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.

The Case for Cheating

Last night I saw “Race to Nowhere,” the antidote to “Waiting for Superman,” the new film which blames the failure of our educational system on teachers’ unions and other proponents of publicly run public schools. “Race to Nowhere” is a powerful indictment of the pressure-packed environment today’s kids have to navigate. It’s one of the most intense movies I ever saw, partly because a lot of kids I have known and loved bear the same scars as those in the movie. At the panel afterwards, some of the protagonists and other experts on educational policy drilled the central message: the obsession with “achievement” is getting in the way of much actual learning.

The kids talked about coming home from a full day of school followed by sports, music lessons, Hebrew school or work to do six or eight hours of homework. One of the talking heads was the author of the book “The Case Against Homework,” which I picked up a few years ago, concerned about the unwieldy obligations of my niece and some of the other kids I know. The book presented a lot of evidence that kids derive no benefit from most of the homework they do, that the rewards of homework diminish rapidly after about 20 minutes per class for high school students, and that unstructured time is important for developing creativity and discovering one’s passions. In the film, one Advanced Placement teacher said he cut the homework in half and the AP scores of his students went up.

Sunday night I had dinner with a friend and the Chinese student who is living with her. Yi Sha told us that high school students in China start their day at 7:00 a.m. and don’t go home until 10:00 p.m., six days a week. Middle school is 7:00 to 6:00 and little kids get to go home at 5:00. We were all horrified, but my friend said, “That’s why we’re failing.” I disagreed, and tonight’s movie reinforced my disagreement. In fact, our kids are working as hard as the Chinese kids, and I don’t think it’s good for either of them.

By contrast, most Palestinian kids go to school from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and don’t do more than a couple hours of homework, and Palestine has the highest percentage of Ph.D.s in the world.

One thing that annoyed me in the movie was a romanticism about what childhood was like in the “good old days” – that is, the sixties and seventies when I was growing up. The parents in the film, who are my age or a little younger, rhapsodize about how much fun we had. All I can say is, they weren’t growing up where I was. I remember feeling suicidal every day for three years – and in my family, I was the happy well-adjusted kid. Several of my classmates actually attempted suicide,. Nearly all of us were anorexic, some were bulimic, many of us were molested, we were bullied, we cut ourselves, we were pressured, we were shamed and ridiculed by teachers. My classes were smaller than today’s, but only because I was born during a period of declining birth rates and the budget cuts hadn’t quite caught up with the lower enrollment. It didn’t matter how large or small they were, though, because you didn't get individual attention if there were five kids in your class; it wasn’t part of the methodology back then.

I remember some years ago figuring out that the reason I never learned anything in gym class was because no one really tried to teach me anything. The teachers thought yelling stuff like, “Watch the ball!” or “Try harder!” would turn you from a klutz into a gazelle. The more interesting realization was that the frustration I experienced during the one period of Phys. Ed. was what kids who weren’t good at academics experienced the rest of the day. No one tried to figure out why they weren’t learning. They just got bad grades, and if the grades were bad enough they failed.

By far the most useful thing I learned in school was how to get along with people whom I didn’t necessarily have that much in common with. The second most useful was that not everything was going to be about me. I might be bored, the culture of the school might not be what I was comfortable with, but that was just life, and I had to adjust. That is something I was pleased to hear mentioned in the film: that the main purpose of education is socialization.

So that begs the question, what are we socializing kids for? The given in every discussion about education is that the goal is to get a good job. One theme that was continually raised in “Race to Nowhere” was that the skills taught in school need to be relevant to the jobs people are trying to get.

Apparently a major response to the pressure that kids are under to achieve has been a meteoric rise in cheating. In one very high achieving school, 80% of the students said they had cheated. The assumption was that this is a problem, and I’m not saying it’s not, but we can also look at cheating as cooperation. What’s the difference between helping a friend pass a test and being a “team player”?

Recently, I got to take a private class in database development. I had been trying to write a macro to do something and it wasn’t working. I asked the teacher and he said, “Google it.” So we did and found some code that I copied into my macro and it ran.

I said, “That’s what I usually do, but I always thought it was cheating.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “Does it work?”

“Usually.”

“Then why is it cheating?”

I said, “Well, I don’t exactly know why it works.”

“Does it matter?” he asked.

I am a little ambivalent. You could say that it’s ridiculous to make challah when I can buy perfectly good ones from Semi Freddie’s. I would say that it’s both useful to know how to make bread and fun to do it. But I know that the secretaries at my job who spend time retyping documents because they don’t know how to scan and OCR them (or even better, that they can send them to me to do for them) are not using their time wisely. So I would add to the list of most important things I learned: distinguishing between activities that have intrinsic value and those which are unnecessary busy work.

Some years ago at a workshop, the facilitator asked us to write down a negative characteristic of ourselves that we are kind of proud of. Without hesitation, I wrote, “I’m lazy.” When I tell people that, they always argue with me. How can I be lazy when I’m involved in so many projects and take on so much work? But I’m not being humble. My laziness is what makes it possible for me to accomplish a lot. The fact that I’m the laziest person on earth makes me good at my job, because I’m always looking for the fastest way to get the work done with the least amount of effort.

I get frustrated that most of my coworkers are not adventurous. They’re smart and experienced, they know a lot, but they’re afraid to try new things. They prefer to plod than to figure out how to learn what they don't know. I learned to word process by lying. I said I knew WordPerfect when I had never used it. I went to a bookstore and read up on how to turn on the computer, change the margin, set a tab. When I got to my first job, fortunately there was no one sitting near me to see me frantically looking at the help menus. By the time anyone came to see how I was doing, I seemed like an expert.

So if my experience is any indication, laziness and lying are more useful qualities to teach kids than honesty and industry.