By: Michael Kaufman
Imagine this: Charles Dickens rewrites his novels to cut out anything about the miserable conditions facing the working class and poor in 19th-century England. Leo Tolstoy revises War and Peace to leave out Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Toni Morrison doesn’t notice the racism hammering Black people, Salman Rushdie ignores the impact of colonialism, and Margaret Atwood omits the growth of the hyper-patriarchal religious right.
We’d be left with Hallmark greeting cards. Hollowed out, superficial, why-bother-reading, fiction.
But here are the mantras I still hear from too many writers: “I’m not political.” “I leave politics out of my fiction.” “Art (with a capital A, of course) has no room for politics.”
As a fiction writer whose latest mystery (The Last Resort) revolves around some serious themes (climate change and violence against women) — the book ads say “Margaret Atwood meets Raymond Chandler meets Greta Thunberg” — I’d like to share a few thoughts with you about the place of social, political and economic themes in fiction.
Including such themes does not mean you’re writing a political pamphlet or telling people how to vote.
Broadly put, politics — whether in governments, workplaces or the personal politics of relationships — is all about the exercise of power and how the institutions and ideas we inherit from the past effect all facets of our lives. Power and conflict (as well as love and connection) lie both at the core and the ephemera of people’s lives. This meshes perfectly with fiction. After all, at its heart, even the most escapist fiction deals with conflict. It deals with the struggles and challenges people experience, whether in the supposed quiet of their homes or the deafening blasts of a country at war.
Imagining that your fiction isn’t “political” is a luxury only enjoyed by those who have some form of social power.
It would be pretty impossible for a LatinX, Asian-American, American Indian, or Black writer to pen a present-day story that isn’t informed by past injustices, ongoing racism, and the daily hammering of micro-aggressions. It would be impossible for a woman to pretend that sexual harassment, violence against women, unequal pay, sexist remarks, and limits to women’s autonomy aren’t a factor in her women characters’ decisions, movements, life-choices, relationships, and work. Similarly, others who don’t enjoy social power — those who face discrimination and bias because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, physical and mental differences, or socio-economic class — simply don’t have the luxury of pretending that art is separate from the world we live in.
That much said, thankfully fiction is different from nonfiction.
I’m fortunate in that I get to write both. (My latest nonfiction book is The Time Has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution.) When I want to teach something about that world, I write nonfiction. In my fiction, I get to tell stories that are situated in that world. I get to entertain, amuse, startle, soothe, amaze, outrage, sadden, turn on, and delight.
In The Last Resort, and my Jen Lu mystery series as a whole, I face a particular challenge. Well, actually two big ones.
One is that it is set in the near future in Washington, D.C. The last thing the world needs is another grim, dystopian novel or movie. Yes, climate change is hitting hard in 2034, the gulf between rich and poor is widening, but as a long-time activist for social justice, I’m a pretty positive and hopeful guy. I wanted to recognize the challenges that lie ahead, but ultimately, my goal was to write a page-turner, a story that’s as much fun to read as it was to write. And I got to tell you, it was really fun to write.
The second is I didn’t want it to be “about” those serious themes but rather have Jen Lu embroiled in them, along with her very unusual partner, Chandler. Here’s the way I do it: Environmental lawyer and media darling Patty Garcia dies in a bizarre accident on a golf course. Of the seven billion people on the planet, only D.C. police detective Jen Lu thinks she was murdered. After all, Garcia just won a court case for massive climate change reparations to be paid out by oil, gas, and coal companies. Chandler, the bio-computer implanted in her brain and wannabe tough guy, tells her to put on the brakes, but soon the two of them are digging deep. Did her abusive ex-husband kill her or was it a big shot in the oil industry…or perhaps someone else? In no time, Jen is in the crosshairs of those who want to ensure the truth never comes to light, no matter the cost. Jen Lu is next on the killer’s list.
My decision to make the series playful, to imbue the books with a sense of hope, to have the reader smiling on one page and biting their nails on the next — such is the strategy I use that allows me to seamlessly fold in the social and political themes.
Oh, one last thing on Tolstoy: Although I stand by what I said above, he’d have been the first to say he should have tightened up the battle scenes and the exposition about the war. He himself said Anna Karenina, written eight years after War and Peace, was his first real novel.
Michael Kaufman, PhD, is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction books. As an advisor, activist, and keynote speaker, he has developed innovative approaches to engage men and boys in promoting gender equality and positively transforming men's lives. Over the past four decades his work with the United Nations, governments, non-governmental organizations, corporations, trade unions, and universities has taken him to fifty countries.