Who Killed Fiction (and Why)?

If you want to feel really good about your community, publish a book.

That's what I learned last year. I thought releasing my first novel, after such a long process, would make me feel good about myself. But instead, it made me feel good about other people. I have been so gratified and amazed by how eager people are to help me, how much they want to see me succeed. I do believe that is in part because I wrote a good book, and because people see it as useful to social justice movements, specifically to justice for Palestine. But many people reached out before they'd ever read the book, and that includes people I never thought liked me, people I've had ambivalent political relationships with over the years, and even some people who don't agree with my politics on Palestine. Coworkers bought multiple copies to give to their families and friends for Christmas presents, while some of my good friends had private book signings (Tory bought more books than we sold at the Modern Times reading). Local bookstores have promoted it and let me know when there were problems in the supply chain.

I've also gotten some wonderful nuanced feedback from writers I respect, which will help me as I delve into Book 2 of the Rania & Chloe Palestine mystery series (pleased to have editor Elana Dykewomon back on board for Murder Under the Fig Tree). I've gotten used to talking about my writing process, how art differs from life, and had opportunities to reflect deeply on the events in my life that led to embarking on this project. I even remembered what I was working on before I went to Palestine, and made a commitment to get back to it before too long.

One of the less encouraging things I've learned is that fiction is out of favor in US culture right now. I've been surprised by the number of people who have told me, “Oh, I don't read fiction.” I'm not sure how I missed knowing this, since as early as 2004, commentators were reporting that “Although fiction still sells in great quantities … the attention of publishers and booksellers has moved elsewhere. Everyone in publishing agrees it is getting harder to sell a new novel, even by a distinguished name, in this country; book buyers seem interested only in non-fiction.” “The top 10 non-fiction books on the bestseller list always outsell the top 10 fiction books, save an occasional mega-seller,” wrote Anthony Chatfield in 2007.

Blogger Scott Esposito suggests that this trend reflects a desire for instant gratification: nonfiction offers the appearance that we've made an immediate gain in terms of useful knowledge. Another reason nonfiction might work better for people in this overscheduled information age is that it's easier to pick up and put down, or read parts of, requiring less commitment than a novel. Who, after all, really read Thomas Pickety's bestseller on capitalism from start to finish? I really liked Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of the Islamic State, but it didn't exactly make me miss any bus stops because I had to find out how it ended.

At the same time, alarm bells have been sounded by those worried about gaps in our kids' education – the same ones unwilling to address the elephant in the room, poverty. Researchers claim that high numbers of graduating students “may be able to compute a math problem or analyze a short story but they can't read a complex non-fiction text.” To remedy this perceived weakness, the Common Core Standards “calls for a shift in the balance of fiction to nonfiction as children advance through school. According to the CCSS guidelines, by the end of 4th grade, students’ reading should be half fiction and half informational. By the end of 12th grade, the balance should be 30 percent fiction, 70 percent nonfiction across all subject areas.”

I seriously question whether students can in fact analyze a short story if they can't “read a complex text.” The key words “analyze” and “complex” are not defined, at least not in any of the metareports I looked at; I didn't see the original data, which is attributed to the creators of the ACT college readiness exam. If by “analyze,” we mean anything beyond describing what happened (which is not analysis, but reporting), analyzing a work of fiction should require more complex thinking than reading even the most difficult nonfiction work because the information in a remotely well-written nonfiction text should be communicated directly, while the themes and lessons of fiction must be intuited or derived by careful attention to the symbolism of events and characters. A more likely explanation of the disparity between students' ability to analyze fictional versus nonfictional texts, if it exists, might be that the fiction they are reading is chosen, by themselves or their teachers, for its relevance to their lives, while the nonfiction is simply presented as information they need to know.

I remember when I was in graduate school complaining to my teacher, the always brilliant Michael Rogin, that I couldn't remember dates and characters in history.

“Can you remember the plots of novels?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied. (The same might not be said today, when I can easily read half a mystery before realizing I've read it before. But that might have more to do with the books than my failing memory.)

“That's because you attach symbolic significance to the events in the story. If you can do the same with historical events, you'll remember them too.” It was good analysis, good advice and it helped me become a better nonfiction reader. It might well work for students who are having the same trouble today. More to the point, if the “complex texts” are about things they think they need to know about, they will probably figure out a way to understand them.

The solution may well be worse than the problem. A series of studies that came out a few years ago found that reading literary fiction increased readers' empathy. One study used “a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.” Of course, once again, key words like “literary” and “popular” fiction are not defined. Examples of the literary works included books by Don DeLillo, Charles Dickens and Louise Erdrich, while popular fiction included Gillian Flynn and Danielle Steele. One hypothesis about the difference was that the characters in the popular works were not as well defined. I might offer some other hypotheses regarding Gillian Flynn (a friend and I just watched “Gone Girl” on TV) – such as that her characters are so unpleasant, one would not really want to get inside their emotional worlds. And yet, as I have previously mentioned, Flynn is often included among genre writers who have “crossed over” (a review of her book, Sharp Objects, says, “this is more literary novel than simple mystery”).

I haven't seen studies proving this, but I don't need any to know that fiction also helps us stretch our imaginations. Reading fiction is essential to the creation of revolutionaries, because if you can't imagine something that doesn't exist, you cannot help to create it. Is that perhaps a reason why these education reformers are so determined to limit the time that kids spend exercising their imaginations? Or is it simply that their own imaginations are so starved, at this point, that they can't remember the joy of being transported into another place, another time or another person's reality?

I went to see 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens" the other night. I enjoyed it, especially the 3D effects. But there was a lot less to the story than in the 1970s episodes, which is not saying that much. There's almost no character development; it's two hours of nonstop battle scenes. The best mainstream movies I saw last year, “Spotlight” and “Trumbo,” along with some I didn't care for like “Bridge of Spies,” were barely fictionalized versions of true stories. Among the 12 top grossing films of 2015, nine were installments in multi-film franchises, two were based on old television shows, one was based on an alleged true story and one was a remake. Only two, “Inside Out” and “The Martian,” were original fictional narratives.

Those of us who write fiction might need to start fighting for its place in our culture, for the sake of the culture as well as ourselves.

Murder Under the Bridge has gotten some excellent reviews.

Middle East Monitor
East Bay Express
Counterpunch
Library Journal

I've also done quite a few interviews on radio and even one on TV. If you're interested, you can find some of them on my website.

I will be reading in Washington, DC on January 16 (Politics & Prose, 1:00 pm), Richmond, VA on January 19 (Fountain Books, 6:30 pm) and Portland, Oregon on January 22 (Another Read Through, 7:00 pm). More information.  If you're in one of those cities and can't make the reading but have time to get together, please email me.

Better Fast Than Right? Between The Colorlines

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me an announcement for Facing Race 2014, a national conference organized by Race Forward: The Center For Racial Justice Innovation.  A number of my friends have gone in the past and found it stimulating and useful.  This year’s conference is in Dallas, in November and I have no desire to travel that far, and anyway I hate conferences.  BUT, ever since reading The New Jim Crow, and especially since the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court on the same week that gay marriage was given a shot in the arm, I have been burning to be involved in a movement for racial justice – specifically a movement targeting U.S. apartheid.

Yes, you read that right – I am saying that the U.S. has an apartheid system.

We used to have formal apartheid only in the South, but at that time, we didn’t need it in the rest of the country because whites were a huge majority. So we could have “majority rule” and still have white rule, and with it a “system of segregation and discrimination” which, in case you did not know, is the definition of the Afrikaner word, apartheid.  Ta-Nahisi Coates’ explosive article on reparations in The Atlantic documented the myriad ways in which that unacknowledged apartheid system has been built up over the last eighty years: housing segregation, educational discrimination, employment discrimination, enforced income inequality, denial of credit, discrimination in public benefits, “the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy.”  Today one of my friends posted on Facebook an article reporting that families headed by a white person without a high school diploma are wealthier than Black and Latino families headed by someone with a college degree.  (I do wonder, incidentally, how that breaks down in terms of age; I’m guessing that most of those white high school dropouts with 51,000+ of wealth are older, but that’s not here or there.  In 1950, 56.3% of whites 25-29 had graduated high school.  In 2012, it was 94.6%.  For Asians it was 96.1, for African Americans, 88.5 and Latinos, 75.1.)

Now there are lots of organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, that are, in theory, working to rectify these gross injustices.  In point of fact, Race Forward (until recently Applied Research Center), the organizer of the conference and publisher of Colorlines, itself has an office here.  So I shouldn’t need to go to a conference 2000 miles away to find something to get involved in.  Sadly, though, none of the myriad racial justice nonprofits seems to be looking for middle-aged, middle class white women to become part of their cadre.  Quite understandable.  Not, mind you, that I have to be cadre.  I’d be happy to help stuff envelopes (huh? I’m sure the young organizers would say?  What’s an envelope?), proofread copy for their websites, or make phone calls.  I frequently discuss this with a friend who has similar interests.  She called an organization we both admire and offered to call people who had signed up to volunteer, find out what they want to do and try to get them plugged in.  The organizer she spoke to eagerly embraced that idea.  He never called her back.

So I did not immediately delete the Facing Race announcement from my inbox.  I left it there to fester.

The next time I thought about it, it was because I saw a tweet on #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, from someone (not sure who – can’t find it now) saying they were boycotting the conference and Colorlines because #IStandWithAura.  Okay, I knew who Aura is (here I want some credit for not making a bad pun like what color is your aura).  Aura Bogado is the news editor of Colorlines, a frequent contributor to The Nation and AlterNet.  I generally like her stuff.  We have some mutual friends.  I frantically paged back back back in my twitter feed to find out why I needed to stand with her and boycott a conference I hadn’t decided to go to.



What I learned was this:  On September 10, Bogado posted an article responding to a video, or t-shirt commercial, by a company called “FCKH8.”  I never heard of the company but I h8ed them instantly because everything around here knows that “H8” has something to do with the gay marriage.  (Proposition 8 was the ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage in California, the very same one that was struck down a few days after the Voting Rights Act.)

Here’s how FCKH8 describes themselves:  “FCKH8.com is a for-profit T-shirt company with an activist heart and a passionate social change mission: arming thousands of people with pro-LGBT equality, anti-racism and anti-sexism T-shirts that act as “mini-billboards” for change. Started in 2010 with comedic viral videos that captured millions of views on YouTube, FCKH8.com has shipped almost 200,000 equality tees, tanks and hoodies to supporters in over 100 countries.”

You don’t really have to go to their website to get the picture.  I have no doubt that they’re people who care about the issues they are promoting, as well as people who never met an issue they couldn’t make a buck off.

The specific video Bogado (and apparently other Colorlines staff who contributed to the article) were responding to was advertising a t-shirt that says, “Racism Is Not Over But I’m Over Racism.”  It’s title: A Kinda Awkward Note To America By #Ferguson Kids.”  The article raises a bunch of very legitimate questions about this video and its kind:  “Even if the children are from Ferguson, it’s unclear if or how they’ve been compensated. Either way, the idea that these kids are from Ferguson is paraded for consumption…. According to its website, FCKH8.com “recently became owned and managed by Synergy Media,” a corporate branding firm whose clients include Magnum bodybuilding vitamin supplements and pretty offensive “Buckeye Boob T’s” (the latter despite the fact that FCKH8.com says it’s anti-sexist).  There’s an entire economy around black death—and this ad campaign illustrates it all too well. Ironically, this economy’s profit margins depend on upholding the very racism this video claims to want to eliminate.”  Bogado’s post also mentioned that $5 from the sale of each shirt “will supposedly go to unidentified ‘charities working in communities to fight racism.’”

The article, which is quite short (353 words), drew a spate of h8 tweets and accusations of "reverse racism" by supporters of FCKH8, along with a press release revealing that Race Forward was one of the “unidentified organizations” designated to receive the money.  On September 15, Race Forward added a 464-word “update,” read by many as an apology and unwarranted criticism of Bogado, who was not mentioned.  Hence #IStandWithAura was born.

As far as I can tell the original post contains exactly one claim which is inaccurate: that FCKH8 didn’t have gear specifically promoting transgender equality.  Everything else addressed in Race Forward’s update was not a statement but a question or a comment about the appropriateness of the video’s medium and message.  Race Forward didn’t know that it was one of the designated charities, and said they were turning down the money.

Also as far as I can tell, Race Forward does not denounce Aura Bogado, the original blog, nor apologize for its content.  The statement was signed “Colorlines and Race Forward,” which is more confusing than clarifying.  Bogado is the news editor, so one would expect her to have been involved in crafting the response.  Was she not?  Her supporters jumped in to StandWith her and denounce Colorlines, which the next day issued a Unity Statement, criticizing itself for its response.

  
For her part, Aura Bogado seems to have said nothing.

What this incident illustrates for me is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and one of the reasons I’ve been blogging less and less frequently.  The Internet Age rewards people who don’t think too long or deeply about what they put out in the world.  Big duh, right?  The evidence of that is everywhere, from the smearing of Sunil Tripathi as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to the #CancelColbert campaign which harmed its creator far more than it did Colbert or the people who sent an offensive tweet in his name.  Yet the ethic of better fast than right continues to gain credence.

I recently sent an op-ed about a Supreme Court decision to a respected online publication.  They rejected it because the decision was four days old already.  I understood, but was frustrated.  This sped-up news cycle privileges the voices of those who can drop everything to pen their comments.  But it also privileges those who don’t do too much research, or let the fact that they don’t know much stop them from mouthing off.  And then we get mad at each other and jump on each other for being wrong.

Could the people who wrote the original post on Colorlines have looked a little more carefully at the website of FCKH8 and seen that they have some transgender-themed t-shirts?  Indisputably.

Could Colorlines have taken time to talk to Bogado and others about the implications of their response to criticism before posting it, making sure no one felt disrespected?  Definitely.

Is there a benefit to people boycotting Colorlines, one of the most thoughtful (usually) publications out there taking race seriously?  Not a chance.

Will the bad feeling created by this public fracas live on in subtle or not-so-subtle ways?  Who knows?

As I have previously observed, movement people are notoriously purist and quick to judge.  I shudder to think what my friends and I might have done to one another in the eighties, if we had had Twitter at our disposal.