Putting Novelists on a Leash?

 There’s an excellent op-ed piece in Saturday’s Washington Post entitled “Limiting What Novelists Write About Won’t Help Readers”. The column talks about how a writer can no longer depend on his or her imagination. According to the emerging social climate, one must only write about what one knows.

Yes, I’ve heard that old, tired cliché, “Write What You Know.”

Boloney. Writers use their imagination.  Did Tolkien live as a hobbit? Did J,K.Rowling live in a wizarding world? Did George R.R. Martin ride a dragon? 

Was Pat Conroy Black?  Was he ever a slave?  No?  And yet he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner. 

Could he have published that book today?  I seriously doubt it. 

According to the Washington Post piece, the “literary dark age” started in 2020 when Jeanine Cummins published American Dirt.  It’s a story about undocumented immigrants, a woman and her son, were forced to flee when the woman’s husband, a journalist, exposes a drug cartel.  

The book was picked as an Oprah Book Club selection, it was on the New York Times bestseller list, selling three million copies in 37 languages.  It was an unqualified hit.

And then it wasn’t.  Cummins and her publisher were the victims of public blowback.  Cummins wrote from the viewpoint of the immigrants…and the author is white and from New Jersey.  Her book tour was canceled.  

In my series of mysteries, I write in the first-person viewpoint of Geneva Chase, a female reporter.  I’m very lucky that I’ve received mostly good reviews and that most of my readers are women.  I have, however, gotten reviews labelling me as a misogynist and one review in particular, was unusually harsh: “I hate this book with a passion. While the murders were initially interesting the main character is so obviously written by a man it’s vomit inducing.”

As I said, my books have garnered hundreds of good reviews.  But you know, it’s the bad ones we remember. 

And I’ve also been criticized for a single paragraph I wrote about Fox News in my book Random Road. It was a single sentence and it’s been described as being overtly political.  It wasn’t…but yeah, it kind of was. 

 I write about current affairs.  They’re things that concern me like climate change, sea level rise, school shootings, LBGTQ issues, and sex trafficking. They’re subjects I think are important. 

Write what you know?  I don’t think so. 

How many mystery writers have actually murdered someone?  Hint…I’m hoping the percentage is really, really low.  

And that brings us book banning.  According to PEN America, these are the subjects most often banned in schools and some libraries:

o Titles that deal explicitly with LGBTQ+ topics, or have LGBTQ+ protagonists or prominent secondary characters have been a major target in the current wave of book bans. This is reflected in the Index, with 379 such titles (33%), including a distinct subset of 84 titles that deal with transgender characters and topics (7%).

o Fiction novels and non-fiction books with protagonists of color also made up a significant part of banned books in the Index, including 467 titles (41%).

o Books dealing with Jewish and Muslim characters and religious/ethnic themes have also been targeted, with 18 titles listed in the Index.

In some school districts, even some classics have been banned at one time or another, such as The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Handmaid’s Tale, and Slaughterhouse Five.  

Pat Conroy once said, “Fiction is where I go to tell the truth.”  

Let’s hope the pendulum swings back to center again sometime soon and our imaginations run wild. 

Art and Outrage

I (Donis) have been seeing some discussion on television about this year's Met Gala being a tribute to the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Some people have taken exception to the choice of Lagerfeld because of some of his unsavory positions in the past and some of the offensive things he said. And they were offensive, for sure. But his designs are beautiful and were quite influential in the fashion world. All of this brings up the eternal question: How do you separate the artist from the art? And should you? Picasso was an egomaniac. Hemingway was a raging misogynist. They were both brilliant.

Several years ago an NPR program held a contest to rank the ten most offensive classical music composers over the last 500 years. They had plenty of nominees. Beethoven never bathed. Mozart gambled away everything he earned and left his family destitute. Vivaldi was a libidinous priest. Whether any of these accusations are true I would never presume to hazard an opinion. However, even if they were all true, would this mean their music was not beautiful or worth listening to? The winner of the contest, by the way, was Wagner, who really was a despicable anti-semite. No orchestra in Israel can play his music without furious opposition. There's even a play about it called "You Will Not Play Wagner". I recently read an article in the Brandeis newsletter about the play, and the author made a good case that  "music itself cannot be antisemitic. But music has memories attached to it, and music moves the soul." (It's an interesting article. Click here if you want to read it.)

Still, does this mean the music is not brilliant? I can understand not buying the works of a living artist who is horrid because you don't want to support them personally. What about after he's been dead for years?

I've pondered this question for decades, but I've been thinking about it more since so many government entities have taken it upon themselves to start banning books. If you don't want to read a book or support the author, then don't. But there's something disturbingly Nazi-like about passing laws to keep anyone at all from reading a book or author because you don't like their point of view.

Many, many years ago - 1961, to be exact - Lawrence Durrell and the Austrian writer Alfred Perles published a book called Art and Outrage, A Correspondence About Henry Miller. It's a collection of their letters to one another over several months in which they wrote about this very subject. The author Henry Miller had no filter and his books contain passages that border on porn, which got him banned in many places at the time. But his writing is beautiful and deep. Is it art, Durrell and Perles wondered (very wittily)? Miller himself had a thing or two to say about it.

I can't help but be influenced by an artist's personal beliefs, if I know what those are. But as an author myself, I also know that when you're in the writing zone (or painting or composing or designing zone), what comes out feels like it has nothing to do with you, but comes from some higher power. I think this is why the ancients believed in the Muses. In the movie "Amadeus", the composer Antonio Salieri was moved to renounce God because his rival Mozart was blessed with genius, and whose music was heavenly, even though Mozart was a totally unworthy sinner and Salieri had spent his life composing only to please God. 

That's the problem with genius. It's like the rain. It falls on the worthy and the unworthy alike.

I'd be very interested to read what you think about Art and the Artist, Dear Readers. Perhaps you can clear things up for me.