” that followed, the very same slate of reforms Vargas Llosa ran on were implemented by his opponent.

In the new millennium, especially after his 2010 Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa became progressively unhinged. In 2022, he threw his weight behind Dina Boluarte, Peru’s unelected president, and cheered her suppression of students and indigenous groups. The following year, he came out in support for Bolsonaro, whose “clowning around” — as Vargas Llosa put it — included conspiring in a failed far-Right coup against Lula. In Chile, too, the novelist bet on the wrong horse, praising José Antonio Kast (who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights) who went on to lose to the Leftist Gabriel Boric. More risibly, apropos of #MeToo, Vargas Llosa dubbed feminism “the staunchest enemy of literature”. A potential Podemos victory heralded a “return to caudillismo”.

The penchant for outré pronouncements revealed a man utterly out of his depth. Luckily for him, his reputation in the world of belles lettres rests not so much on his political forays as his high-minded erotica and formidable command of literary history. Happily, there coexisted two Vargas Llosas, the one a columnist and the other a novelist. His authoritarian neoliberalism scarcely intruded on his later fiction, and it takes a magnifying glass to detect minute traces of it in, say, The Feast of the Goat (2000) or The Dream of the Celt (2010). The Vargas Llosa that will be remembered is the playful chap who whispered “Henry James is shit” to his friend José Donoso on the latter’s deathbed, to which came the reply: “Flaubert, more so.” As a fan of Flaubert’s, Vargas Llosa no doubt would recognize that his tired shilling for autocratic and neoliberal shibboleths wouldn’t have been out of place in the master’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

You are probably thinking that Perfection is about how Millennials are shallow, demotivated and image-obsessed. You are right, but the book goes one step further, offering a diagnosis of that predicament: according to the novel, the real problem facing Millennials is perfection. Millennials are stuck in the paradox of utopia, living lives so good that they’re bad.

To get a feel for this paradox, try a thought experiment: describe an ideal world. Fill it with all the things you think make life great and remove everything that makes life terrible. In the world you are creating, all of your social and political ideals have already been achieved, and nobody has to worry about survival, or oppression, or violence. The food tastes great, it never rains on your picnic, children don’t throw tantrums and everyone always gets a good night’s sleep. Now imagine you have a choice between living there, in that perfect world, and here, in the imperfect one with all the flaws you routinely bemoan. If you are inclined to choose our world, because the one you made up seems too smooth, too perfect, too unreal, then go back and add in a few of those obstacles you removed. Now you have an almost perfect world, perfectly imperfect, with just enough of a taste of struggle to mix things up. If you still don’t want it — because those struggles are too small and too fake — go ahead and add a few more. Good now?

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By Matthew Gasda

If your answer is still no, then it is starting to look as though you aren’t going to be satisfied until you’ve added back everything. Nothing short of the real world, with all its real problems, will do. Utopia might be something you want to aim for, but it is not something you want to have. This is the paradox of utopia: why strive for social progress if the endpoint of those efforts is a hollow and sterile world bereft of meaning or purpose? Why do we work so hard to solve problems we would prefer remain unsolved?

Anna and Tom are the couple at the heart of the utopian world of Perfection. There is a lot we never find out about them. We don’t know what they look like. We never hear them converse. We don’t learn about their childhoods, or get a comparison of their temperaments, or access either’s inner life. Generally we are not privy to information that could differentiate them from one another. They have the same job, the same priorities, and, most importantly, the same aesthetic: “Either of them could choose anything on their joint behalf — be it a dish from a menu or an apartment — without a second thought, confident that the other would like it.” They almost always show up as a unit: “Anna and Tom” occurs 121 times in the short novel, 10 times more than the number of times that either name appears on its own.

Most of those solo-namings are in the few pages describing their sex life, which is a source of mild concern to them: “a thought would worm its way into that bliss: that was the same sex they’d had last week, two months ago, three years ago.” But sex is an exception to the rule: they don’t have the corresponding worry when it comes to the basic pattern of their lives, their jobs, their tastes, the amorphous friend group that stays the same even as its members come and go, their relationship with their families, or the prospect of children — they don’t want any, and that’s that. They enjoy their lives, and each other, and each falls asleep with “a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were. It was always answered.” The novel offers us what passes for a plot in the small rumblings of discontent that Anna and Tom experience — remember the little fake obstacles you added back in to your utopia — which prompt them to travel, to return home, to travel again. In Perfection, nothing really changes, because nothing can change. Everything is the same.

Anna and Tom are not different from each other, nor do they differ from the other expats who populate their friend group. Their apartment is not distinctive either: on vacation in Lisbon, they look at listings of Airbnbs and encounter one indistinguishable from their own. Anna and Tom are originally from somewhere in Southern Europe, but we never learn exactly where. Spain? Italy? Greece? It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because it’s all the same. Sameness saturates the novel, even though Anna and Tom, by profession and self-conception, are explicitly presented as curators of difference: “Their exact titles varied depending on the job, but they were always in English, even in their native language: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist. What they created were differences.” They worked their way into these jobs from youth, having grown up alongside the internet, already as teens pre-occupied with constructing “personal websites and profiles that reflected their tastes and interests, lists of things that made them special”. Why does the quest for difference end in a blanket sameness?

To answer that question, we have to return to the paradox of utopia, which is to say, the tension between what makes a world feel good and what makes it feel real. Humans are creatures who reshape their environments to suit their needs. We are artificers; we produce artificiality. The better we get at crafting the world that works for us — eliminating the parts that cause us trouble and rearranging the remainder — the more perfect and more artificial our environment becomes. This applies to our physical environment: a tangled heap of fallen twigs becomes a neat cone, the better to start a fire. But it also applies to our social environment and even our intimate relationships. A cadre of humans thrown into a wilderness will be forced to stick together for warmth and security, but, given the resources to move into giant mansions where each family member has their own wing, they will. You can blame this on capitalism, but only in the sense that capitalism makes us rich, and wealth supercharges our power of artificing.

As lovely as that bright, warm, smooth, safe artificial world looks to the humans stuck in the scary dark forest, as soon as we insert them into it, they complain. They start to feel lonely. No longer sure that anyone needs them, each tries to prove their value — “this mansion is better off with me in it!” — by showcasing their own distinctiveness. But the more exclusively they devote themselves to producing this impression of uniqueness on one another, the more similar they become. They’re living what was once their dream, but they are not happy. They continue to feel that what they need is just a bit of difference, a touch of authenticity, some jagged edges. Remember those little fake obstacles again. Where are they going to get them? They might travel, only to find that everywhere is pretty much the same. They might take up the plight of those less fortunate, whom they regard with a touch of envy — after all, their struggles didn’t have to be invented, because their obstacles are not fake. Or they might occupy themselves with normative pictures. Anna and Tom try all of these routes, settling on the last.

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The torture of an unphilosophical life

By Agnes Callard

A normative picture is a picture that reverses the typical direction of evaluation. Usually, the quality of a picture — be it a drawing, or a photograph, or a painting — lies, at least in part, in its ability to accurately capture an independently existing reality. A normative picture is, by contrast, a picture that tells you what reality is supposed to look like. Reality succeeds if it matches the picture, rather than vice versa. Social media is filled with normative pictures, and Anna and Tom spend their lives, first, producing such pictures, both on behalf of their work clients, and so as to populate their own Instagram accounts, and, second, consuming them, which is to say, wrangling their lives so as to make them match the aforementioned pictures. The normative picture tells you that you have not quite arrived at utopia, because this — this image of two glasses of Campari on a table overlooking a vineyard backlit by the sunset, “laptops usually somewhere in the frame to prove they weren’t on holiday” — is what utopia looks like. The normative picture reassures you that perfection still has to be struggled for, that there is still work to do, which means that complete happiness could, in fact, be yours, if only you could close that last little gap.

Perfection doesn’t wear its genre on its sleeve, but I read it as horror. It describes a human future that is bad in a brand new way. It is not violent, or painful, but something even worse: deadly quiet. And I think this horror story is meant as a warning for the reader. On the one hand, Anna and Tom are profoundly unreal. They couldn’t be real people. On the other hand, we could become them.

If worries about Millennials eating too much avocado toast seem like a distant, foolish dream now that we have real problems like rising authoritarianism and runaway inflation and the prospect of confronting whatever AI is going to turn (us) into, then Latronico’s novel suggests a reframing. Yes, there are problems everywhere, and yes, we should try to solve them, but the fact that we won’t know what to do with ourselves once we have succeeded — that is also a problem, and it remains with us even when we are not thinking about it.

Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artifact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.

Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.

Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridization is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”

White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridization for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalization seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.

Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.

What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.

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And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.

Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Euroscepticism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labeling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalizing genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.

This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesized, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognizably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalization would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.

In truth, though, this book makes Bridgerton look like the result of years of painstaking research by Hilary Mantel. The ostensible setting for the romance is mid-Victorian England. Gloomy gothic is out, and poppin’ pastel dresses and splendidly lush trellises are in. Characters’ surnames sound as if they are being mumbled by a drunk or spoken underwater. Over here, lurking in the shrubbery, are Lady Ashmond and Viscount Demeroven; over there, guzzling all the finger sandwiches, are the Lords Havenfort, Prous, Frightan, Thorton, and Psoris. Occasional references to “the ton” and the desirability of playing the “pianoforte” hint at the Regency period, but mainly you know you are in Victorian times because the hooped dresses are voluminous, the maidservants are cheeky but devoted, and strapping young men are always chucking muddy rugby balls around when they aren’t playing croquet. And in case you’re still in any doubt, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act — a real-life parliamentary bill enabling secular divorce for the first time — features as an unlikely plot device.

In every other way though, the dominant idiom is 2000s Californian. In Charlotte Brontë’s roughly contemporaneous fictional world of Villette, Lucy says things like: “Some lives are thus blessed: it is God’s will: it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden.” Yet in this version of the mid-19th century, younger characters have somehow mastered Friends-style ironic repartee. “I don’t know about you,” says an august lady character at one point, “but I think I sweat my body weight on that walk.” Gwen and her rascally father tease and flirt with each other to an extent which cries out for a family therapist’s intervention. The cook and the maid have been having an affair for years. And Beth’s liberal mother just wants her gay daughter to be happy.

It’s not new for those writing for teen audiences to plunder the classics for inspiration — in the Nineties, Clueless smartly reworked Austen’s Emma by setting it in high school, and 10 Things I Hate About You retold The Taming of the Shrew — but it is relatively new to “queer them up”, as the parlance now goes. Alongside DWYLABF, we have recently been treated to Manslaughter Park, a reimagining of Mansfield Park “as a queer romance and a murder mystery”, and Emmet, a “gender-bent” retelling of Emma as a gay man. And soon to be published in the UK is Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa, whose blurb tells us that its protagonist Oliver Bennet feels trapped: “Not just by the endless corsets, petticoats and skirts he’s forced to wear on a daily basis, but also by society’s expectations. The world — and the vast majority of his family and friends — think Oliver is a girl named Elizabeth.” Luckily for Oliver, though, along comes “a sweet, intelligent boy with a warm heart” called Darcy. Suffice it to say I doubt that any of these titles will appear on Florida school district reading lists anytime soon.

Though they superficially might look similar, these creative endeavours should not be confused with established academic attempts to “queer” literature from the past. A staple of would-be edgelords in the academic humanities for decades, the hypothesis goes that, whenever a repressed author of yore such as Austen or one of the Brontës wished to represent same-sex desire to her readers, she was thwarted by nasty heteropatriarchy. Accordingly, she had to create secretly “queer-coded” characters or images instead, hoping against hope that, centuries hence, some Gender Studies major would uncover the truth. And so, via the medium of heavily meaningful paragraphs about a woman’s archery skills, the sensory delights of hyacinths or the impenetrability of walled gardens, otherwise conservative authors supposedly indicated the presence of homosexuality even as they described deeply traditional social arrangements of the time.

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Indeed, these days, attempts to find secret signs of homosexuality in great works of fiction from the past are so ubiquitous and unshocking that one wonders whether some kind of alternative academic practice should be introduced instead, whereby explicitly homosexual texts are trawled for their subversively heteronormative content. And in fact, Don’t Want You Like A Best Friend would be a good candidate. It’s basically a traditional marriage plot but with a couple of twists. According to scholar Talia Shaffer, Victorian literature offers at least two competing ideals of marriage: the ideal of romantic marriage, reliant on passion and sexual intensity, versus the “marriage of rational esteem”, predicated on trust, familiarity and shared family ties. Gwen and Beth seem to achieve both: madly excited by each other, but also exhibiting levels of friendship and mutual understanding impossible to reach with the men around them.

Being newly published it’s unclear how this book will fare on the market, but what is clear is that — with or without accompanying pseudo-historical paraphernalia, and whether the protagonists are girls or boys — same-sex romance is now a very successful YA genre. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is particularly popular among young women, whether they are emerging lesbians, bisexuals or straights. For, ignoring their modern trappings, at the heart of most such books is something rather old-fashioned and none the worse for it: sweetly passionate love stories.

Many adolescent girls adore the idea of romantic intimacy between two young people, and their adolescence is probably the last time society will allow them to indulge in the illusion of it. Later on, progressive society will tell them they should dilute any residual emotional intensity, quash their jealousy and possessiveness, date promiscuously, and cut off searing feelings wherever possible. Hundreds of magazine articles will promote polyamory to them as a cool, antiseptic modern ideal: the complete antithesis of a teenage girl’s obsessive focus on one person at a time. But for now at least, they are socially permitted to let their burning hearts run away with them.

For the most part, these girls don’t want sexual pleasure simply for its own sake — they can barely understand what that might mean. What they long for and love to read about is passionately intense intimacy. They want a meeting of minds as well as bodies; a merging of twin souls in order to face the rest of the world together as one. The very otherness of the opposite sex in romantic fiction — his essential differences — can seem like an impediment to the female reader’s imagination in this regard, and the spectre of reproductive consequences can also get in the way. But where the lovers are both female (or both male), ecstatic union is so much easier to picture. Everything is just that bit more symmetrical.

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In DWYLABF, the main characters exemplify this ideal very well, though it is far from its only manifestation. Another recent example is the graphic novel Heartstopper, written by a woman and now also turned into a film. In Japan, there is a hugely popular genre of fiction and fan-fiction called Yaoui or “boy love”, featuring homoerotic stories about male couples, written by women for women. Even where the object of teenage female lust is actually a person of the opposite sex, he is often relatively feminine in his presentation — with K-Pop boy bands sometimes taking this to a surgically enhanced extreme.

Arguably, women writing about gay male relationships are typically about as accurate as men making films about lesbians; with the women falsely inflating the role of longing looks and wildly romantic feelings, and the men falsely inflating the role of unfeasibly pornographic sex. Female authors writing about female relationships are probably on safer ground. But either way — and as with wanton carelessness about historical details — it won’t matter one jot to the average young fan of same-sex romances. They are only in it for the swoons.

There’s a deep irony here, I think. The more that the sexes are set up by contemporary society to do battle with one another, and the more all of us are encouraged to disassociate emotionally from strong romantic feeling, the more likely it is that same-sex relationships — as depicted in fiction, at least — will look like a paradigm of intimacy. When Right-wing politicians such as DeSantis or Orbán try to ban books like DWYLABF, they presumably think they are protecting young people from something subversive and corrupting. The reality, however, is arguably the opposite: they are removing a quaintly archaic vision of how close, emotionally committed, and sweetly faithful a human sexual relationship can still be.

This was a joke I often used to make in my own ever-evolving lecture about women and writing. I used to say, “I wrote my first three novels while expecting my first three babies,” and would then outline the challenge I had writing my fourth novel without being pregnant. Eventually, I got tired of this attempted witticism and dropped it, but it did no more than record a fact. Men might have thought it an impertinent fact, but it meant a lot to me, as pregnancy and childbirth seemed so intimately connected with my career and writing life.

In her lecture, Le Guin discusses an episode in my third novel, The Millstone, in which the narrator, Rosamund, describes how her baby has chewed up quite a lot of her flatmate’s novel-in-progress. Le Guin makes the point that the tone of this scene is comic and accepting rather than bitter or tragic. Both women survive it without acrimony: babies do eat books, and, as she says, and it is terrible, “but not very terrible”, because a book can be Sellotaped together again. And the babies “are only babies for a couple of years, while writers lived for decades”. I loved that description; she keenly understood the minor hazards of the writing mother’s life, the interweaving of books and babies.

I so well remember the birth of my son Joe in 1965: as I lay in bed with this very new baby I received a proof of The Millstone’s enchanting dust jacket by Quentin Blake. The two events are closely linked in my memory and will ever remain so. No choices, no contradictions there.

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And yet. And yet. During the Sixties and Seventies, my speeches about Women and the Novel often included long lists of female predecessors who had had no children, and who did indeed seem to “sublimate” their creative activity into writing (partly because no other professions were open to them): Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, Dorothy Richardson, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf (whose 1931 talk on “Professions for Women” gave Le Guin her eponymous fisherwoman’s daughter). My interest here was largely sociological. I was interested in pointing out the changing demographic of women writers, as authors such as Fay Weldon, Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and I began to emerge in the Sixties.

I, like Le Guin, sought for women in history who wrote about domestic experience. I was particularly pleased when I found, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters, advice to a correspondent asking how best to organise her time if she wished to become a professional writer. Gaskell, who raised four children and lost two, replies that it is very useful to soak the washing overnight, as this lessens the time spent in the morning. In that moment she felt very close, as though she lived in the same world as I did, though I assume she had servants to help her.

Another successful writer who appealed was George Sand, immensely prolific, sexually adventurous, and a loving mother: she said that of the three main components of her life, she put her children first, her books second, and her lovers third. That seemed to me an admirable attitude. She didn’t go in for self-restraint, but she had her priorities.

In her lecture, Le Guin quotes extensively from Tillie Olsen’s influential study of marginalised writers, Silences, which I had not read until The Fisherwoman’s Daughter prompted me. I had been afraid it would silence me. I assumed its thesis was that women had been largely silenced by domesticity, a thesis that I obscurely but strongly felt would have negated my life’s endeavour. I feared that if I were to read that I had been silenced, I would be tempted to become silent.

Perhaps it illustrates how precarious my sense of self was, how lacking I was in what some might call ontological security. I suspected, quite wrongly, that Olsen took an adversarial view of literature — men triumphant and oppressive, women passive and oppressed. I had assumed that she shared the aggressive views of some of the early feminist critics of that period, whom I found disturbing — Kate Millett on the patriarchy and the faults of the family in Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone, who memorably and to me offensively compared childbirth to “shitting a pumpkin”. I didn’t want to be part of that ill-tempered debate, and I had thought Olsen might drag me into it.

How wrong I was about this open-minded and inclusive survey not only of women’s silences but of men’s. Olsen writes movingly of the silences and struggles of Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and G. M. Hopkins, marginalised by penury, censorship and the demands of a religious vocation respectively. She also sympathises with Joseph Conrad. But Le Guin takes her to task on this: she concedes that Conrad may have “wrestled with the Lord for my creation…a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world” but all this while, food was being put before him and life was being made easy for him by “a silent, watchful, tireless affection”. His wife, presumably, although she is not named. Is that better or worse, more selfish or more unselfish, than Henry James’s dream of the Great Good Place, where invisible hands would wait upon him in a kind of country house or club — “a vision of soundless, simple service”? James was much coddled and liked to eat three coddled eggs for breakfast. Would I have written more and better if somebody had coddled me?

I suspect not. Domesticity was my subject, it was what I had in common with other women, it was what gave me a sense of the lives of others. Writing at the kitchen table kept Harriet Beecher Stowe in touch with daily realities, although it gave her little free time for work. Le Guin embraces the values of the domestic life, repudiating Nina Auerbach’s view (which she had once accepted) that Jane Austen was able to write because she had “created round her a ‘child-free’ space”. We know, as Le Guin points out, that Austen was very important to her nephews and nieces, with whom she played happily, and whom she comforted when they suffered loss.

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Le Guin’s reasons for trying to accept Auerbach when she was younger are interesting: she had been taught that her own experience “was faulty, not right — that it was wrong. So I was probably wrong to keep on writing in what was then a fully child-filled space.” Maybe it was something like this that prevented me from reading Olsen when she first appeared.

Yet Olsen mentions Doris Lessing several times: one of my own inspirations partly because, as she wrote, “Whole areas of me are made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before.” I felt the same. She wrote about sexual freedom, loneliness, independence, standing alone and taking control of one’s own life. She valued the domestic as a subject, motherhood as a subject. She was a good friend of mine, and although we talked about books, we also talked about kitchen matters: she it was who pointed out to me that my kitchen shelving was in the wrong place. How she knew this I do not know, as her own domestic life was chaotic. Generous and sociable, but chaotic. But Lessing and I shared the belief that women’s lives were important. And that was one of the reasons why people wanted to read us. Had we been honorary men, disguising ourselves under male pseudonyms or gender-free initials, what new things would we have had to say?

Lessing, of course, is a problematic example of motherhood, but so are we all. None of us gets it right, just as most of us feel we haven’t got our novels right. But Lessing didn’t shy away from it or consider it of secondary importance. Le Guin, quoting Alice Ostriker, summons up the possibility of “the advantage of motherhood for an artist” and continues with Ostriker’s words: “we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years…” I feel that this culture is almost with us.

Almost, but not quite: it is easier to cite women who have written openly about sex, sexual orientation, menstruation and abortion than those who have written positively about childbirth. Some, like Sarah Moss, write intensely and brilliantly about the anxieties of parenthood, and Sylvia Plath wrote poems about breast feeding, which I used to quote in my lecture. But I continue to be surprised by the fact that “the Nursing Madonna” was considered a wholly suitable subject for art, while breastfeeding is still hardly ever mentioned in literature. We continue to inhabit a world of paradoxical values, one in which books and babies are not yet entirely compatible.

For this reason — and also because my own books feature murder, mayhem, and severed body parts in kitchen sinks — I make it a rule never to assume that the views expressed by a fictional character also belong to that character’s creator. But I have made an exception for Stephen King’s latest novel, Holly, because it includes a note from King himself, at the end of the book, stating that the novel’s politics are also his own.

The novel is set in 2021, in the thick of the Covid pandemic and addresses the country’s pandemic policies directly. King writes: “A considerable portion of the American population — not a majority, I’m relieved to say — are anti-vaccination” — but those people, he says, will probably find his heroine’s Covid takes “preachy”. After her own unvaccinated, Trump-supporting mother dies of the virus, the eponymous protagonist, Holly Gibney, spends a good portion of 450 pages obsessively masking, inquiring after other people’s vaccination status, and bemoaning the selfishness of the unwashed, unvaxxed Right-wingers without whom the virus would surely have been tamed by now.

King admits: “It’s true that my opinions match hers on the subject.”

Other critics have lamented King’s lack of subtlety, but to me, what’s more striking is the lack of craft. I’ve read — and in many cases, re-read — virtually everything the man has ever written; this is the first book of his I’ve ever struggled to finish. A hallmark of King’s oeuvre is how human the horror is, how rooted in a world that is familiar and recognisable. Holly, on the other hand, feels like it was written by someone who’d been locked down for so long that he no longer remembers the basic rhythms of normal in-person conversation. Insofar as the world it depicts is recognisable, it’s only because it’s the world as it appeared online during the pandemic, filtered through the lenses of social media and cable news. Holly is nominally a detective novel, but the mystery is like a whisper-thin web that strings together one trendy Covid narrative after another, the kind of stories that went viral on Twitter because they confirmed the biases of its highly educated, politically progressive user base.

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The irony is that a number of these viral narratives were themselves fiction, fed to us by a media that had gone all in on the pandemic as a politicised spectator sport and didn’t particularly care if the stories they aired were true. It’s a bit grotesque, to see how fake news becomes repurposed, and legitimised, in fiction: when Holly’s mother catches Covid at an anti-mask rally and dies gasping to her last that the virus is a hoax, one assumes that King must have caught the relevant segment on CNN — but not the later reporting that revealed it to be a fabrication.

And while Stephen King has never shied away from addressing political topics in his work, the pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vax messaging of Holly is different — not in degree, but in kind. If there’s such a thing as a unifying political principle in King’s books, it’s anti-authoritarianism. Look at who his heroes are: bullied teens, rogue gunslingers, plucky outsiders who follow their principles instead of just doing what they’re told. And his villains? They’re the corrupt bureaucrats, the officious rule followers, the control freaks-in-chief who must insist you take your medicine — for your own good, and for the greater good.

Consider The Institute, his 2019 novel in which children with supernatural abilities are kidnapped, tortured, and weaponised by a shadowy government organisation that believes itself to be the keeper of a precarious world peace. Consider Firestarter, featuring a young family on the run from the state agents who want to imprison and experiment on them. Consider Carrie, whose protagonist is failed by every authority figure in her life until the story ends in a literal bloodbath — or The Running Man and The Long Walk, both set in dystopian futures where human suffering doubles as state-sponsored entertainment. Even Annie Wilkes, the iconic villain of Misery, is terrifying not because she’s an agent of chaos but because she’s a stickler for the rules, and as such, capable of perpetuating astonishing cruelty under the guise of giving care. If Wilkes had been around during Covid, she would have loved kicking people out of their dying loved one’s hospital room in the name of social distancing protocols.

The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

Pandemic aside, Holly definitely has the fingerprints of 2020 political Twitter all over it. The book’s female villain, one half of a pair of cannibal murderers who think they’ve found the proverbial fountain of youth in the form of human brain parfaits, is basically Karen incarnate, written to embody the stereotype of the older white woman who became a national object of fear and loathing during the pandemic. She’s not only anti-vax and anti-mask, but also anti-black and anti-gay. In one particularly on-the-nose scene from the book’s denouement, the female villain’s diaries are discovered: they contain a detailed record of her crimes interspersed with page upon page of all-caps racial slurs, in keeping with the contemporary belief that people do not contain multitudes, that any person who is one kind of bad thing must be every kind of bad thing.

But there’s something different, and tragic, about how this plays out for Holly — not the book, but the character. Holly Gibney had all the makings of a classic Stephen King heroine, an eccentric and iconoclastic outsider who has become an increasingly complex and confident character over the course of several books. Yet here, in this novel with her name on it, she’s practically unrecognisable: a model of pandemic paranoia, the personification of dull and dutiful compliance. King’s author’s note suggests that Holly just happens to share his views on the topic of Covid, but reading the book, she seems more like a mouthpiece for them, a character being used by her creator to send a message rather than tell a story. If you had any fondness for Holly Gibney, this hollowed-out version of her is dismaying to see.

Still more dismaying is to see an author who has written so poignantly about the triumph of the human spirit, of heroic free will, tweeting his earnest belief that unvaccinated people should be fired from their jobs and unpersoned by their government: “We are in a war here. Thousands of Americans die each week.” This sudden enthusiasm for empowering the state to strong-arm people into compliance is quite a change, coming from a guy who used to have nothing but contempt for such meddlesome overreach into ordinary people’s lives. As the narrator of Firestarter observes, “No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

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There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.

But if the boomers were set off balance by culture’s great awokening, the pandemic awakened something else: the terrifying and unavoidable awareness of their own mortality. The virus, as it turns out, does not care how young you feel.

Which brings us back to Holly, and more particularly to its villains. This couple, these cannibals, are terrified of aging, deteriorating, dying; consuming the flesh of younger, fitter people is how they buy themselves more time. It’s a perverse inversion, to sacrifice those at the beginning of their lives for the sake of those who’ve already lived full ones. But it’s one that we might recognise: what did so many of our pandemic policies accomplish, if not to prioritise the safety of vulnerable octogenarians over the health and happiness of kids?

There was a time, not long ago, when Stephen King might have objected. “Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition,” he wrote in The Institute. But of course, that was before the Science, and its self-appointed interpreters, decided that children were nasty little vectors for disease, and that maybe a little sacrifice on the altar of probability — just the education of an entire generation or so — was in order.

When you’re old, and scared, and vulnerable, maybe a government folder with your name on it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. Someone has to protect you, after all, from all those irresponsible youths who don’t understand that it’s more important to be safe than free.

In the context of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, this long harangue about America’s decadence at the close of the Seventies is slightly tongue-in-cheek, the barroom prattle of an ageing rake complaining about the strange new world emerging in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. But just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously. If there’s one consistent message in The Passenger, McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years, and its companion volume, Stella Maris, it’s that things are much worse than you think.

Such pessimism, of course, is not new ground for the 89-year-old McCarthy. Today, he’s probably best known as the author of No Country for Old Men, in which the most memorable character is a psychopathic killer who lectures West Texas hayseeds on fate and free will before puncturing their skulls with a cattle gun. Even that was relatively light fare, however. The book that got him on Oprah, 2006’s The Road, featured a father protecting his son from marauding bands of cannibals in the aftermath of what appeared to be a nuclear war. And his masterpiece, 1985’s Blood Meridian, which follows a band of American scalp-hunters murdering and pillaging their way through the US-Mexican borderlands, is one of the bleakest, goriest books ever written. Its central character is a gargantuan, hairless albino child rapist known as Judge Holden, who eggs on the group’s mindless bloodletting with Nietzschean speeches about the divinity of war.

The darkness of McCarthy’s subject matter, combined with a high-flown style that earns him comparisons to William Faulkner and James Joyce, has contributed to his legend as perhaps the greatest living American author, and certainly as one of a small handful who could accept a Nobel Prize without embarrassment. At a time when the dominant strain of American writing is still “autofiction” — claustrophobic frog-marches through the psychic landscape of the graduate-educated bourgeoisie — McCarthy’s epic, blood-drenched tales of the American South and Southwest are a throwback to a time when novelists wrote big books about big questions and had the temerity to think they could answer them. McCarthy has said he admires “gutsy” writers such as Dostoevsky and Melville, and elsewhere he has dismissed Proust and Henry James as “not literature” because of their failure to “deal with issues of life and death”. No one could level the same accusation against McCarthy. Death and violence are his great subjects, which he approaches with philosophical rigour and theological depth.

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McCarthy is also many other things that most of our present-day writers are not. He is second only to his contemporary Thomas Pynchon for his reclusiveness, rarely granting interviews and almost always refusing to talk about his own work. His fictional worlds are overwhelmingly masculine in a way that might provoke critical scolding were he 40 years younger. And the worldview of his novels is decidedly reactionary, which is not to say that they are crudely political or interested in anything so vulgar as a defence of the bourgeois social order. Rather, his books are coloured by a sweeping scepticism toward all the improving efforts of mankind, which can never rescue us from the fundamental brutality of our nature. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the New York Times in 1992, and the naïfs who allow themselves to believe in progress on this score “are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom”.

Given this history, McCarthy’s latest novels are, for him, relatively subdued — in neither book is anyone shot through the head with a dragoon revolver or disemboweled by Apaches and hung upside down from a tree. There’s very little violence at all, and quite a lot of conversing about quantum mechanics and Kantian epistemology and mathematical topology, which McCarthy makes only half-hearted attempts to render comprehensible. (I confess I have a high tolerance for McCarthy’s brand of high-concept speechifying, but even I found myself wondering whether it was worth the trouble to look up “S-Matrix theory”.)

The Passenger and Stella Maris follow a pair of Tennessee-born Jewish siblings, Bobby and Alicia Western, whose father was a nuclear physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the construction of the atomic bomb. Alicia, whose conversations with her psychiatrist make up the entirety of Stella Maris, is a beautiful, schizophrenic math genius who commits suicide on page one of The Passenger. When we meet Bobby, it is 1980, eight years after Alicia’s suicide, and the former physicist is living an ascetic existence in New Orleans, socialising with roughnecks and barflies, still paralysed with grief over his dead sister. We soon learn that Bobby and Alicia were in love.

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Early on, it seems as if The Passenger will become a thriller along the lines of No Country for Old Men. But a conspiracy concerning a mysterious plane crash and visits from government agents turns out to be a MacGuffin, serving only to create a persistent atmosphere of weirdness and threat. Most of The Passenger consists of Bobby going about his work and talking with family and friends about a range of chewy subjects. In Stella Maris, the action is dropped entirely — the book is a long series of dialogues between Alicia and her doctor about subjects like pure math, the philosophy of music, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the nature of mental illness. The recurring theme of these conversations, in both novels, is the impossibility of knowing anything — the unavoidable conclusion that, as Alicia puts it in a discussion of Richard Feynman’s over-sum theories, “human consciousness and reality are not the same thing”.

Given that McCarthy has apparently been working on these books for close to 20 years, one can’t help but wonder if the author at some point lost interest in his own premise in favour of the mind-bending scientific questions that consume Bobby and Alicia’s attention, and which are clearly objects of fascination for McCarthy. Some of Alicia’s dialogue in Stella Maris, for instance, is lifted in only slightly altered form from a 2017 essay, in which McCarthy suggested that language is a kind of parasite, transforming our unconscious into, as Alicia puts it, “a biological system under successful assault by human reason”. “In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least part of the world with what can be said about it”, she says. “Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.” It’s fascinating stuff, but it doesn’t particularly feel like something a 20-year-old girl would say in 1972, even if she were a math genius.

What ultimately holds the books together, in the absence of more conventional narrative structure, is a pervasive feeling that time is running out — for the doomed lovers Bobby and Alicia, and for America and Western civilisation. At one point midway through The Passenger, McCarthy writes that Bobby, whose parents met in 1943 at the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” McCarthy has long toyed with the idea that history moves in cycles, that civilisations reach a zenith and then decay, and that there is something self-undermining in man’s conquest of nature — consider the man-made apocalypse of The Road or the nuclear test explosion that closes The Crossing. “The noon of man’s expression signals the onset of night,” says Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. “His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement.” Here that same exhaustion appears as righteous judgment on our own civilisation’s “peak”, the industrial slaughterhouses and nuclear infernos of the 20th century.

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There is a curious passage in Stella Maris where Alicia’s therapist asks: “What do you think is the one indispensable gift?” Alicia answers: “Faith.” No elaboration. I skimmed over this exchange the first time, more interested in the ensuing discussion on Schopenhauer’s theory of music, but now I think it might be the key to both books. For McCarthy, at least, faith is a spur to life, and like life, it is fundamentally irrational. Reason kills faith only to reveal that it cannot replace it, that it is in the end nothing more than a tool, like the physical theories that can build an atomic bomb but cannot explain themselves, let alone tell human beings how to live.

One of the epigraphs to Blood Meridian is a quote from the poet Paul Valéry: “Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.” It comes from an essay called “The Wisdom of the Orient”, in which an Asian “scholar from the land of Thin” rebukes a European for his civilisation’s rationalism. The line immediately before it: “You are in love with Intelligence, until it frightens you.”

That novel, and in particular the character of Judge Holden, is often read as a “deconstruction” of the myth of Manifest Destiny, a judgment on the genocidal violence behind the white man’s westward expansion. But read backward through The Passenger and Stella Maris, it is also possible to see the judge, a man of science for whom “whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent”, as an indictment of the whole Faustian thrust of Western science and progress. “We are,” McCarthy once told Der Spiegel, “like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.”

It’s a grim vision, sure, but perhaps not as grim as it seems. “When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it,” Alicia tells her doctor. “And it will be a long time coming back.” One suspects that for McCarthy, this outcome is nothing to fear, and indeed might mark a kind of rebirth. Or maybe not. If there’s one lesson to be learned from his fiction, it’s that the world cares precious little what we think of it.

This article was first published in October 2022.

“When you’re writing a story with violence in it, how do you balance the need to entertain an audience against your responsibility to depict the violence sensitively?”

That this question is, itself, question-begging, is never discussed. It is simply a foregone conclusion that the responsibility exists, born of an ubiquitous sense among writers and readers that exploring the dark underbelly of humanity — even through the medium of fiction — is fraught in a way that requires some sort of reckoning. Even those who would grudgingly admit that the depiction of fictional crime on a page has little to do with its real-life counterpart — that the killers and rapists and thieves among us are probably not perusing the local bookstore in search of inspiration — will nevertheless insist that crime novelists are accountable in some nebulous, moral sense. If you write about murder, or assault, or kidnapping, or armed robbery, you must be at pains to treat them with the proper respect — or at least, you need to be seen as such, lest someone think you are not only exploiting these things for their entertainment value, but also that you perhaps secretly enjoy them.

Exactly how to do this is an enigma unto itself. The thrillers and mysteries that make up the world of crime fiction often follow a formula. Countless books have been written about how to construct one, to pace your red herrings and twists and reveals so that the reader remains fascinated, compelled to keep turning the page. But there is no such rulebook for how to plumb the depths of human depravity without crossing the line between a respectful depiction and a lurid one, nor can anyone tell you precisely where that line is (even those who are happy to criticise you for falling on the wrong side of it). Every attempt to sketch these boundaries is a failure, and this is perhaps never more true than when attempted by the writers themselves.

“How do we ethically portray violence in crime fiction?” asked veteran author Don Winslow in TIME magazine in April 2022. If anyone should know the answer it’s Winslow, who has written his fair share of crime novels. And yet the conclusion he reaches, after nearly 1,500 meandering words, is that he doesn’t and cannot know. Far from establishing guideposts for fellow writers or discovering the ethical sweet spot between bloodless cosy mysteries and graphic accounts of bodies ripped apart by gunfire, the writing of this piece accomplishes one thing and one thing only: it demonstrates to the world that Don Winslow Has Really Thought About This.

Whatever one thinks of the term “virtue signalling” (I’m not a fan), it’s hard to see essays like this as anything but a cursory advertisement of the author’s moral bona fides. Having demonstrated them — maybe of his own volition, maybe at the behest of a nervous publicist — he will surely go on to write whatever he would have written anyway.

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This is, of course, what all novelists do, whether we’ve been permitted the benefit of an ass-covering TIME essay or not. Keeping the sensibilities of some hypothetical reader in mind is simply not possible when constructing a work of fiction — partly because it’s creatively paralysing, but perhaps more because every reader has different sensibilities, and predicting what will set any one person off is impossible. (I received dozens of angry messages about the death of a cat in my last novel, while the severed human nose someone pulls out of a garbage disposal ten chapters earlier provoked not a single objection.)

But the more interesting question is why the ass-covering is required at all, and here the notion of responsibility in depicting violence on the page dovetails perfectly with the present-day obsession with authenticity in literature, asking what we owe to the real-life victims of the real-life horrors for which we write fictional counterparts. I was once chatting with a fellow author who was working on a novel about a mass shooting; she had sent sample pages to an agent, only to be floored when the agent asked if she had run her story past a sensitivity reader — a person who, by definition, would have to have survived a mass shooting in order to offer critique.

“Imagine approaching someone who’s been through that and asking them to relive the worst experience of their life, just so I can describe the sound it makes when a body hits the floor,” she said. What she didn’t say, but was understood, was the obscenity underlying the agent’s question. Far from stigmatising the writer’s imagination, we should understand it as something to be celebrated: among other things, it saves those of us who write fiction from retraumatising people who have been through the unspeakable, people who hardly need dramatised accounts of a horror they know firsthand. Is the resulting story less authentic? Maybe, at least by some definitions of the word — though if the reader is lucky, they’ll never have to find out.

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But also, crucially, the multitudes which human beings contain means that imagined and authentic need not be mutually exclusive. One thinks of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, such a fully rendered depiction of the Civil War that many actual veterans were gobsmacked to learn that the author had never himself been in battle. The most remarkable thing about this is not that a man could imagine himself into a textured, visceral rendering of something he hadn’t lived, but that we have somehow since come to the conclusion that doing so is a bad thing.

And then, there’s the question of the role of women in all this. Jokes about the overwhelmingly female audience for crime fiction and true crime alike bump up against the reality that women are also producing this content. The expectation that a writer should agonise over every fictional act of violence, fretting over the hypothetical offence it might cause — is it too lurid or too aloof? Too sanitised, or too graphic? — seems not just unrealistic but profoundly gendered, the product of a broader conviction that women must, whatever they are doing, maintain a baseline level of concern about other people’s feelings. The trope of women as nurturers dies hard, even (or perhaps especially) when the woman in question is writing about the discovery of a partially dismembered rat-bitten corpse in a trash can. If men want to write or read about rats nibbling on a severed human head, well, this is to be expected. But if women want the same, a story inevitably springs forth about why they want it for noble reasons: the rat is a metaphor for the vulnerability women experience in a misogynistic world, and so on. That women are full and complex human beings who take the same dark pleasure as anyone in stories designed to disgust or titillate or terrify us is, apparently, too real.

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Essentially, the quest to control the depiction of violence in works of fiction — or to demand that authors flagellate themselves over it — seems to centre on the uncomfortable fact that the stuff of real-life tragedy is also the stuff of compelling drama, and that the line which separates entertainment from trauma is not just blurred but entirely subjective. What delineates one from the other is not in how the author chooses to describe it; it’s whether the trauma in question is happening to someone else. And while murder is one of these traumas, it is hardly the only one. The list of things we love to read about yet don’t want to live through includes affairs, betrayals, breakups, and estrangements; deaths and disasters; broken hearts and broken bones. One person’s action-packed man-vs-nature survival story is another’s utter devastation as they sift through the wreckage of their tornado-flattened home. One person’s exciting forensic thriller is another’s spouse, parent, or child lying cold and in pieces on an autopsy table.

Novelists capture these moments not for those who have lived through them but those who haven’t, trapping them in a medium through which we can examine murder, tragedy and terror, and experience an emotional response to them. It is like viewing a solar eclipse through a shadow box: the sun you’re seeing isn’t exactly real, but you can consider that little sliver of light for as long as you like without burning your eyes.

The joke was on me, I thought. Or maybe the joke was on Calvin Klein. Faced with a grotesque sight that I could just as easily have viewed in my own bathroom mirror, I resolved to eat less and exercise more often — and to stop buying Calvins.

But was the billboard actually a joke? On reflection, I had my doubts. If there is one aesthetic experience that defines the present, it is the feeling of being under more or less constant attack by the anti-beauty impulse — the kind of deliberate ugliness that I saw on the billboard. Examples of this style of defacement are everywhere, and particularly in commercial ad campaigns, from Calvin Klein ads to the cover of Sports Illustrated. Their omnipresence suggests that something more radical is afoot than an attempt to expand beauty standards by, say, showing us that men and women of different races, genders and sexual preferences might all partake of a common, more inclusive set of ideals. There is in fact an overriding difference between appreciating the beauty of men and women of different races and physical types, which at this point in history seems like a lesson that adequately-educated children learn in grade school, and asserting that a grossly overweight woman on a motorised chair — as featured on another Calvin Klein billboard — is a beauty object. The former expands and enriches a common ideal of beauty; the latter says that beauty doesn’t exist, shouldn’t exist, isn’t important, is the enemy of virtuous behavior and thought.

The anti-beauty impulse is iconoclastic, not in the playful mid-20th-century sense, but in the literal sense of destroying icons. It is dour, tight-lipped and totalising. Sex is forbidden, as are desire, playfulness, and pleasure. What’s left is the feeling of someone spitting in your face and forbidding you from wiping it off. The aim of such gestures is not to expand anyone’s aesthetic. It is to punish you for being attracted to what is now forbidden.

Iconoclasm has its own history. A few years ago, I visited John Calvin’s church in Geneva, whose brutalist interior was achieved by smashing the statues that had once been inside. I am not a Catholic and have only a passing acquaintance with the glories of Renaissance art, but still, it was hard not to feel the destructive force that had been unleashed in the interior of what had once been the city’s largest cathedral, even as a children’s choir sang hymns in the background. As the authors of that particular bout of heady vandalism no doubt intended, it was not a particularly peaceful or pleasant experience. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

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The idea that destruction should be pursued programmatically, as a virtue, with beauty as the enemy, is what separates puritanism from punk, an aggressive aesthetic that rejected prevailing standards of beauty and other norms and instead sought to release energy by smashing things. Punk was a studiously primitive expression of the life-force. The Calvinist vandals of Geneva, like their latter-day successors in the Taliban, sought to repress the life-force by denying the validity of any experience or standard outside their own fixed notions of virtue.

The assault on beauty that we are seeing today is more puritan than punk; its authors defend their actions as expressions of the millenarian urgency of their supposedly secular beliefs. When climate activists deface paintings by Monet, Klimpt, Vermeer, Picasso, Van Gogh and others, they are not merely attacking paintings; they are saving the planet. Activists in the United States who tear down sculptures memorialising Confederate war dead are not merely attacking works of art, or rejecting the achievement of peace between warring sectional armies; they are posing as warriors locked in a death-struggle with racism and white supremacy. Putting photographs of overweight women, or trans women, on the covers of men’s magazines is said to be a way of fighting misogyny or saving trans lives, even as it is also obviously a way of expressing contempt for the readers of those magazines and the universe of desire they inhabit.

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The motivation behind these acts would be recognisable to the inhabitants of Calvin’s Geneva: to attack images and objects considered by others to be beautiful or sacred. Why beauty should find itself the target of a culture-wide rage for destruction is a question to which no single answer is likely to suffice. A short list of such candidates might include: widespread feelings of misery and powerlessness caused by rampant inequality; the disillusioning reach and effect of new technologies; and the desire to build a better world, save the planet, and put an end, once and for all, to racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny and other barriers to equality.

A more sweeping answer can be found in the Russian science-fiction novel We, written nearly a century ago by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is set in a future utopia run by engineers whose rage for equality mediated by algorithms would be familiar to many of today’s puritanical activists. The novel is presented as the diary of a state mathematician named D-503, who falls in love with a woman named I-330, whose particular combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. D-503’s feelings of attraction for I-330, and his desire for an exclusive relationship with her, in turn draw him into a conspiracy against “the Only State”. Zamyatin’s totalising utopia is a centralised surveillance state governed according to a highly-advanced mathematics of happiness incarnated in the Integral, a giant computing machine/spaceship that will soon “force into the yoke of reason other unknown beings that inhabit other planets, perhaps still in a wild state of freedom”.

Love has been banned by the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust. Sex has not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code: “Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object.” Citizens are issued ration books of sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to spend a “sex hour” together and to lower the shades in their glass apartments, becoming temporarily invisible to surveillance, which is how the romance between D-503 and I-330 begins.

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We is chiefly known today in the West as the inspiration for Orwell’s most famous anti-utopian fiction, 1984. Orwell’s reading of We was heavily coloured by his revulsion for both the fascist and communist real-world versions of the one-party state, which he had come to loathe during the Spanish Civil War. “The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 review of We. “Now the Single State has restored [mankinds’s] happiness by removing his freedom.”

Yet key aspects of Zamyatin’s book puzzled Orwell. “Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable,” Orwell observed. “What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country,” he concluded, “but the implied aims of industrial civilization.”

Yes, but. If the opposition between happiness and freedom that Orwell found in We became the central theme of 1984, Zamyatin had introduced a third term, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human than the desire for freedom: Beauty.

By eliminating freedom and all causes of inequality and envy, the Only State claimed to guarantee infinite happiness. The real threat to this ideal isn’t sexual envy, which is rampant in the Only State, or the existence of an invisible elite that in fact rules the city. It’s beauty. For D-503, dance is beautiful, mathematics is beautiful, and the contrast between I-330’s black eyes and black hair and white skin is beautiful. Beauty is the answer to D-503’s urgent question, “What is there beyond?”

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The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, was not reconcilable with utilitarian calculations of social justice. Beauty is unequally distributed, and therefore manifestly unjust. At the same time, no one loses anything because someone or something outside themselves is considered beautiful by others. My perceptions of beauty in a person or a piece of music are entirely my own, yet at the same time they in no way preclude others from the same enjoyment; the enjoyment of beauty is therefore at the same time wildly unequal yet universally available.

Beauty, Zamyatin believed, was an inherently stubborn human force that is rooted in our biology, and therefore in external absolutes, like the mathematical ratios that determine D-503’s perceptions of the beauty of I-330’s face, which are at the same time both fixed and irrational. It is something real we perceive in the world, and not, or not merely, an arbitrary “construct” determined by power relations. The ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, beauty is key to our humanity.

Human beings want what we want because we are human. Therefore, we will never stop seeking beauty, and will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder our desires according to the logic of machines. Machines can be programmed to weigh out exact measures of equality, but they can’t be programmed to feel what humans feel when looking at other humans in their underwear. Nor can machines feel envy, spite, or the impulse to desecrate things that other people find beautiful.

It is no accident, then, that in a moment when Zamyatin’s vision of a technologically-advanced society whose chief value is equality seems to be within our reach, that beauty would present itself as an obstacle to that vision — and as a primary target of egalitarian rage.

It’s hard to say if this debate has produced more sensitive depictions of fictional murder, or how to quantify the notion of harm when the person you’re killing never actually existed to begin with. It’s easier to locate the source of this anxiety. There has been, in the last decade, an absolute blurring of the lines not just between entertainment and activism, but between lurid tales of fictional murder and the real crimes, real tragedies, that happen to real people.

Responsible for this, at least in part, is the boom in true crime podcasts — a boom that shows no sign of slowing. Shows like My Favorite Murder or Dr. Death boast tens of millions of loyal listeners; investigative journalists have won coveted awards for In the Dark and S-Town; and podcasts are not only being adapted for TV (Dirty John) but parodied in killer comedies (Only Murders in the Building). But one podcast, and one story, started it all — a story that seems to have reached its final act this week.

On 19th September, Adnan Sayed, the subject of the breakout podcast Serial, was released from the prison. He had served 23 years of a life sentence for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, whose partially-buried body was discovered in a Baltimore park in the February of 1999. For 8 of those years, journalist Sarah Koenig has been chronicling the case for Serial, documenting the flaws in the prosecution — as well as the flaws in the defence. Syed has always maintained his innocence.

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The wave of interest generated by Serial, which included record-breaking downloads and international media coverage, led to a renewed interest in Syed’s trial. The focus raised uncomfortable questions about the fairness of the criminal justice system regardless of how you felt about the question of his guilt (Serial‘s audience was split on this). Books were written; TV specials were filmed; another podcast, this one produced by Syed’s childhood friend Rabia Chaudry and openly dedicated to proving his innocence, sought to keep the case in the public eye.

While Koenig had always maintained a journalist’s distance and objectivity, the new spate of Syed-related content was different, something between a spectator sport and a soap opera— one for which the public had begun to crave, or even expect, a Hollywood-worthy ending. Adnan Syed was starting to feel more like a mythological figure than a real person, and his story more like a thrilling crime drama than what it actually was: a complicated and tangled glimpse into the dysfunctional underbelly of criminal justice. That the mythology surrounding him might be bullshit — or that he might in fact be guilty — became unsayable, if not unthinkable.

Despite all the ink that has been spilled on the dangers of trial by media, people don’t seem to recognise that these same dangers are present in the idea of exoneration-by-podcast, or by seeing Syed as a character rather than a case study. The truth is always thornier than a popular narrative can allow for — and the more we allow ourselves to be captivated by the dramatic tale of a vulnerable and sympathetic hero caught in the system, the less attention is paid to the system itself, even though that’s where the problems lie.

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Two years after Serial told his story, Syed’s request for a new trial was granted by Maryland courts in 2016, but was reversed by a higher court and ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court three years later, just in time for the release of an HBO docu-series, The Case Against Adnan Syed. By the time a judge vacated the conviction and released Syed this week, citing new evidence that cast doubt upon his guilt, he was one of the most famous prisoners in the country. And for those who were glued to Serial back in 2014 like an Agatha Christie miniseries, this week’s plot twist is the ultimate listener experience: the kind of courtroom victory you usually only see in the movies.

This story is a rare beast in the world of true crime: a riveting mystery that managed to hold the interest of its audience over the course of almost a decade, before coming to a satisfying conclusion in a world where the open ending is par for the course. Because mostly, true crime podcasts tend to be time-wasters: eleven hours of red herrings, cliffhangers, and dead ends, until a final episode in which a journalist with vocal fry levies a final, shrugging judgment: after all this, we’ll just never really know who did what, or why. Even Koenig ended Serial‘s opening run with a straightforward acknowledgment of the impossibility of knowing the truth; her only certainty was that he’d been ill-served by the justice system.

“As a juror, I vote to acquit Adnan Syed,” she said. “I have to acquit. Even if, in my heart of hearts, I think Adnan killed Hae, I still have to acquit. That’s what the law requires of jurors.”

It’s tempting to see Syed’s release as an example of podcasts as a force for good. Occasionally, they are this. In the Dark investigated the racially charged 20-year quest by Mississippi prosecutors to convict Curtis Flowers for a 1996 mass shooting at a furniture store; the podcast was credited with drawing renewed attention to the case that ultimately resulted in Flowers’ exoneration. Other podcasts — such as the first season of To Live and Die in LA — offer a satisfying conclusion, a sense of a story well told, if not a legal victory. And Serial, despite its ambiguity as to Syed’s guilt, left no doubt that the justice system had failed him.

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We tolerate the dissatisfaction baked into the true-crime podcast model because the binge model of entertainment makes it tolerable: there’s always another podcast, another season, another story. And if you’re not exactly satisfied, at least you’re always full. But amid this mindless true-crime consumption, we’re missing something. A lot of things, actually: not just the countless stories of injustice that are too banal to catch the interest of an audience, but also the true cost of a conclusion like the one Serial just reached.

It’s easy to imagine a straight causal line between the podcast and the payoff, but it is also a mistake to do so. What it actually takes to free a wrongfully convicted person is not 12 slickly-produced episodes, but endless years and countless hours of filing motions, shuffling papers, and waiting for decisions from a byzantine carceral system that would rather allow innocent people to languish in prison than admit it made a mistake. And while the public interest in Adnan Syed’s case surely helped his cause, we should realise: it didn’t just take a podcast to set him free. It took eight years, a crowdfund, and a media empire. An innocent prisoner, in general, can only dream that their case might attract such scrutiny.

We are also missing this: we may view wrongful convictions or botched murder investigations as excellent podcast fodder — a story for some journalist to unravel years down the line for our entertainment — but these miscarriages of justice get very little attention in the moment, when there’s still time to stop opportunities from being lost or lives from being ruined. UnHerd’s Park MacDougald criticised the “can’t prove a negative” narrative that Serial constructed around Syed’s case, but surely this was Serial‘s point: the impossibility of proving a negative is fundamental to the entire concept of a fair trial. Defendants are not required to prove they didn’t do it; it’s the state’s job to prove they did, and to do so responsibly and within the confines of the law.

Right now, too many prosecutors abdicate that duty. They choose to cut corners, withhold evidence, or threaten draconian sentences if the accused demands the jury trial to which they are constitutionally entitled. It’s because of this abdication that Adnan Syed’s case didn’t get the scrutiny, or the defence, it deserved, until Sarah Koenig deigned to give it to him. Of course, it’s good that podcasts like Serial expose these injustices in hindsight. It would be better if they never happened at all.

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It remains to be seen whether the state will attempt to try Syed again. In all likelihood, they won’t — not least because a new trial will come with a new round of public scrutiny that not only makes great content but makes the bar for a guilty verdict much, much higher. One gets the sense that the State would like this show to be over. And so it probably will be.

There’s one last episode of Serial, of course, one last attempt to squeeze every bit of juice from this endless saga. Koenig herself continues not to offer her personal opinion on Syed’s innocence, choosing instead to focus on the legal aspects of the case, as she always has. But there will be one last victory lap for everyone who always believed in Syed’s innocence. Ultimately, though, the story of a man’s life after prison will never hold the same kind of drama as the story of how he came to be there, and people will move on, if they haven’t already. To the next crime, the next tragedy, the next injustice we didn’t care about until it was already too late to be anything but entertainment, with the superficial gloss of activism on top. They’ll keep chasing that high, the one that comes from hunting down a killer or setting an innocent free, the one that feels like reading a crime novel except better, because you didn’t just hear a story, you participated in a moment.

On the day of Adnan Syed’s release, Rabia Chaudry tweeted in exasperation: Serial fans, random strangers, were messaging her en masse asking to come with her to the courthouse — to be right there with Syed’s friends and family, welcoming him as he walked out the door. In eight years of following this story, they had come to imagine they were a part of it, even essential to it, like a fandom. But that’s the difference between true crime and fiction, between consumption and activism. And it’s an unfortunate but necessary truth: if you really want to make a difference, it won’t happen with your earbuds in.

In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical didn’t premiere until early in 2015, just four short months before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and inaugurated the age of populism. This means that Hamilton enthusiasm was partially a lagging indicator, and partially just something for stunned liberals to desperately grasp onto, a thread running backward to the cosmopolitan American future they had lost.

I do not come to bury this kind of fandom: the Miranda musical is terrific no matter its ideological baggage. But it still might have been more intellectually productive if the Trump era had inspired its fans to turn from Miranda’s version of the Founding to the one found in Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel Burr.

Burr already had one cultural moment, dropping originally amid the squalor of Watergate, when its dose of cold-eyed iconoclasm was well-received by critics and bookbuyers alike. But today the novel can be read or re-read with new eyes, outside the long shadow cast by its late author’s famous media persona, and in a landscape where its vision has just as much to offer.

That vision is cynical on the surface. Vidal retells the story of the Founding era from the perspective of what one of Aaron Burr’s biographers called the “Fallen Founder” — the almost-president of 1800, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, the man tried for treason for a supposed scheme to detach the western states from the Union.

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The treason trial ended in acquittal but also ended Burr’s public political career; he bounced around Europe unhappily in search of patronage and then ended up back in New York City, where he lived quietly as a lawyer until a late marriage to a wealthy widow in 1837. That’s the point at which the novel picks up, through the agency of its narrator, Charles Schuyler, a young journalist on the make who befriends the aged Burr but also agrees to betray him, by gathering evidence intended to prove that the disreputable killer of Hamilton and famous ladies’ man is also the secret father of Vice President Martin Van Buren, whose pending ascent to the presidency Schuyler’s patrons hope to block.

With this hope in mind, the journalist induces the aging Burr to share his own unfinished memoirs, granting us first-person flashbacks to the Revolutionary War and early republic, in which Burr describes his own rise and fall while settling accounts with all his former friends and rivals.

Compared to the pieties of conservative founder-worship or even of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, these portraits can seem savage. George Washington is an incompetent general who, as president, obsesses over his own quasi-royal dignity. Hamilton, of course, is everything that he accused Burr of being: A man of vaulting ambition, eager for aristocratic style and monarchical power, “capable of any illegality including a military coup”, who actually engaged in an attempt to steal the 1800 election. (Vidal’s Burr writes: “I suspect that when Hamilton looked at me he saw, in some magical way, himself reflected. And so if one is an embryo-Caesar, accuse the looking-glass of that high treason and divert thereby the wrath of the plebes.”)

Finally Jefferson, in Burr’s telling, is expedience and ambition personified — a man who had the gift “at one time or another to put with eloquence the ‘right’ answer to every moral question”, even as in practice “he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power”. A man whose principles committed him to an agrarian and decentralised confederacy, but whose presidency settled “with suspicious ease” on empire-building and executive power. A better Napoleon than Napoleon himself, since his empire-building in the vast Louisiana territory actually endured.

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As readers we need not accept that Burr-the-narrator is reliable in all these details, or buy all of his extensive self-justifications. We only have to accept his unique observer’s position, as a man interested in his own honour and prospects but not especially keen on any grand ideological project, at a time when one of history’s grandest ideological projects — the age of revolution — was getting underway.

From that perspective, Burr’s account is cynical and deflating relative to mythmakers and ideological historians — and one of the points of setting the novel’s framing narrative in the 1830s is to see how quickly American mythmaking took hold. But even through the eyes of the Fallen Founder there is no escaping the fact that what he describes is a political success story: a republic established and then expanded, various disasters and civil wars avoided, the Caesarist appetites of even the most powerful figures checked and limited, and at least some revolutionary ideals put into political practice.

Indeed, the novel’s Burr often circles back to acknowledge as much. All his barbed comments about Washington culminate in the observation that: “He was the supreme creator of his union … [whose] powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.” His war with Hamilton doesn’t conceal his partial liking for his rival, and his sneers at the self-made immigrant double as an acknowledgment of the Horatio Alger qualities celebrated on Broadway.

Even Jefferson, Burr’s final enemy and the instigator of his treason trial, is presented as, well, what he was — a dreadful hypocrite, with a tangle of competing motivations and ideals slicked over by self-interest, but also a remarkably effective politician who adapted himself to the new republic’s presidency rather than being carried into disasters by his radical inclinations.

So what is the novel’s un-cynical message? Perhaps that politics is an always unfinished and ambiguous vocation, whose moments of moral clarity are inherently exceptional, and whose normal workings require a constant balancing-act between idealism and realism, private probity and public vision, the necessary and the possible.

This balance needs to be struck within the individual statesman, first. The reader will observe that Burr falters and falls, relative to the other Founders, not because he’s worse and they’re better, but because he has the wrong proportions: too much concern for his private honour, which makes him miss crucial opportunities and also carries him into the fateful duel, and not quite enough concern for public ideals and great causes, which makes him an insufficiently inspiring leader for any of the new country’s clashing factions.

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But then, in good Madisonian terms, the balance also needs to be struck between competing statesmen. The great good fortune of America in the Revolutionary era, in Vidal’s portrait, was not that all its leaders were uniquely public-spirited but rather that their talents and rivalries interacted in such a way as to mostly stabilise and strengthen the young country. Which is to say, while everyone was accusing everyone else of being a monarchist or Caesar in the making, the republic took form and proved stronger than any individual or faction.

This brings us to the book’s relevance for our own political era, in which accusations of incipient autocracy fly as freely as they did in the United States of 1800. There is a certain relief in recognising this similarity. It’s a reminder, among other things, that periods of stable consensus politics are almost as exceptional as moments of total moral clarity, and that the people who have constantly asserted this-is-not-normal about some feature of the age of populism are mistaken. It’s quite normal for small-r republican politics to be shadowed by the fear of tyranny, corrupted elections, misinformation, destabilising foreign influence, the fate of Rome. (Before there was the reductio ad Hitlerum there was the reductio ad Rubicon — and perhaps the exhausted response: “A Catiline-conspiracy analogy, again, really?”)

These similarities also hint that the politics of the late-18th and 19th centuries may be more relevant to our own fragmented era than the mass movements and ideological tyrannies of the early 20th century. The category to which Burr belongs, the political adventurer — the none-too-principled but also none-too-ideological figure seizing opportunities as they come to him — seems especially relevant to the rise of Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson. And of course Andrew Jackson, hovering in the wings of Burr, remains the crucial antecedent for all American populism, past, present and yet to come.

But to the extent that aspects of our own era can be glimpsed in Vidal’s vision of the American Founding, the recognition also brings with it a sense of the depressing difference. We have the adventurers, the fears of Caesarism, the conspiracy theories and fake news, but the qualities of leadership and vision that Burr grudgingly acknowledges in his rivals seem altogether absent. Instead of vaulting ambition counteracting vaulting ambition, our adventurers stand out, clownishly, amid a landscape of greying mediocrity. This is far less dangerous than the alternative, but it is a sign of decay rather than life.

Their absence is perhaps understandable. In our age of mass-strikes, cost of living crises, and political turmoil, escapism — even of the murderous kind — seems like an appealing option.

This wasn’t the case in the 19th century, when everyone from Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell to Benjamin Disraeli, turned their hand to writing novels which described “the way we live now”: itself the title of Trollope’s 1875 satire of financial scandals. Gaskell’s North and South (1855) is an emotionally febrile exploration of the horrors of industrial England, as the initially naïve and snobbish Margaret Hale is forced to leave the idyllic Helston — a village like “in one of Tennyson’s poems” — and move north. A few mill workers’ riots, some tasteless northern wallpaper and one naval mutiny later, Margaret is morally improved and, perhaps more importantly, engaged.

Disraeli’s novel, Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) is a similar exploration of “the Condition of England”. The poverty of those living in England’s industrial cities is so extreme as to seem to belong to another country. Many of Charles Dickens’s works contain an element of reportage on the same places. Amidst the unstintingly ridiculous character names, putrid fog, and marauding donkeys, Hard Times (1854), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1839), and Bleak House (1853) all attempted to reflect Britain back at the British.

Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot’s “study of provincial life”, is the undisputed masterwork of this genre. Through granular examination of the lives of the inhabitants of a middle-England town, Eliot explores everything from medical developments to the status of women in the early 19^th century. But its regular appearance on lists of “the best state of the nation novels” leaves me queasy. Is the book intended to be about national change and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, or is it a universal examination of human psychology?

State of the nation novels have been defined as those that “address social and political changes”. This seems simplistic, even trite: by its nature, a work of fiction inevitably addresses social questions. By that reckoning, Middlemarch is certainly a state of the nation novel, but then so is Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Eliot, like Adams, toys with “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. She gives us a tangled web of human interconnectedness, heartbreak, and failure. The number 42 is conspicuously absent.

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Yet some contemporary novelists have taken up the challenge. Amanda Craig has written a sequence of nine interconnected novels all set in contemporary Britain, including 2020’s The Golden Rule. For her, contemporary state of the nation novels are those which, like Middlemarch or any of Dickens’s or Trollope’s offerings, “help us get a grasp of the way we live now”. She acknowledges a scarceness of modern equivalents to the likes of Gaskell and Disraeli, and attributes it to being “bombarded with current affairs by the media”.

The author William Boyd similarly blames the news cycle. “The basic problem is, it seems to me, that time moves on so much more quickly than in the 19^th century”. There is a risk for novelists that a “on-the-nail, crucial novel will be irrelevant in three years time”. He uses the example of Justin Cartwright’s 1995 novel In Every Face I Meet. The “central epiphanic metaphor” is a try scored by the former England rugby union captain Will Carling. As Boyd says, “that novel will now require footnotes to make any sense to someone who doesn’t remember the occasion”.

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Looming obsolescence was less of an issue for Dickens and Trollope: their works were often serialised prior to publication, in magazines and newspapers which carried news as well as fiction. Rather than writing about the news cycle of politics and contemporary issues, they were practically a part of it.

Thackeray biographer, D. J. Taylor, identifies another issue that faces the would-be state of the nation writer: in the age Thackeray created Vanity Fair (1848), “it was possible for a writer to understand his or her society in a way that isn’t possible now”. They could grasp the political, financial, and class structure of society. Now, “no modern novelist really understands how money works”. It is far harder to describe class signifiers and differences in an age where someone earning a six-figure salary can still call themselves “culturally working class”.

And, many novelists are out of touch with the class-based issues which are at the heart of state of the nation fiction. There are, of course, exceptions — Luan Goldie’s brilliant new novel These Streets is about gentrification and the cost of living in East London; an area the author knows well. But it would be hard for a West London-dwelling, Remainer, Lib Dem-voting novelist to write convincingly about disillusionment and anti-EU sentiment in a former mining town.

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The lack of literary fiction that deals with contemporary life is not a recent development. Out of the books which met with acclaim last year, it would be hard to find many which take, as their primary subject matter, the intricacies and relentlessness of modern life.

But it would be facetious to claim there have been no blockbuster state of the nation novels in living memory. In 2012, John Lanchester published Capital: a precisely observed chronicle of London life as the 2008 financial crisis shook the world. The lives of the inhabitants of one road in London — from Polish builders to Senegalese footballers and rich Bankers — are fastidiously explored, and a true portrait of Britain in the 21st century emerges.

Most recently, Ali Smith wrote her Seasonal Quartet in the years following the Brexit referendum. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer and this year’s Companion Piece offer a commentary on British lives as they are lived now. While 19th century novelists recorded railway timetables, the price of stamps, and contemporary legal battles, Smith instead revels in descriptions of disembodied heads and an almost ekphrastic dedication to describing art. Her books are about contemporary life — Summer managed to touch on Covid-19 despite only being published a few months after the pandemic began — but, in their radical form and style, they are not so much “state of the nation” novels as they are markers of the “state of literary fiction”.

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Neither Lanchester nor Smith’s achievements alter the fact that this is a genre where the tide is going out. What could be the cause of this reluctance to fictionalise the day-to-day lives of normal people?

For Boyd, there is a pragmatic reason: it is risky, and potentially unrewarding, for writers to write about the present. Many novelists — himself included — write about the recent or semi-distant past because “everything is fixed and known”. From The Blue Afternoon (1993) to The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (2017), Boyd has written contemporary novels and short stories, but he would “defy any reader to determine what year they’re set in”. He takes “great pains not to make any topical reference so that its contemporary feel can last a decade or maybe two and is generic rather than precise”.

But Craig takes a different approach. The protagonist of her most recent novel, The Golden Rule, is a single mother who cleans homes for a living and continually struggles to make ends meet. But Craig believes that readers are put off by the potential Left-of-centre moralising of a novel which deals with poverty and financial inequality. A state of the nation novel “has to be able to hold a mirror up to some of the big social and personal problems of the day and ask readers what they sympathise with”, but “a strong moral compass hasn’t been fashionable for the past 75 years”.

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This difference in opinion marks a subtly different approach from the purpose of contemporary details in fiction. Are they intended to provide a “contemporary feel” — a modern backdrop to the story’s action — or are they a part of the story’s direction, and the reason for it having been written?

With Boyd’s fiction, the answer is clearly the former — and for Craig, as for her Victorian counterparts, the answer is the latter. But for Smith, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two: contemporary resonances give her stories momentum and purpose, but her Seasonal Quartet is less fiction that mirrors contemporary life than fiction which mentions contemporary life but retains an element of detachment from it.

This is why these novels have fallen out of fashion. For Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Thackeray, literary culture was inextricably linked to everyday life: novels appeared, quite literally, next to news in the pages of periodicals — and often used events from current affairs as potential plot lines. In our day and age, authors, novelists, and the rarefied book world are separate from “normal life”. (Unsurprisingly publishing statistics reveal a dearth of working-class employees in the industry.) We don’t want to read novels about the housing crisis, corrupt politicians, and global turmoil when we can watch it on our television screens. In response, fiction has found a home for itself ever further from day-to-day reality.

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But we should not be content with this division of literary culture from everyday existence. Let’s bring back serialised novels in newspapers, books with thinly veiled real-life politicians, and fiction about the minutiae of normal life. It isn’t the issues or politics that readers remember about Victorian state of the nation novels, but the characters.

The Britain they lived in, with its financial scandals and venal celebrities, is not so different from ours. The stories are all still there: a modern day Becky Sharpe in a train strike; a scheming, corrupt Obadiah Slope in the contemporary Church of England; an updated Oliver Twist as a look at the woeful state of children in care; or even Dorothea Brooke as a certain feckless MP’s wife. All we are doing is waiting for talents to tell them.

It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic. In tone intimate and ironic, it seemed to take its readers into its confidence, assuming a high level of curiosity and scepticism, large-mindedness and mirth, but also anxiety, lest waking from one nightmare was no guarantee that we wouldn’t fall headlong into the next.

We didn’t read it as we read polemic — the characters were too vivid to allow us to forget we were reading fiction — but it was conjecturally high-risk in a way that other novels weren’t. Laughter and Forgetting: the very concatenation of those words promised an original ride. So we hung on, rubbing our eyes as though waking from a long sleep, curious to read whatever Kundera had written earlier and impatient to read whatever he would write next. Today, the laughter has fallen silent and, except among a few aficionados and readers without an axe to grind, Kundera himself is all but forgotten.

The forgetting of Kundera’s title is the state-sponsored forgetting essential to totalitarianism, allowing that totalitarianism insinuates its way into the most private corners of our lives. The novel’s opening reads like a fairy tale told by a historian. “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace…” Next to Gottwald on the balcony is the Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and, noting that Gottwald is bareheaded, Clementis takes the fur hat off his head and puts it on his leader’s. Four years later Clementis is hanged for treason and “immediately airbrushed out of history”, which means being airbrushed out of this and all other photographs as well. Inspect the photograph today and the only evidence that Clementis was ever on that balcony is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head. So tellingly comic is the image that one wants to push it further into surrealism and remove Gottwald too, leaving only the hat to hover Magritte-like in the snow.

We have our own vocabulary to describe what the Czech Communist party did to Clementis 70 years ago. We say it “cancelled” him. It is, I think, instructive to trace cancel culture’s political origins in the mindset of totalitarianism.

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The cruel irony is that Kundera’s novel has itself become the object of the very cancelling it describes. Little by little, whether by malevolent design (which is hard to prove) or by subtle changes in the literary/political zeitgeist (also hard to chart) Kundera and his novels fell out of favour.

He had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and never returned when it was safe to do so. Why was that, some wondered. A willing exile is not the same as a forced one: did he remain in France in order to keep his distance from people who could reveal a secret? Rumours of his having earlier sold out a colleague to the Communist authorities began to circulate. Vehemently denied and never proved though this accusation was, a whiff of deception, not to say betrayal, remained. Not impossibly, some people wanted it to remain in order better to sell or explain a disaffection that had other causes. A Kundera who forged his own biography was a Kundera whose books might also lie to us.

The world was changing; subtle re-evaluations of the contributions of Soviet Communism among those very intellectuals who would once have been Kundera’s admirers, compelled them to think again about him or, as was more convenient, to forget about him altogether. Ideological enemies of the Left were no longer automatically embraced. New sorts of crime, more insidious but not necessarily any less terrible than those which Kundera had made his reputation excoriating, required new and no less vigilant policing. Universities began to take on the aspect of commissariats. You might say that Kundera’s ironic tone, once so bracing, now sounded stale, tactlessly assertive and masculinist. No one was going to ask this question in so many words, but did irony even have a place in literature any longer?

In a marvellous flight of inspirational fancy in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera describes two kinds of laughter: the Devil’s, which denies “all rational meaning to God’s world”, and which by its very maliciousness permits “a greater latitude in living”; and the Angel’s, which is no laughter at all, but a horrible fabrication of it, declaring the beauty and goodness of everything on earth.

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Once a longing for unitary meaning turns into a cult or ideology of that meaning — as Soviet Communism was — any dissenter from that cult becomes its enemy. To cancel, in our culture, is to deny such dissent the space to breath in.

“I too danced in a ring,” Kundera writes. “It was the spring of 1948.” That has the wistful tone of a confession — an allowance that the yearning to join such a dance is inescapable if you are young — albeit the confession of someone who dances in a ring no longer. 1948 was the year of the Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. A time of victorious celebration if you were of the Angel’s party, and for that short time, who wasn’t?

You held hands, your hearts overflowing with joy, and danced in a ring of perfect unanimity. It might remind us of the rapturous welcome Jeremy Corbyn was given in Glastonbury by thousands upon thousands of popular music orgiasts, already gathered to dance in a giant ring, and for whom adding Corbyn to their objects of unquestioning worship was a small step. Kundera’s dancers, “fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time”, finally grow wings and soar above the earthly Prague. The fantasy that buoys them is the same fantasy that briefly enabled Corbyn’s supporters to believe they were flying.

Discussing the surprising omission of Kundera and his long-time admirer Philip Roth from the list of Nobel Prize winners, the French Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut speculates that the charge of misogyny levelled at both writers has something to do with it. “The Stockholm jury was ‘woke’ before the word appeared,” he says. I wish to stay out of using ‘woke’. Words when they come with poisoned tips promote hostility, not accommodation. We all have our sore spots.

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Myself, I bridle at expressions of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, I don’t think even the clearest evidence of it in this or that novelist’s work disqualifies them as novelists. A ferocious, convicted anti-Semite the French writer Céline might have been, but he wrote a couple of fine novels. He made us see the world as we previously had not. Sometimes, in the discomfort we feel reading or looking, is to be found art’s true purpose.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia weakened itself when it airbrushed out Valdimir Clementis but kept his hat. To cancel is to forget, and to forget diminishes not only the forgotten but the forgetter. It is also, as Kundera’s great novel demonstrates, to forgo the liberation there is in laughter — laughter not as the Angels understood it but as the all-disparaging Devil did — the power to question and criticise and scorn, to leave the dance of shared conviction and refuse the ecstatic fantasy of flight.

I need not have worried, of course. From the moment the lights dimmed in the Odeon, Leicester Square on 10 December 2001, the Lord of the Rings films were a phenomenal success. And although poor Tom B. never made it onto the screen, Jackson’s trilogy carried all before it, grossing a staggering $3 billion and winning a record-equalling 11 Oscars for the final instalment alone.

Two decades on, the films stand up remarkably well. As for the wider Tolkien industry, the bestselling books just keep on coming: The Fall of Arthur in 2013, Beren and Luthien in 2017, The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. And next autumn sees the release of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series – at a cool $1 billion over five seasons, the most expensive television project in history. Not bad for a writer who’s been dead since 1973.

To some people, all this could hardly be more infuriating. For as we all know, Tolkien is still associated in the public mind with a sweaty, furtive gang of misfits and weirdos — by which I mean those critics who, for more than half a century, have been sneering at his books and their readers.

As far back as the mid-Fifties, the American modernist Edmund Wilson published a comically wrong-headed review dismissing Tolkien’s work as “juvenile trash”, marked by — of all things! — an “impotence of imagination”. Decades later, Philip Pullman, never happier than when sneering at his Oxford forebears, called Tolkien’s efforts “trivial”, and “not worth arguing with”. And whenever some new survey crowns The Lord of the Rings as the public’s favourite novel, the reaction is always the same.

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“Another black day for British culture” was Howard Jacobson’s verdict after a Waterstones poll put Tolkien’s work well clear at the top. “Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964,” agreed Germaine Greer, “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has been realised.” Yet by her own admission, she had never even read him.

So are Tolkien’s works “trivial”, as Pullman claims? Surely not. Even if you can’t stand them, only a fool would deny that The Lord of the Rings occupies an extraordinary place in the modern imagination. Indeed, in his trenchant defence of Tolkien’s reputation, the literary scholar Tom Shippey suggests that much of the criticism is rooted in pure social and intellectual condescension, not unlike the rank snobbery that Virginia Woolf directed at Tolkien’s fellow Midlander Arnold Bennett. Shippey even argues that in the future, literary historians will rank The Lord of the Rings alongside post-war classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies and Slaughterhouse-Five. Who’s to say he’s wrong?

One reason highbrow people dislike The Lord of the Rings is that it is so backward-looking. But it could never have been otherwise. For good personal reasons, Tolkien was a fundamentally backward-looking person. He was born to English parents in the Orange Free State in 1892, but was taken back to the village of Sarehole, north Worcestershire, by his mother when he was three. His father was meant to join them later, but was killed by rheumatic fever before he boarded ship.

For a time, the fatherless Tolkien enjoyed a happy childhood, devouring children’s classics and exploring the local countryside. But in 1904 his mother died of diabetes, leaving the 12-year-old an orphan. Now he and his brother went to live with an aunt in Edgbaston, near what is now Birmingham’s Five Ways roundabout. In effect, he had moved from the city’s rural fringes to its industrial heart: when he looked out of the window, he saw not trees and hills, but “almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond”. No wonder that from the moment he put pen to paper, his fiction was dominated by a heartfelt nostalgia.

Nostalgia was in the air anyway in the 1890s and 1900s, part of a wider reaction against industrial, urban, capitalist modernity. As a boy, Tolkien was addicted to the imperial adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, and it’s easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a belated Boy’s Own adventure. An even bigger influence, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris, inspiration for generations of wallpaper salesmen. Tolkien first read him at King Edward’s, the Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Morris’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. And what Tolkien and his friends adored in Morris was the same thing you see in Burne-Jones’s paintings: a fantasy of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of industrial Britain into stark relief.

It was through Morris that Tolkien first encountered the Icelandic sagas, which the Victorian textile-fancier had adapted into an epic poem in 1876. And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, such as the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga. And for the rest of his life, Tolkien wrote in a style heavily influenced by Morris, deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic.

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But there’s more to Tolkien than nostalgic medievalism. The Lord of the Rings is a war book, stamped with an experience of suffering that his modern-day critics can scarcely imagine. In his splendid book Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth opens with a rugby match between the Old Edwardians and the school’s first fifteen, played in December 1913. Tolkien captained the old boys’ team that day. Within five years, four of his teammates had been killed and four more badly wounded. The sense of loss haunted him for the rest of his life. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years,” he wrote in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.

But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.

Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.

And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.

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“Trivial”, then? Clearly not. Tolkien was at once a war writer and an ecological writer; a product of High Victorianism and also a distant relative of the modernist writers who, like him, were trying to make sense of the shattered world of the Twenties and Thirties. But he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own.

His portrait of the tortured relationship between Gollum and Frodo — both of whom yield to the temptations of power and knowledge embodied by the Ring — could scarcely be a more powerful vision of man’s inherent weakness and sinfulness. And his themes might have deliberately chosen to appeal to modern readers, anxious about the consequences of science, the environmental costs of industry, the dangers of war and the fate of the individual in the face of the vast forces reshaping Western societies in the early 21st century. To put it simply, then, Tolkien matters. How many writers can you say that about, these days?

State of Terror, co-written by Clinton with veteran thriller writer Louise Penny, represents a familiar sort of pivot for a politician who’s traded public service (and in this case, pantsuits) for the world of publishing. The story meanders through well-trodden territory — a sordid tale of corrupt bureaucrats, conniving conspiracists and an international terrorist plot to detonate dirty bombs on US soil — and features, as all books of this type do, a plucky heroine who is clearly a fantasy avatar for the author herself.

Blonde, Spanx-wearing, never afraid to get her nicely manicured hands dirty, Clinton’s Ellen Adams is a fiercely competent woman in a world of condescending (if not outright hostile) men; the book’s opening scene finds her arriving late and covered in mud to the President’s State of the Union address, where she sprints shoeless through the halls of the Capitol while her male Chief of Staff politely negs her appearance. (“With all due respect, Madam Secretary, you look like a hobo.”)

Apart from their entertainment factor — and State of Terror, while it won’t win any literary prizes, is a perfectly enjoyable entry into the genre of novels by former politicians — books like this tend to generate interest as a perceived window into the psyche of their authors. Given the opportunity to reimagine themselves in fiction, who do these political icons become? (Bill Clinton has taken his own turn at this in a pair of novels co-authored with James Patterson: his hero, Matthew Keating, is an ex-president and ex-soldier who is still so virile in his post-POTUS life that his hobby is challenging his secret service agents to shirtless canoe races — which, of course, he always wins.)

Clinton does show some restraint here: her protagonist is the Secretary of State to a former political rival, despite what was surely a tempting opportunity to fulfil the author’s thwarted presidential aspirations by putting her fictional avatar in the oval office. But she also doesn’t miss an opportunity to use her heroine as a mouthpiece for dire, hectoring rhetoric about the threat to the nation posed by a certain former president and his supporters. The terrorist plot at the centre of the book is basically a feverish progressive fantasy in which American citizens, including high-ranking military and government officials, are so backwards, so racist and so super mad about gay marriage and immigration that they’ve decided to stage a coup, kill millions of people, and annihilate three American cities with nuclear bombs.

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In a press release accompanying the book, Louise Penny describes how she and Clinton came up with its storyline: “Before we started,” she says, “we talked about her time as Secretary of State. What was her worst nightmare? State of Terror is the answer.” This may be partially true — the possibility of nuclear weapons in terrorist hands surely terrifies anyone whose job is to keep the international peace — but it also elides the fact that State of Terror was clearly written with much more current concerns in mind. It was, after all, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State that the Benghazi attack by Islamic militants killed four American citizens — and yet we’re supposed to believe that what kept her up at night was fear of an attempted government coup by proto-MAGA chuds?

But this is the real form of wish fulfilment that Hillary Clinton’s pivot to fiction offers. Not an opportunity to recreate herself as a hero on the page, but a chance to occupy a particular role within American culture: that of the erudite elder statesman whose wisdom and experience transcends politics, who has earned a graceful retirement into book-writing or painting or winery-owning or whatever, but who may still have valuable things to say from time to time when it comes to matters of state.

What’s interesting is that this is a role usually reserved for people who’ve held our country’s highest office — and not, crucially, for those who wanted the job but didn’t get it.

And yet, awarding such status to Hillary Clinton is entirely in keeping with her broader role in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when the prevailing opinion in the media was that she’d been cruelly, maybe even illegitimately, robbed of the presidency. #NotMyPresident trended on Twitter. New York magazine reported that a group of “prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were urging Clinton to challenge the election results, having found “persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” Millennial icon Lena Dunham described sobbing with denial after Clinton’s loss: “It’s her job.” Even nine months after Donald Trump was sworn into office, many members of the media — and even Clinton herself — were still openly suggesting that he might have colluded with Russia to steal the election.

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Amid all this, something peculiar happened: in rejecting Donald Trump as our leader, Americans bestowed the status and dignity of the office on his opponent. Hillary Clinton wasn’t, and never will be, our president… but look, she tried. Isn’t that good enough?

And with the publication of this book, it’s almost as if the last four years never happened, or at least happened differently. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate timeline in which Trump never won the election, in which Clinton’s political trajectory continued as intended, and in which her successful tenure as President was followed by a graceful transition into a new life as a writer of political thrillers. For those who wanted to see Clinton succeed on her chosen path, it’s enough to make the past four years seem like nothing more than a bad dream.

What is hard to imagine is that this would happen for anyone but Hillary Clinton. It’s particularly hard to imagine that a man would be granted a similar position of status and influence as a sort of consolation prize for losing an election. In a world where political power has always been held and aspired to largely by men, only women get credit for, nevertheless, persisting.

Hopefully, it won’t always be thus. But for now, in the absence of any actual woman presidents to occupy this role, all we can do is make an icon of the one who almost got there. Five years later, we’re #StillWithHer: the would-be shatterer of glass ceilings, the might-have-been Madam President. And while Hillary Clinton never did manage to succeed her husband in the country’s highest office, in the aftermath of her phantom presidency, she does in fact exceed him: her book, unlike his, is actually pretty good.

Dear Bobby,

I wanted to warn you that only one of my three kids will show at the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan this year. Roman finally exploded that the reading of all those names every frigging September (though he didn’t say “frigging”) has got “kill-yourself boring”, even if one name is his uncle’s.

For Ettie, who was only two at the time and can’t remember you, 9/11 belongs in the same dusty bag as Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Just out of college, she dismisses the memorial as an exercise in archaic patriotism — itself a celebration of “white supremacy”. I know, I know. That expression used to refer to a few kooks in peaked white hats. It now functions as an indictment of the entire country. And that’s just the beginning of what you’ve missed out on.

I’m hoping that bringing you up to date about the past two decades will partially restore the breath-taking sense of perspective that descended on me that monstrous morning. Although the weight on my chest was almost unbearable, I do miss the accompanying clarity.

To my chagrin, I’d suddenly been elevated to American royalty: I’d lost an immediate relative to the attacks. I soon grew weary of the deference. I didn’t want to feel special. After all, part of that clarity was realising the country itself wasn’t as special as we’d thought. People have been attacking other countries since forever, especially rich countries full of people who think they’re special.

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Why wait to die?

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Not that I believe we deserved it, mind. Just that shit happens, even to the United States, which we might have learned from Pearl Harbor. And sisters have been losing their brothers forever, too.

Everyone was nice and kind and open in the immediate aftermath, as if the shock had shattered the shells we hadn’t even realised we were cocooned in. The force of collective mourning was so overpowering that nothing else seemed to matter, which frankly made the conduct of prosaic daily life rather difficult.

Having still to remember that we couldn’t have tacos again tonight after having had tacos just three days earlier was embarrassing. Funny, I got into a huge fight with Roy, when I pointed out about ten days in that now no one was going to give a flying fig for a documentary about how “attachment parenting” turns your kids into little shits; all that mattered about kids now was that they had parents at all.

Roy exploded. He couldn’t believe his wife could concern herself with anything as petty as her career at a time like this. I said, well, at least it took me a whole ten days to even remember that, oh, crap, a year’s work just swirled down the sewer. In our family mythology, I was the selfish one, and Roy found the typecasting useful. By the way, and you won’t be crushed, because you never cared for his high-horsery: we’re divorced.

Epiphanies are lies. They seem to offer a radical realignment of how you look at things for the rest of your life, but actually they’re just tiny wrapped-up presents that you can peek at but don’t get to keep, and then you snap right back to seeing everything the same way again. It took New Yorkers only a day or two to get competitive about who’d lost someone or knew someone who’d lost someone, who was closer to downtown at the time, whose neighbourhood stank worse, and whose sidewalks were more covered with that awful grey silt. 9/11 brought in a whole new hierarchy, but it was still all about status, so New Yorkers were simply reverting to the same rivalrous assholes they’d always been.

It’s been especially brutal for me that when you died, we still weren’t speaking. And we fell out over what? Bush v Gore! I can’t even dredge up the details we got so exercised about—something about chads and military ballots and “cherry-picking”. Okay, our whole family couldn’t get over my having voted for “that idiot”. You accused me of merely trying to distinguish myself from my liberal family out of desperation for a separate “identity”, but at the expense of throwing the country under a bus. Honestly, in retrospect, I think I just didn’t care for Al, whose dreary sanctimony reminded me of Roy. FYI, our pal Al, always fleshy, is now fat.

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Obviously, that 2000 election ripped the country in half and put us all at each other’s throats. At first, 9/11 seemed to mend that rift. But only with a basting stitch, whose straggled threads broke years ago. No one cares about terrorists anymore. Americans save their animosity for each other. As for contested elections, the last one takes the cake. Two-thirds of Republicans think the 2020 presidential election was stolen, without a shred of evidence. Like, practically half the electorate thinks voting is rigged and fake. That’s way worse than some too-close-to-call in Florida, and even Al had the grace to concede. So that sensation of us all being in this together, that warm feeling of communal suffering while walking down Broadway? Long gone.

The other revelation 20 years ago was, wow, there really is such a thing as an enemy. There really are people out there who hate this country and want to destroy it, and it was pretty disturbing that I’d never noticed before. Well, kiss that insight goodbye, too. These days, no one seems to pay the slightest attention to enemies outside the country. They’re all in the country. Our very President — Joe Biden, believe it or not, and no, he’s not dead, or not quite — claims the biggest threat to the US is “domestic terrorism”. He’s not talking about Islamic nutjobs with visas for going to flying school, either, but about white people — and not even the white people burning down black-owned businesses in the interest of “social justice”.

So never mind China (massively more dangerous than in your day), or Russia, or Iran, or the tons of terrorists in Africa and the Middle East still plotting more mayhem; all that matters is “systemic racism” right here. You’d think this country had never elected a black president (surprise!) — twice (double surprise!). You’d think 9/11 had never happened — that we’d never been shaken up, never looked around wide-eyed at the big scary world out there. We’re back to squabbling with the other children in our grubby private sandbox.

When the South tower collapsed with you in it, I also thought: my God, there is such a thing as evil. Such a thing as truly horrible, despicable people who do horrible, despicable things. And now our compatriots think “evil” means asking someone where they’re from or complimenting a foreigner’s English or using the wrong pronoun. If Ettie and her friends ever came face-to-face with proper evil, smoke would come out their ears and their brains would short out.

After the attacks, we blathered endlessly about defending “freedom”, but no one gives a tinker’s damn about freedom anymore. For 18 months they’ve “locked down” swathes of the country, telling everyone to close their businesses and stay home. That’s what now passes for “liberty and justice for all”, and practically nobody complained.

Maybe that’s because no one feels safe saying anything more controversial than their shoe size. If you announce what might have seemed self-evident 10 years ago, like “women don’t have penises”, you can lose your job, and the only place I’d dare to type such heresy is in an unposted letter to my dead brother.

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You’ll be glad to hear we attacked Afghanistan in your memory, but less happy to learn that we only left that slagheap, tail between our legs, ten days ago. The Taliban are back in power, and aside from leaving them as one of the best equipped fighting forces in the world — with $86 billion’s worth of our gear — everything is the same. Oh, we finally shot the Jesus-y creep who ploughed a plane into your office, but two trillion dollars is a stiff price for one hit job. Eight years of occupation of Iraq cost nearly the same money and accomplished the same nothing.

I need to get ready for that memorial, so this will be rushed. In 2008, the financial world went blooie. Though we’ve technically recovered, we’re still tippling on the edge of a sheer drop; my finance guy’s advice is: “Don’t look down.” In 2016, we elected an inarticulate, narcissistic blowhard as president, who made us an international laughingstock. Now we’ve elected an elderly puppet with encroaching dementia who draws not contempt but pity; he’s spending money as if medically incapable of remembering that he already spent all of it last week. The government is in hock $23 trillion and counting (your eyes are bulging), and if the dollar is ever replaced as the world’s reserve currency — this is your bailiwick, Wee Willy Wall Street — we’ll all be huddled around campfires with meat on sticks. Or soy protein on sticks. Yum.

Back in 2001, it was medieval fanatics who denigrated our country as decadent, degenerate, corrupt and irredeemably amoral. Now the leadership of all our institutions — universities, arts foundations, corporations, even the Army and CIA — has taken on the smear job for them, happily trashing the country as wicked and unsalvageable. It’s a form of the entrepreneurship we’re so famous for: Americans have learned to terrorise themselves.

By the way — although well into production, my new documentary on “cancel culture” has just been cancelled. Imagine the hilarious late-night debrief you and I might have enjoyed as I drip-fed you the ironic details. One more of our jousting, wine-soaked sibling powwows would have more than compensated for my wasted work.

L.

The battle between Lawrence and the rest of the world started in 1915 with the censorship of The Rainbow. He called it his “big and beautiful book”, a biblico-mythico epic about the sexual awakening of three generations of women on the borders  of Nottingham-Derbyshire. Beginning in 1840, when men were still in wordless communication with nature, it closed in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts, and a rash of new houses were corrupting the landscape. The novel was sentenced to death before the bench at Bow Street magistrate’s court, where Dr Crippen had recently been charged with murdering his wife; the 1,011 remaining copies were removed from the offices of Methuen, Lawrence’s publisher, and burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

The Rainbow, the court concluded, was “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” although the prosecutor had difficulty specifying precisely what it was he had found so obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written 12 years later when Lawrence had nothing left to lose (he died in 1930) contained words like fuck and balls and arse, but The Rainbow was about as offensive as Thomas Hardy.

The real problem with the novel was the author himself, a working-class upstart with a German wife whose own morals were debatable. Frieda Lawrence, it was rumoured, had left her middle-class husband and three children in order to run away with this sex-obsessed miner’s son. Added to which Frieda’s cousin, Baron von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, was the only German fighter pilot whose name was known to every Englishman.

After The Rainbow fiasco, Lawrence began a new life as an outlaw. “One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it” he announced, and as soon as the war was over he exiled himself to Europe and then America, firing bombs all the way.

Like Blake, D.H. Lawrence spoke in prophecies, many of which have been proved — not least his anticipation of his own afterlife. This is dramatised for us in a remarkable scene in The Rainbow’s sequel, Women in Love, published 100 years ago this May. Birkin, Lawrence’s alter-ego, is reading quietly in the drawing room when his girlfriend, Hermione Roddice, approaches him from behind with a lapis lazuli paperweight which she brings down with full force on his head. When she sees he is still breathing, she brings it down again but Birkin takes cover beneath his book. It is curious that Hermione Roddice did not become a cult heroine, because women have been bashing Lawrence on the head ever since.

The most lethal blow was delivered by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), which was effectively the first list of “Shitty Men” in Literature.  Millett argued that Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer were guilty of misogyny and while Miller and Mailer rode the storm,  Lawrence did not.  He became, and remains, one of those writers whose name triggers a mental lockdown; in the Seventies and Eighties, for a woman to reveal that she liked D.H. Lawrence was akin to saying that she liked being roughed-up by her boyfriend. Until Burning Man, I kept my own interest in him quiet.

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Kate Millett’s bludgeoning of Lawrence was based on her reading of a short story called The Woman Who Rode Away. Written in 1924, when Lawrence was living — or rather dying — in New Mexico, the tale is a dreamlike parable about a bored American housewife who rides off into the desert in order to offer the Chilchui people her heart. Her death, an offering to the Gods, will save the tribe. She is taken by them on a long climb to a cave behind a frozen waterfall where she is laid out for her sacrifice. Lying on the rock slab, she watches for the sun to hit a column of ice, at which point the blade of the knife will be struck into her. It is here that the story ends.

Unlike the prosecutor of The Rainbow, Millett was able to say what she found obscene in The Woman Who Rode Away. It was, she argued, “sadistic pornography”, a snuff movie in “MGM technicolour”. She is right that the story is sick but then, as Lawrence said, “we shed our sicknesses in books”. But should it be read as a story? Lawrence also said that if we read his stories “simply as stories we should not get much satisfaction from them”. This is because he thought in symbols. His own symbol was the phoenix and The Woman Who  Rode Away is another allegory of regeneration: modern America sacrifices itself for the cosmic world it has lost. The woman’s death ensures the movements of the planets; the movements of the planets ensure the life of the tribe, and the tribe connects capitalist America to its roots.

The savagery of the tale was its purpose. Lawrence argued in Studies in Classic American Literature, the most dazzling experiment in literary criticism ever written, that the distinguishing feature of American literature was “unconscious duplicity”. In each case a nice-as-pie upper-consciousness disguised a turbulent under-consciousness: “Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness,” Lawrence wrote, “Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. and the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.” In The Woman Who Rode Away his quintessentially American tale, Lawrence makes us hear the destruction underneath. It is Uncle Sam’s ego, and not the woman’s heart, that is being knifed out.

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In another of the insights of Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence counselled critics “to save the tale from the artist who created it”. And ye gods, does his own writing need saving.

Lawrence had the same concerns as we do today: democracy, free speech, sexuality, the sickness of the modern world, the decay of civilisation, how to be alone. But the voice in which he expressed himself was more startling and original than that of any of his peers.  Take the opening sentence of his essay on free verse: “It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity.” Lawrence, too, is breaking into song here. A lifelong claustrophobic, forward movement was his great subject: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, begins his travelogue Sea and Sardinia.

His oeuvre largely confounds genre, but if we have to categorise it we can say that he wrote 10 novels, three of which, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were recognised as game-changers while two — Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo — are, I suggest, the first examples of autofiction. He also wrote 70 short stories, four of the most innovative travel books of the century, two bonkers studies of the unconscious,  thousands of poems, dozens of essays on subjects ranging from syphilis to the novel of the future, a collection of plays set in miners’ cottages that anticipate the work of the Angry Young Men, a history book for school children and, of course, the incomparable Studies in Classic American Literature.

He was less a modernist than the last of the Romantics: Byronic in his audacity, Wordsworthian in his ego, Coleridgean in his mysticism, and Blakean in his insistence that there is no progress without contraries. Contraries were what Lawrence was built upon: remove them, and you take away the structure of his being. His contradictions were numerous: he was an intellectual who valued “mindlessness”, he was a profoundly religious agnostic, he both revered and feared homosexuality. The greatest contradiction of all, however, was his belief in the wisdom of the very body that was failing him. Lawrence had consumption from his youth, and every winter was a near-death experience.

No novelist before him had considered the body as a part of consciousness, but the Lawrentian body bore little relation to the anatomy described by doctors. Lawrence believed, for example, that the solar plexus was the home of the unconscious and source of all wisdom: “I just don’t feel it here”, he said of Darwin, pointing to his stomach area. He similarly believed that we are composed of magnets which lead us hither and thither, and that tuberculosis comes from an excess of maternal love. In other words, Lawrence believed that his mother had literally crushed his lungs.  Denouncing science in what his friend Aldous Huxley described as “the most fantastically unreasonable terms”, Lawrence would refuse to be vaccinated today. But at the heart of his eccentricities lay the need to hold onto the mystery and wonder that were fast disappearing from the mechanised world.

So what does the most silenced male writer of the modern age have to tell us? He wrote his own epitaph is in his late poem, ‘Phoenix’:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

Lawrence suffered all of those things, but he will rise again.

Frances Wilson’s ‘Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence’ is available to pre-order. 

On Beauty is a campus novel, and it’s a book about identity. Howard Belsey is white and English, teaching at the fictional (but very Harvard-ish) Wellington College; his wife Kiki is American and black, and so are his three children. His great rival in his field — which is Rembrandt studies — is Monty Kipps, who is black and Trinidanian-British and (this is perhaps the most important part) a conservative Christian, while Howard is an atheist and a liberal. “Howard,” we learn, “had always disliked Monty, as any sensible man would dislike a man who had dedicated his life to the perverse politics of right-wing iconoclasm”. It is not exactly irrelevant that Monty has published his Rembrandt book while Howard’s is a perpetual work-in-progress.

Their animosity is played out on the field of aesthetics (Howard teaches his students that “prettiness is the mask that power wears”, while Monty says things like “poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized”); it is driven by their ideological differences; and, when Monty joins Howard’s department, it is all forced through the meatgrinder of office politics. By the end of the novel, Howard isn’t holding onto his anti-Monty beliefs from principle—if principle was ever the whole story behind them—but because his career depends on them prevailing. (The same is true for Monty.)

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Inflation is never coming down

By Sarah Ditum

This is, of course, as things have always been on campus, and it has never mattered very much. Part of the joy of the campus novel, historically, is that the closed world of the university provides a small canvas for the satirical humiliation of small men with petty ambitions living lives of minor hypocrisy — think of Lucky Jim or The History Man. But over the twenty-first century, beefs that were once safely contained in the common room have spilled over into the real world.

Partly that’s down to technology: Howard is a technophobe who won’t use a mobile phone, but his 2020 equivalent is on Twitter all day firing off 37-part BUCKLE UP threads with the intention of destabilising his enemies. The recent scuffle at Cambridge over free speech, which came down to whether opposing viewpoints needed to be “respected” or merely “tolerated”, played out across social media and in the press. The ability to follow — and participate in — academic drama in real time makes all of us bit-players in a campus novel, all the time.

But it’s also because the seemingly arcane business of theoretical analysis turns out to matter very much to how we think about ourselves. Howard’s Marxist analysis of art as power, while not exactly false, asserts a deterministic relationship between who we are and what we feel. At the same time, his children are all living experiments in identity. 15-year-old Levi adopts a kind of universalised political blackness that would deny his middle-class advantages, with an ersatz Brooklyn twang: his gently satirised adventures in identity make him a forerunner of British adherents to the US Black Lives Matter movement, who talk as though Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, UK were politically interchangeable. (The people he attempts to make common cause with see through him, of course.)

Howard’s daughter Zora follows her father through the university system with uncomfortable closeness. And most shockingly to Howard Jerome, his eldest, rebels by converting to Christianity and falling in with the Kipps family. Smith describes gorgeously the pleasure that can come from giving up one’s habitual beliefs: “When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demanded equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk back further into the receiving sofa.” There’s an almost erotic deliciousness sometimes in submitting to the views of the other, and for Jerome, Monty’s refusal to speak according to the script is thrilling.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

The battle for Jerome’s soul only heightens the professional rivalry between Howard and Monty, which reaches a climax over (of course) a question of free speech. Monty has proposed to deliver a lecture series called “Taking the Liberal Out of the Liberal Arts”. Howard — accusing Monty of homophobia, sexism and racism — demands that Monty should give the department a preview of the lectures’ text so they can excise any material deemed counter to the institution’s internal “hate laws”.

Monty rebuffs him, on the obvious First Amendment grounds: “If it will make him feel better — I know how much the liberal mind likes to feel better — I hold myself completely responsible for the contents of the lectures I give.” But there’s another, perhaps even more compelling, argument he doesn’t even need to make, because his skin can say it for him: if Howard’s analysis of power is correct, why should a white man be able to dictate how a black man talks about race?

You can tell that Howard is going to lose the departmental vote on this when a colleague asks: “Is the liberal consciousness […] really so slight that it cannot survive a series of six lectures that come from a perspective other than its own?” The scene feels like the forerunner to every conversation that’s been had over the last 12 months about no-platforming, hate speech and intellectual freedom — not, obviously, because Smith is a soothsayer, but because she delineates a tendency that has since grown to monstrous proportions.

The question of who gets to speak, and for whom, is a pointed one for the novelist. In late 2019, Smith published the essay “Fascinated to Presume”, which was either a defence of fiction or a farewell to it: “what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally,” she wrote. 2020 responded by beginning with a concerted campaign to destroy an author for having the temerity to write Latino characters while being white.

The novel at the centre of that furore (American Dirt) is no On Beauty. Still, the bitter reaction to its very existence — led, depressingly, by other novelists, who seemed like Howard determined to judge the book only as the bearer of a system of power — felt like a rebuke to the entire concept of fiction. As Smith had said in her essay: “The old — and never especially helpful — adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.”

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The truth about 'American Dirt'

By Jesse Singal

But to write fiction is necessarily to invent your way into the other, to think what might be thought by such-and-such a person in such-and-such a situation, no matter how remote from you. Smith is cagy about moral arguments for the novel — art should be pleasurable, not medicinal. Nevertheless, “Fascinated to Presume” points out that to forbid imagining beyond your immediate identity it to forbid the possibility of community: “without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all.”

The first section of On Beauty is called “Kipps and Belsey”, and its epigraph sums up the dysfunction between Howard and Monty: “We refuse to be each other.” By rejecting the possibility of sympathy, they seal themselves into a relationship of mutual destruction. On Beauty, though, asks that we find some compassion for both. This is not necessarily easy: Howard is priggish; Monty is domineering; both would be for it if this novel were set in the #MeToo era. Both of them are wrong. Both deserve at least the justice of being understood.

Of course, On Beauty is a novel of its time, and one detail that feels very 2005 rather than 2020 is that Monty was able to rely on his academic colleagues’ underlying commitment to free speech. The “liberal consciousness” no longer seems to have the same confidence in its own resilience, as evidenced by the backlash to the Harpers open letter on free speech or the hounding of columnist Suzanne Moore at the Guardian for her dissent from the orthodoxy on gender identity. Individuals who find themselves holding unpopular opinions in liberal institutions today are at least as likely to encounter shunning, denunciation and career death as they are principled support.

The room to be wrong — whether that’s allowing someone else to be wrong by your lights, or allowing that you yourself could possibly be wrong — is vanishingly small. Smith’s novel is a window into another way of thinking, where difference can be a pleasure rather than pure threat. It’s also a declaration that pleasure matters. Calls to “decolonise the canon” have a certain justice, but they fall back too hard on the knee-jerk denigration of the “dead white male”. Sure, some are overrated; but what good is a politics that forces you to chuck E. M. Forster in the bin? In On Beauty’s revision of Howards End, Smith meets the other as an equal — irreverently, affectionately — and makes something new.

I’d been invited to deliver the opening address of the Brisbane literary festival. The organisers had originally requested that I speak on the theme of “Community and belonging”; I told them for such a soft, sappy topic they had the wrong speaker. By all means, choose your own subject, they wrote back. I proposed to speak about identity politics in fiction, and received wholehearted approval.

I chose to focus on a concept I’d only recently encountered, which at the time had primarily been used to castigate adventurous musicians and fashion designers. ‘Cultural appropriation’ was a brand new taboo: ‘stealing’ from other people’s traditions for your own evil creative purposes without ‘permission’. Although it was baffling however one might go about securing such a licence.

In 2016, I was hard-pressed to come up with examples of this peculiar no-no being used to impugn works of fiction. But I did manage to dig up the fact that a white male British novelist had recently been chided in reviews and on social media for daring to employ a female Nigerian character. I worried that if this sort of rebuke spread, the new taboo could be catastrophic for my occupation, one wholly dependent on imagining what it’s like to be someone else.

Alas, only three years later, I’d have found copious examples of fiction writers who’ve had their knuckles rapped for helping themselves to what didn’t belong to them.

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Before delivering that lecture, I’d been solely concerned that my thesis was so self-evident that the speech would be boring. Afterwards, I was informed that one audience member, a 24-year-old from Southern Sudan, had flounced down the middle aisle and out of the venue – to be followed, after several minutes, by her concerned mother.

The young woman — who has dined out on her rude exit ever since — promptly posted an indignant screed online about how deeply hurt and offended she was by my talk (much of which she did not hear). Said screed was so over-written that it was actually funny. Nevertheless, the Guardian, which has an increasingly, shall we say, ambivalent relationship to my politics, picked up the blog and posted it on the paper’s website.

The rest is history.

Media across the world piled on. The story, such as there was one, was widely misreported. One woman walking out, followed five minutes later by her mother, transformed into a mass audience desertion. My final flourish of donning a sombrero – a droll reference to the speech’s intro, and worn only during the last three words of the speech – was mis-described in every account. According to news reports, I’d worn the sombrero belligerently during the entire 45-minute address. Now, that was slanderous. I have a far better sense of theatre.

To set the record straight, I had had my publicist post the keynote’s text online. Meanwhile, the festival administrators informed the press that I had spoken “beyond my brief”, and had no permission to address this topic. When my publisher sent the organisers a copy of the email thread demonstrating that they knew perfectly well what I would speak about and had given the topic their blessing, we got back sorrow about my “hurt” and “pain”. I wasn’t hurt or in pain. I was pissed off. Advertising that I go rogue at the podium impugned my reputation, and potentially curtailed future speaking invitations.

In private, I received a surprising quantity of supportive email, some from friends I didn’t know I had, but most of these defenders didn’t take a public stand. Oh, and that British writer, whose novel I stuck up for? He’s never spoken to me again.

*

It had been my intention to nip in the bud a poorly thought-out hard-Left injunction that had the capacity, if widely applied, to make my occupation untenable. Instead I fear that I helped spread the very concept that I’d hoped to discourage. For ‘cultural appropriation’ has in this last three years become widely regarded as forbidden in fiction.

I confess that I’m sick of the subject. Nevertheless, my opposition to this harebrained notion has grown only more implacable.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

It took me a while to figure out that the ‘appropriation’ foofaraw is, in part, about the commodification of identity. In those indignant 2016 comment pieces, I encountered outrage that pale-faced authors were making money from experience that wasn’t theirs to sell. Thus the idea must be to reduce supply of writing about ‘marginalised communities’, and thereby to increase demand. Presumably, if we white writers are prevented from using ‘stolen’ material – if we’re required, in the latest lingo, to ‘stay in our lane’ – then, clamouring for fiction about characters from Southern Sudan, the minority-starved reading public will turn the recent first novel of a certain huffy African-Australian activist into a bestseller. I fear this model displays a poor understanding of economics and publishing both.

In literature, too, ideological predation on established writers is intended to allow younger, woker folks to take their place. When I was coming of age, we younger writers were eager to find mentors whom we admired, and with whom we often tried to ingratiate ourselves in Master of Fine Arts programs. We inhaled the work of accomplished predecessors, the better to hone our own skills.

We now have a generation that simply ‘cancels’ the older generation, the better to clear the stage and clamber onto it. (None of these people read anymore, but mysteriously they all still want to be writers.) What I encountered in Brisbane hewed to an ugly behavioural model that has more in common with big game hunting than with art.

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I'm Lionel, I'm a news-aholic

By Lionel Shriver

More fundamentally, I challenge the propositions that any of us ‘own’ our own culture, that a culture is even subject to strict definition, and that a culture has any borders that can therefore be rigidly policed. Because we are all elements in other people’s landscapes, our experience – how we act, what we say, what traditions we observe – is also an ingredient in other people’s experience. Thus I would submit: we do not even own exclusive title to ourselves.

I reject this hoarding, hostile, selfish, and perplexingly commercial relationship to ‘identity’. Better that we all conduct our work and social lives in a spirit of sharing, generosity, exploration, curiosity, experimentation, and even willingness to fail in our sincere efforts to understand one another.

But apparently we white writers are now on notice that we don’t have “permission” to write non-white characters. There was actually a headline I tripped over online during the Brisbane hullabaloo, atop an article I didn’t choose to read: “Lionel Shriver Should not Write Minority Characters” – just in case I hadn’t got the message loudly and clearly enough. Ironically, this implies that authors like me are obliged to portray the Western world as if it’s still the 1950s. Off the page, our countries may grow ever more ‘diverse’, but between book covers we’re back to apartheid.

*

The strictures now constraining the imaginations of fiction writers are not limited to a ban on cultural kleptomania. All artists today are encouraged to be political, but only in the service of a narrow hard-Left orthodoxy. Any novel that challenges the trans movement or the 100% socially and economically beneficial character of today’s mass immigration to the West will attract a Twitter mob and scathing reviews. And that’s assuming you could get such books published in the first place.

Cutting-edge artists were once famously ‘transgressive’.  Now to be cutting edge is to be cookie-cutter. Despite the reputation of the artist as a maverick, I live in a world of conformity. I don’t personally know a single fiction writer in London who supports Brexit.

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The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

You know, even having characters voice views or behave in a manner that runs contrary to progressive mores is now dangerous. At the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

It’s especially perilous for a novelist to express anything but officially approved progressive opinions in non-fiction – and as a prolific comment writer and columnist, I should know. I should have kept my noxious libertarian views about tax policy, the EU, and affirmative action to myself. I’ve made myself a target of animosity for virtually all the people who can influence my career – who commission the manuscripts, judge the literary prizes, award the writing residencies, and assign the reviews. For politically, my professional milieu is almost perfectly homogeneous. In outing myself in journalism, I’ve branded myself an outsider, if not an exile, among my own kind.

Hence I now get a brand of review I’ve come to recognise —whose author pre-hated me, and read my novel only with a view to locating unforgivable sins against social justice.

A friend of mine who teaches criticism at Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program in New York confirmed that this recent inclination to judge literature in accordance with its adherence to a political catechism is not all in my head. Over a glass of white wine last summer, she despaired that all her criticism students think the job of a critic is to assess a given work in accordance with its implicit racial or sexual mores. Her students won’t even cut historical texts any slack if the content doesn’t line up perfectly with contemporary progressive values.

*

Writing fiction used to be a hoot. Now it’s fraught with anxiety. My colleagues and I have been made destructively self-conscious about any sentence that touches on race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual harassment or assault, Israel, colonialism, imperialism, diversity, class, or inequality – and that list keeps getting longer. As a consequence, too many of today’s artists are struggling to be ‘good’ rather than to do ‘well’. Perpetual nervousness that a foot wrong could get you banished from civilisation for life is not conducive to making art at all, much less outstanding art.

Publishers’ practice of employing “sensitivity readers” to vet and censure manuscripts is currently restricted largely to Young Adult fiction, but could soon be coming to a mainstream publisher near you. Self-appointed experts in the delicate feelings of a range of protected special-interest groups supposedly ensure that the text doesn’t offend anyone —although at this point if your book doesn’t offend anyone, it’s probably not worth reading.

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Who called the fun police?

By Richard Godwin

After #MeToo, we authors are also fearful about how we behave at parties, which could not only invite personal censure but get our books withdrawn from the shelves. Now that the presumption of innocence is out the window, we have to protect ourselves from both our real sexual lapses and mere accusations of such lapses. Ask Junot Diaz. It took months of ignominy to clear the author’s name after he was accused of planting an unwanted kiss, and meanwhile booksellers banned his work.

Remember when writers like Hemingway were expected to be licentious hell-raisers who drank too much? I’m perfectly capable of batting the odd hand from my knee, so please give me back the old days, when being a novelist was good fun.

*

What are we all to do?  Because this watch-your-step environment is not only a problem for artists. We’re all being coached to use dumb expressions, to edit what we say lest we violate a host of unwritten regulations, and to be increasingly avoidant of people different from ourselves not because we’re bigots but because we might say something wrong.

The hard Left’s code of conduct is drafted by people with no authority. A small group of self-nominated tyrants concocted ‘cultural appropriation’ as an unpardonable transgression, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay any attention to these bullies. The only thing that gives made-up rules any teeth is obeying them.

I’m an old-school rebel. Tell me I can’t do something and my immediate impulse is to do it. I write minority characters. You can only dispense with silly rules by breaking them, and any freedoms that you don’t exercise you’re bound to lose.

This means resisting the all-too-rational protective urge to self-censor. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint outraged American conservatives, and Roth meant the novel to be outrageous. He recognised that artists are supposed to push the confining cultural boundaries of their times. But these days, that means pushing back against the rigid rectitude of the Left.

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CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

We can also maintain our senses of humour. The best weapon against people who take themselves too seriously is not to denounce but to make fun of them. They deserve it, and we deserve a good belly laugh at their expense.

It’s also important to come to the defence, publicly and not only in private emails, of artists, academics, journalists, and thinkers who have stuck their necks out only to have their heads chopped off. The august, yet temporarily disgraced philosopher, Roger Scruton, who was crucified by an irresponsible journalist taking his quotes out of context, was only restored to respectability with the assistance of friends and allies who advocated on his behalf.

Otherwise, we just have to weather the storm. This Left-wing mania for dos and don’ts can’t last forever. I fear what may be required is some sort of catastrophe, one that makes ‘microaggressions’ suddenly seem as trivial as the expression suggests. This lunatic authoritarian obsession with an infinitely growing list of rules in relation to an infinitely growing list of specially protected categories of people? It’s an ailment born of prosperity. It’s the ultimate first-world problem. A plague of antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria across the planet might kill billions of people, but it would also wipe identity politics right off the map. In my desperation to restore sanity, playfulness, mischief, and abandon to our cultural landscape, I just hope I don’t have to resort to disseminating the bacteria myself.

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How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

Both artists and arts consumers need to return to first principles. That is, the purpose of art is not to do good. A given novelist may choose to promote the author’s version of virtue, but being good-as-in-virtuous is not what makes a book good-as-in-excellent.

It’s time to return to valuing not only nuance and complexity, but anarchy, wickedness, and heresy. It’s time to stop feeling obliged to be such good little campers, at least in our heads. Both writers and readers need to feel free to explore the unseemly underbelly of our imaginations. After all — aren’t books the ultimate ‘safe space’?

And sometimes we just have to talk about something else — something besides whatever group is socially disadvantaged this week, or what remark some public figure made about race or gender that’s supposedly beyond the pale. Sometimes we authors have to write about something else — so maybe I’m even apologising for the very topic I’m speaking of right now.

Because for me, the biggest trap of this whole identity politics lark has been getting lured into debating a proposition that’s unworthy of my address. I get drawn into fights from which I’d be better off just walking away. I’m genuinely embarrassed to have continually explained what I think is wrong with the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ for three solid years. It’s a dumb idea, and it’s dumb terminology. Call it ‘cultural appreciation’ and the argument is over. For there’s a way in which, when you spend your precious time on this earth battling something dumb, even if at length you prevail, you’ve nevertheless thrown your pearls before swine, and the morons have still won.

This text is an abridged version of Shriver’s John Bonython Lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies, entitled ‘Creativity in the Age of Constraint’, which she gave in Sydney earlier this month.