Three years ago, when thinking about what my next novel should be about, I straw-polled friends: which issues did they find important? They came back with the stuff of our current political season: race and gender. Watching last year’s primary contest, I felt like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News; I’d thought something in the privacy of home, and now I watched people struggle to talk about it on my TV screen.
Part of the fun of novel-writing – if such a dead lift can be called fun – is stepping into other minds. An African-American woman’s brain was, for a Long Island Jew like me, hard, exhilarating territory. Today’s fretful association of Blacks and Jews — 60′s civil rights partners — is one of the great arithmetic problems: how did two close communities divide so thoroughly? Besides, what ambitious novelist takes on America without having a go at America’s fissure lines?
For my novel More Than It Hurts You, casting the African-American characters, I couldn’t stop trying to see the story through Black reviewers’ eyes. This was an added, probably detrimental step; putting on the mask, then quickly taking it off to see what it looked like. I also constantly ran the sociological numbers: if 28.5 percent of black men have been in prison , is it reasonable to make one black character an ex-con? And when I attempted jailhouse slang, I’d see myself as being Vanilla Ice-level bogus.
So I’d need to restrain my P.C. reflexes. My protagonist is Darlene Stokes, a Black pediatrician who works to pry a baby from his white family. The challenge was to make this woman like me in temperament, without being me in blackface. Taking on that challenge reminded me of what fiction — and maybe only fiction — can do.
There’s something memorable Jonathan Franzen once wrote ; he took a stand against male authors writing female protagonists. “Something about” it made Franzen “uneasy”: “Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object?” he wondered. “Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women?”
But if you’re going to write honestly about your time and country, you can’t think like that. You’ll find yourself ambling up behind your story with your leash tinkling.
Still, thanks partly to statements by Franzen and other novelist-experts in self-demolition, people forget that fiction is uniquely positioned to address such complicated issues. Not long ago, the creaky laureate V.S. Naipaul said that fiction is of “no account” when measured against the larger global political situation . But the novelist’s spark is the spark of ambiguity, which seems right for such journeys: the guide walks gingerly as the cave walls light up and the shadows enlarge.
A good novel shows the world as world not as you see it, but as others do — and it helps us to understand that nothing is as simple as right v. wrong. As Milan Kundera wrote, this complex take is almost impossible “to hear amid the din of the essay, of the political statement.” (That is, I think, what so many people found so unusual and inspiring about Barack Obama’s first Reverend Wright speech. Explaining, or trying to explain, Black anger to the white community and white anger to the Black community: Mr. Obama struck me as having a kind of a novelistic gift. But, politics being politics, tendentiousness soon drowned out that subtlety of literary thought.) I think that’s why this book struck a kind of chord; I was on Good Morning America and The CBS Late, Late Show to discuss it.
Using the novelists’ secret formula — one part research, three parts empathy — I hope I’ve made my Darlene a credible veteran of the Black experience. But you never know; I’ve been faulted for even trying. (My 2000 book Chang & Eng was about the famous “Siamese Twins,” and some reviewers questioned my right even to attempt a novel about Asians.)
Women, Blacks, Jews – the people I wrote about are interest groups. Their grievances are not only real, but ongoing. And they scuffle in discomfiting ways. Such a project should make you uneasy. Making people uneasy is one of the jobs of fiction, which, incidentally, is why Franzen is wrong. Everyone has a story. That’s the reason this political year is so interesting: sometimes those stories drive out of the garage, pull out onto the highway, and crash. Might make a good book.
Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss received a Guggenheim for fiction-writing in 2006. His newest novel “More Than It Hurts You” just came out in paperback. ...
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