The Fine Balance Required of an ‘Authorial Rant’
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Novelists, including great ones, can be a cranky bunch. The crankiest one I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing was Lionel Shriver, the author of, most famously, We Need to Talk About Kevin. When we met in her South London home for a profile in 2013, she warned me to keep my coat on because she wasn’t giving the “price gougers” at the gas company any more money for heat. Her husband, who sat nearby, complained jovially about her habit of yelling at the TV news. Her thoughts on the U.S. budget deficit ate up half an hour of our precious time together. Yet I found her charming because this was all delivered with a wink, a sense of self-awareness that I think explains how someone with an occasional self-professed “loathing of her own species” could create wonderfully complex characters and plots—most of the time.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
Since I met Shriver, she has become as well known for her opinions as for her novels—she writes columns for The Spectator about the perils of high taxes and unchecked immigration; in 2016, she showed up at a literary festival in a sombrero to mock the concept of cultural appropriation. But as Adelle Waldman writes in The Atlantic’s March issue, she has also continued writing books that lend extraordinary sympathy to characters she wouldn’t agree with, and “her novels have never been mere vehicles for her politics.” The exception, Waldman writes, is Shriver’s scathing new book about Biden-era immigration policies, A Better Life. It “fails not because its politics are out of step with progressive opinion,” she writes, but because, among other things, it “reads like an op-ed thinly disguised as a novel,” and its characters are rendered through “sociology, not psychology.”
Has Shriver lost her playful self-awareness and allowed the curmudgeon to overwhelm the literary portraitist? The line between fully developed novel and veiled op-ed is never clear-cut; plenty of excellent fiction accommodates authorial rants. I think of a protagonist’s extreme hatred of cats in Freedom, by the illustrious bird advocate Jonathan Franzen. The concept works not just because it reflects Franzen’s feelings about pet felines killing and eating billions of songbirds annually, but because it’s delivered by a believable and well-rounded character. A much more recent case of visceral opinions intruding on a novel is George Saunders’s Vigil. Saunders, who “has for decades critiqued capitalist systems,” as Julius Taranto wrote last month in The Atlantic, has published a new novel about a dying oil magnate who spent his life downplaying climate change for profit. Taranto writes that Saunders can't seem to describe any of his character’s “sympathetic attributes” without an addendum pointing to his deep flaws, turning what could have been a fine character study into a simple parable about forgiveness.
This is not to say that novelists can, or should, cast off their politics or pet peeves before they sit down at their desk. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, another author who moonlights as an opinion-maker, told Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic last year, “Politics do inform my fiction, but I hope that I never let it either propel or become a hindrance to my writing. I think of my writing as something that’s quite separate from my political self.”
What strikes me is not that novelists sometimes set down tirades on the page; it is that they are able to transcend their particular beliefs at all. Shriver’s many strange enthusiasms have provided her with a wellspring of ideas, which in the past have produced highly topical novels—about school massacres, obesity, religion, and, yes, the national debt. But sociology, as Waldman writes, “is merely a starting point, as a novelist of Shriver’s skill certainly knows.” The reason those books can’t be reduced to political advocacy is their mastery of a greater challenge: They use that knowledge to step into another’s shoes. The best authors look outside themselves, thus encouraging readers to do the same.
The Novel as Extended Op-Ed
By Adelle Waldman
If anyone could write good fiction about immigration, it would probably be Lionel Shriver. Instead, her latest book goes off the rails.
What to Read
Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet
Is anything more engaging than a good murder mystery—one that dares you to guess who did it, and why? I devoured this captivating specimen in just a few days. When the novel opens in Florence, in 1557, the body of the painter Jacopo da Pontormo lies in the chapel of San Lorenzo—in front of the frescoes he’d labored over for a decade, with a painter’s chisel stuck in his heart. The case becomes political when a lewd painting of Maria de’ Medici, the daughter of the Duke of Florence, is found in Pontormo’s room. The ensuing story—consisting entirely of letters among artists, courtiers, and religious leaders—is a wild ride through the politics and intrigue of Renaissance Italy that incorporates real historical figures. This epistolary structure is brilliant: The reader can see precisely who tells what to whom—and discern their motives for telling it. Could the killer be Agnolo Bronzino, Pontormo’s former student? A political rival of the duke? About the ending, I’ll say only that it is funny, smart, and genuinely surprising. — Bekah Waalkes
From our list: Seven books to read when you have no time to read
Out Next Week
???? Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, by Kate Brown
???? Traversal, by Maria Popova
???? The Analects: A Contemporary Translation, by Confucius, translated by Erin M. Cline
Your Weekend Read
James Van Der Beek’s Greatest Trick
By Megan Garber
Dawson was strong and sensitive in equal measure. He was a thoroughly nice guy in a show that refused to treat that status as an insult. He was as thoroughly fantastical as the series that shared his name. But the character worked—and the show worked with him—because, against all odds, he seemed so warm and real. That is mostly because he was played by James Van Der Beek.
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