Politics and Prose is the name of one of America's great independent bookstores, but that's not actually what I'm writing about today. It's just a catchier phrase than "politics and fiction," and that is really the topic du jour.
The other day I was talking with my son about Harper Lee's great novel To Kill a Mockingbird (the film of which is 50 years old this year), and he said that in his English class they're currently reading Gone to Texas, by Forrest Carter. Now, Carter is politically pretty much Harper Lee's opposite--he was a diehard racist who founded a Ku Klux Klan chapter and published his own pro-segregation magazine, among other things. Worse than that, in the context of the current discussion, he was a boring writer.
My son had already discovered the latter--with one of Carter's books, it's obvious right away--and he had a strong suspicion about the former. I confirmed that suspicion for him. His response is that he doesn't want to bother finishing the book. That was not my intent, of course. And if it's the decision he makes, I hope it's because of the boring, rather than the racism.
I'm very direct about my sociopolitical beliefs, as you know if you've read this blog for more than about twenty seconds. Many writers are less so, feeling like stating their opinions outright will turn off readers who might otherwise buy their books. They could be right--many writers sell a lot more books than I do.
But I'm not entirely sold on that. I buy and read and review and promote books by writers who I know to be far more conservative than I am. And I have friends, dear friends, who vote Republican and are far more conservative than me. Some of them also write books, which I enjoy. I don't think you have to agree with a writer's politics to like a good story told well.
There are also readers who claim they don't like fiction to express a point of view. I most recently heard that in reference to Stephen King's wonderful novel 11/22/63, in which a fairly liberal schoolteacher goes back in time to try to prevent JFK's assassination, because he's convinced that the country and the world would have been better off had Kennedy survived.
Now, it's certainly true that even conservatives who didn't like JFK's politics didn't want him killed. But it's also true, in the context of this novel, that a liberal would feel a greater stake in saving him. It's only believable that a guy would essentially throw away his life in 2012 to spend his days in 1963 if he was really, really sold on the idea that JFK was a great, transformative figure who could have made a significant difference with another five years in office.
To make the story work--and it does--the protagonist essentially has to be liberal, has to share many of JFK's beliefs. To me, the book wouldn't make sense if we didn't know the character's politics. Those who feel strongly that they don't want a book (by which they mean, the characters in the book) to hold a political point of view probably just won't read this one, and they're missing out on a great read.
What else they're missing is the reality that every work of fiction has a sociopolitical point of view, even when it's not explicity addressed in the story or by the characters. I started thinking a lot about this when I was picked to moderate a panel on how writers use elements of class in fantasy, at last year's World Fantasy Convention.
Every writer of fiction has to make certain decisions about his or her characters, especially the main ones. What is the character's financial status? Lots of money? Not much money? Employed? Homeowner? How does she afford the things she does in the book? Did he go to an Ivy League university, or go straight into the blue collar workforce after high school? Is the point of his actions in the story to change that financial status--is he a bank robber, for instance, trying to make a huge score, or is he robbing convenience stores to get enough money for groceries?
Even the genre one writes in comes with its own implicit or explicit ideas about class (which a writer can subvert, by choice, but which still have to be considered). A mystery is often about a character's effort to restore or preserve the existing social balance. Someone's been killed at the manor house! That's a threat to society, and the detective won't rest until the lords and ladies are safe and the killer's been caught--thereby preserving the status quo. Horror, too, is often conservative by nature--the monster is The Other, and as long as The Other is on the loose, the status quo--our unspoken but agreed-upon rules about how our society works--is threatened. When the monster is vanquished, order is restored.
Here's an extension of this argument that I wrote in response to an interview question recently. I think it works as is so rather than rewrite it, I'll just lift it whole:
There's always the argument that some stories are meant to be pure entertainment, to take the reader out of his daily life and personal problems for a while and let him experience something else. I'd argue that this argument is overly simplistic--that even in those "pure entertainment" stories, there's more going on. The sheriff is tracking the rustlers--there's a whole plethora of class issues being brought up. Obviously the cattle were stolen from someone who owns land and property. The rustlers, presumably, are short on money and social standing, but are trying to improve the former situation, ir not the latter. The sheriff is trying to uphold the existing social order, rather than, say, trying to find a solution that involves the cattle baron giving up some of his herd and acreage in order to allow the rustler to also earn a living wage. Boring into the more personal, the character of the sheriff might be allowing the reader to experience, for the duration of the story, a life of courage, of capability, of moral rectitude, of certainty about what's right and what's not, that is otherwise missing in the reader's daily life. That's a lot of weight for a simple cowboy story to carry. But--even when told somewhat artlessly--somehow, it does.
Real-world facts come into play in fiction, too, and fiction is, I think, more interesting when those facts are taken into account rather than ignored. If your character is a convenience store clerk AND a multimillionaire, that's going to be hard to believe--convenience store clerks tend not to make a lot of money, and multimillionaires tend to have different types of jobs. Now, if the story is about WHY that rich person chooses to work that job, that could be interesting. But otherwise, the writer has to pay attention to the facts of the world around her.
For instance, during the Civil Rights era, the 1950/60s, there was a lot of racial discrimination in private sector employment but less in public sector employment (especially when the public sector ramped up minority hiring to meet quotas, in order to help equalize the workforce). A lot of African-Americans, who'd had a hard time getting jobs that paid decent money, went into the public sector--school teachers, cops, bus drivers, postal workers, etc. As with many careers, these were carried over from parent to child--not that the jobs were handed down, but the idea that government jobs could put a person in the middle class and provide steady employment was handed down, so the children of public sector workers were also drawn to the public sector. Now we're climbing out of a recession, and the private sector has added something like 4.5 million jobs over the past 25 months, but the public sector has been shedding jobs, and there's no sign of that changing. Partly as a result of this trend (though with other reasons, too, including educational opportunities), the African-American jobless rate right now is much higher than the white jobless rate. These facts will not necessarily dictate the employment situation of a writer's black characters--but they're the kind of thing the careful writer will consider in creating those characters and the world they inhabit.
So every fiction writer is dealing with the sociopolitical aspects of her characters and her world with every decision she makes about those. Does that mean that a conservative writer can only write about conservative characters? Of course not. We're fiction writers. Living inside the heads of other people and convincingly portraying them is what we do. Men write about women. Women write about Venusians. Nobody writing lived in 15th century Spain or 19th century New Mexico, but they still write about those times.
I'm liberal, but I have written what I believe to be convincingly conservative characters (who don't necessarily think about themselves in those terms, since when I'm not writing explicitly about politics, my characters aren't necessarily politically active or aware. They're busy dealing with the horrible things I put them through). Annie O'Brien, the heroine in Cold Black Hearts is a cop, daughter of a cop, and if we knew how she voted (which does not come up in the book, so there's no reason to put it there) she would probably vote Republican. Jessie Dawn Cutler, the protagonist in The Devil's Bait (print edition and eBook), is trying hard to make it in the world of big banking--hardly a liberal bastion. Although her faith in her particular bank is shaken (because of the actions of individuals), her core beliefs about capitalism are not.
To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best American novels ever written. The fact that it's unabashedly anti-racist does not make it less so. I believe that part of Ms. Lee's purpose in writing it was to force the reader to examine his or her own preconceptions, to make the point that people need to be considered as individuals, not as members of a group. It had an explicitly sociopolitical purpose, and it still succeeds as a work of fiction.
Not every book is so upfront, and not every writer is as forthcoming about his political opinions as I am. There are writers, like Forrest Carter, with whom I disagree about very large issues, and plenty of writers whose politics I don't know at all. But every writer of fiction is grappling with these issues all the time, in every piece of writing. And if you pick and choose who you'll read based on what the writer's politics are, you'll miss out on a lot of great fiction.
Forrest Carter definitely not included.
