The Political is Personal

Literature has to grab me in two main ways: emotion and ideas. Either I need to feel empathy for the characters involved or I need to be intrigued by the ideas (political, scientific, philosophical) presented. Ideally, both, but recently I’ve been reading a series of books that seem to be one or the other.

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, exemplifies the first. Framed in a constricted venue ( a family farm during the COVID lockdown) the novel explores its 57 year old protagonist’s recollections of her youthful love affair with a soon-to-be famous movie star. Patchett is an excellent storyteller, with a superb sense of place, and the novel is a powerful exploration of why good girls go for bad boys. Ultimately , it’s unsatisfying though, because I never got a solid sense of how the protagonist was changed by the experience (except to run solidly away from it the rest of her life—her husband Joe is an absolute cliche of decency and mundane reliability). This sense of stasis—one might even say pointlessness—is exaggerated by the story’s detachment from the worldwide events surrounding their nice little cherry farm. Patchett several times refers to “the world burning outside”, as conveyed by safe distance by the TV news. She embraces this detachment, a false sense of safety I could not relate to. Seems like the entire year of 2020, the fire was licking at our door, and no amount of garden-fresh vegetables or homemade cherry pie could make it feel like less of a prison.

Sleepwalking, by Dan Chaon, and Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, both deal with the effects of technology in the near future. In Sleepwalking, the protagonist makes his way through the world as an errand boy for a shadowy and violent organization, surrounded by ecological devastation, smart drones, and all sorts of DNA manipulations and multiple progeny. Ironically, the novel carries more emotional heft than one might expect, due to the protagonist’s desperate search for tangible human connection. It’s by no means assured, or cliched.

I’m only two-thirds of the way through Candy House, a loosely linked series of stories. Some are set as early as the mid-sixties, some close to a century later where everyone’s memories have been uploaded to the internet. The ideas presented are fascinating, especially the way Egan extrapolates our current loss of privacy to an ultimate loss of privacy, that of our own thoughts. So far, though, I haven’t emotionally connected with the characters because no single story arc is followed long enough to allow me to do so. Egan’s too clever by half writing style also distracts. The whole novel is like a bunch of Black Mirror episodes. Of course, Black Mirror is one of my all time favorite TV shows, but I don’t know how much emotional resource this book will maintain in the long term.

I’ve written both ways.

My first novel, Wrong Highway, is more a personal tale. It’s definitively rooted in the 1980’s, and my protagonist, Erica is shaped by that cultural environment. However she is preoccupied with her own family and personal crises. She lives in the Long Island suburbs—New York City is a distant star radiating an intriguing energy. Her husband Ethan’s Wall Street job is an arcane mystery. Politics don’t even register.

My second novel, It’s Always 9/11, is deeply political, but politics as reflected through the perceptions and experiences of a particular family. Otherwise, I’d just be pulling stories from the headlines or my dystopic imagination and it wouldn’t register as true, as something we could all go through. Emotional resonance is really important to me. I want the book to linger in reader’s hearts, not just tickle their heads.

We're still waiting it out

“It’s Always 9/11” was published in August 2021. I’d finished the last sentence about 14 months before, at the height of the lockdown. The claustrophobia of “Shelter at Home” along with the national sense of paranoia, isolation and division, lent my writing an intensified power.

Now, two years later, I feel like we are finally emerging from that fog of isolation and fear, blooming tentatively like the forsythia poking forth on the bushes outside my window. Looking around and wondering “where did that time go?”. “Where are we now?” We’ve all been changed by the past few years, in differing ways. Personally, it made me a lot more libertarian. It shocked me how fast situations could change, how quickly freedoms could be taken away. I’d always been aware, and protective of, our constitutional right to free speech and assembly. But personal rights? The right to leave one’s own home? The right to gather with one’s family? A stifling conformity descended. There were opinions were dared not speak, feelings that labeled us a bad person, a form of “proper thinking” that was totalitarian to its core. “Left” and “Right” lost their significance. I didn’t believe in any of those bundled collections of righteous opinions. I didn’t know who to believe, so I had to rely on my ears and eyes, intution, a semblance of logical thinking, my own conscience.

Of course, that’s what “It’s Always 9/11” is all about, even though I wrote all but the final draft before the pandemic. And it’s still as relevant as ever. The other question I ask myself as I survey the altered world is “How do we crawl out from under the wreckage?”. The passivity wrought by the pandemic still lingers, like a fatalistic stupor stubbornly pulling people back in. The major societal impetus is still to sit it out, to buy the stories we are told, to accept things we should not.

I’ve wondered why I’m so drawn to writing about teenagers. My first novel, “Wrong Highway”, had a teenager at the heart of it. “It’s Always 9/11” does as well. Before that I wrote several short stories, all starring teenagers. I think its because, through decades of life experiences, I’ve never lost a certain teenage quality, that one where the passion still burns. Where you if you sit it out, you’re risking not only your freedoms and your country, but your very soul.

A Peek Behind the Sheltering Sky

I am re-reading one of my favorite books, Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”. Sometimes what I found revelatory as an adolescent (books, movies, music) underwhelms several decades later. But “The Sheltering Sky” has lost nothing.

Let me quote one of my favorite passages:

“You know,” said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, “the sky here’s very strange'“. I often have the the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.”

Kit shuddered slightly as she said: “From what’s behind?”

“Yes.”

“But what is behind?” Her voice was very small.

I frequently (especially in the past three years) hear people profess that they only want to read escapist fiction. No dystopias for them. The real world is difficult and scary. They want their imaginary world to be all fairy princesses and rom coms, or dragons or unicorns or sword fights. They want endings that tie up neatly in an eminently predictable box.

Well, everyone’s entitled to their taste. But sanitized entertainment is not mine. Trouble is, I feel like Port a lot of the time. I’m always contemplating that darkness and mystery behind the azure blue sky. It’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Knowing that its there makes it discomfiting to pretend that it is not. This makes for the uncomfortable themes in my writing as well as my spunky if sometimes misguided protagonists. I don’t want to evoke ugliness or despair—THAT you get enough of in the “real” world. But by facing down fears or demons in a fictional way, by peeking behind that sheltering sky, I gain some measure of agency, some measure of control.

And believe it or not, that’s relaxing.