It's Fiction!

I realized recently that it had been many months since I had seen anything on Bluesky from the NY Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie, and when I dug into why, I found that he had blocked me. That seemed odd since the only thing I could remember ever replying to him about were movies—usually to suggest additional movies based on a post about movies he liked. When I dug into it, I found it was due to a reply I made to a post where he had found the Atlantic writer’s George Packer’s choice for his novel The Emergency reprehensible. Packer’s sin? He had the ultra-left canceling/ruining people, instead of using the MAGA right. Note. I haven’t read Packer’s novel yet, so I can’t verify that Packer actually made that choice. My reply that set him off was pointing out that this was fiction, and that Bouie had no idea how long ago Packer wrote the novel. Hell, as an author of fiction, I felt it was my duty to stand up for another author.

While it might be true that in today’s climate it’s the MAGA-right canceling people in the Federal government who refuse to accept Trump’s outrageous lies that he won the 2020 election and the equally insane claim that the violent insurrectionists attacking Congress for Trump were merely “peaceful patriots”, as well as labeling protestors or anyone opposing Trump as “terrorists”, there was a time when social media warriors on the progressive left were doing a damn good job canceling people (and it could be argued that Trump won a second time thanks in part to the backlash to this). There was a story that came out a number of years ago about a woman who before boarding a flight to the Middle East tweeted out a joke that was in effect making fun of Islamophobia, and the left misconstrued it as an example of Islamophobia. By the time she landed she’d been fired from her job, and her life had been turned upside down. The story made enough of an impact on me that I spent a few days trying to work out a plot for a novel based loosely on it before deciding it wasn’t something I wanted to spend 6+ months on.

Here’s the thing about novels—a novel published today could’ve been written many years ago. I don’t know whether this lore about the GREAT noir writer Jim Thompson is true, but the story is he’d check into a motel room with a bottle of booze and leave a few days later with a finished novel. I’ve also heard stories about writers taking 5 or more years to write a novel. And once a novel is finished, it could take years to find a publisher, and once a publishing deal is struck (which by itself could take months of negotiations), it could take over a year before the novel is scheduled for publishing. So it’s very possible that when Packer made his choice that so offended Bouie, it was the logical choice to make. Here’s another thing: it’s fiction! A novel that promotes ugly behavior, such as racism, antisemitism, violence, misogyny, etc. is reprehensible, but that’s very different than a novel that has characters that behave in an ugly fashion. I’d normally say it would be hard to find a more violent, amoral character than A Clockwork Orange’s Alex (except I’d written one in Pariah with Kyle Nevin), but Burgess isn’t promoting that type of behavior. Instead, Burgess is using Alex to write a novel about free will, just like I used Nevin to write a satirical crime novel about publishing and our celebrity-obsessed culture. Packer’s choice, whatever Bouie might have thought about it, is simply a choice within a much larger idea.