How Iris Murdoch Opened a Young Woman's View of Life

I recently published a short post on why people read fiction and here is another on the same theme.

Susan Scarf Merrell, a novelist and creative writing instructor, has a recent piece in the New York Times in which she relates how discovering the works of Iris Murdoch at a young age opened her eyes to a different world than that in which she was being brought up.

Merrell relates how she grew up in a literary family where books were everywhere, passed around from one person to another and discussed at dinner, in the car or on walks. These included works by authors such as Dickens, Austin, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, George Eliot -- you get the picture.

Iris Murdock was not in the family canon. And despite being a contemporary author who had, at the time Merrell discovered her work by chance in the closet of a vacation house in Sicily, written about half of the 26 novels she would eventually publish, was never mentioned in the Merrell household.

For the young woman -- and this is no doubt a story familiar to many -- Murdock's novels opened a new world of possibilities. Life could be considerably, and excitingly, different from what Merrell up to that point had imagined.

"Her people voiced prejudice, held misguided opinions, and Murdoch took them down, but with understanding and affection.  Marriages ended, things were said, there was way too much drinking and even some fighting, and life went on. Yes, in Murdoch's world characters behaved badly and were not always punished for it.  And even if they were, they found their way to reasonable fates."

And, of course, there was all the sex: "hetero- and homo-, extramarital, even incestuous, all charged with violence, betrayal and yearning -- utterly thrilling to an overly protected kid like me."

Did Merrell then share or discuss these works with other members of her family?  She did not, clearly feeling they were not part of that world.

"I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional works of one's own."

Color Prejudice Can Be As Strong as That Based on Race

When I started writing this blog four years ago, my first post was about a short story in the New Yorker  by Toni Morrison called "Sweetness," which was actually the first chapter of a since-published novel called "God Help the Child."  Over the years, it has become one of my most-read posts and you can find it here.

In a nutshell, the story was about a light-skinned African-American woman who experiences a profound sense of prejudice against her much darker infant daughter.

I mention this because there was a report the other day that the African nation of Rwanda is moving to ban sin-bleaching agents, such as mercury, deemed to be harmful.  Skin-bleaching is a billion dollar industry in predominantly black countries, the article noted.

Why is that?

"In Rwanda and other countries, people use cosmetics to bleach their skin because they feel that lighter skin is the ideal or indicates higher social status. Dark-skinned people do not necessarily see people like them in billboards, movies and advertisements, and dark-skinned celebrities sometimes grow more popular after bleaching their skin. This all makes it easier to believe that darker skin is of lesser value or is not considered as beautiful," the article said.

Those interested can read the New York Times story from which that quote is taken or watch a video on the topic that appeared in the Washington Post.

What is to Come: The Matriarchy

Well, Ok, this is another post that is not about fiction -- unfortunately.

Since the election of Donald Trump as President, many commentators have said that even when he is gone, U.S. politics will never be the same again.

And recently we have had some evidence that they are correct.

I'm thinking here of Rashida Tlaib, recently elected to the U.S. Congress after previously serving in the Michigan state legislature.  The other day, in public remarks, she referred to Trump as a "motherfucker." In the view of New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, Tlaib's use of such terminology was perfectly justified -- for a variety of reasons -- (even though either Goldberg herself or her editors declined to print that word in her column).

Back in the 1980s and 90s, when I was covering various Congressional issues as a reporter, one of he most irascible members of the House of Representatives was David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat. Very liberal, he had little use for many if not most conservative members of Congress and who knows in what terms he may have referred to them in private.  But in public, Obey was careful to say that he held such and such a member of Congress "in minimum high regard."  Translated, that meant Obey considered him a total scoundrel, or worse.

Those were back in the bad old days when "the patriarchy" pretty much reigned supreme and especially in Washington DC.

Well those days are over, it seems, with Democratic voters returning a flood of women to Congress. So much for toxic masculinity.  In its place, we can apparently look forward to equally toxic femininity.

Who is to blame?  Well,  the name Trump will undoubtedly come to the lips of many.  He broke all the rules of civility in public life and most importantly, deliberately and without apology, arguably thus thrusting open the floodgates for all that is apparently to come.

But I'm afraid it's really back to Pogo declaring "we have met the enemy and he is us."

We the people collectively elected Donald Trump even though he failed to win a majority of the popular vote, and even though we knew exactly who he was and how he operated based on his conduct during the primaries and the run-up to the general election.

Yes, things have changed. Welcome to the world of Rashida Tlaib and the impending "matriarchy."

Religion Seen as Most Difficult Topic for YA Fiction

I've written a number of posts on YA (Young Adult) Fiction because it has been showing good growth while sales of most other genres of fiction are described as stagnant or even declining.

Not surprisingly, given what anyone can easily find on the Internet, few topics are off limits for young adults (aged 12 to 18) except perhaps religion. That's the view of Donna Freitas, an author of such books and a person who has a doctorate in religious studies, as recently expressed in the New York Times  weekly book review section.

"A writer can go as dark and violent as it gets. Sex is more than fine. ... Graphic, instructive, erotic, romantic, disappointing: bring it all on.  Even better, current YA novels now have many L.G.B.T.Q. protagonists ... which was not the case 10 years ago."

In fact, "the sky is the limit," Freitas said, except for religion.  "Religion is the last taboo."

Since most wars these days seem to be grounded in religious differences, that's a curiosity even beyond the reasons Freitas gives in her article.

"As a frequent speaker on college campuses, I can confirm that while young people may be more skeptical about traditional religion, their hunger for a more inclusive, nontraditional spirituality is  constant," Freitas said. While teenage readers "search for themselves" in the books they read, few protagonists of YA fiction identify with a particular faith or claim spirituality as something of interest, she said.

Why don't authors address such interests?

"We worry someone may be trying to convert or indoctrinate teenagers; we resist preachiness about certain moral perspectives,"  Freitas said.  But at the same time, she conceded that "religions and religious people have done and still do reprehensible things in our world, to women, to children, to some of the people I care most deeply about."

Not to mention what they do to other societies in general that don't happen to adhere to their faith. Remember what ISIS did to their neighbors and what they apparently would have loved to do with us, and what we in turn did to them?  And all the "collateral damage" that occurred in the process?

But Freitas' point is nonetheless well taken.  And I say that as an agnostic.

Signaling Virtue is Where It's At, Especially for White Males

New York Time conservative columnist David Brooks, who has mostly been wandering in the political wilderness since the election of Donald Trump, had a highly amusing, and mostly on target, satirical piece in the Jan. 4, 2019, edition of the paper.

It was all about what constitutes being a "good person" in the current age.

I will focus on one of his four recommendations: feeling indignant all of the time.

"When you are indignant, or woke, you are showing you have a superior moral awareness.  Your indignation itself is a sign of your goodness, and if you can be indignant quicker than the people around you, that just shows how much more good you are," Brooks wrote.

This is called "signaling virtue" and I cited an example of it in a recent column where Washington Post critic Ron Charles, a white male, expressed his indignation that J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is still in the canon of great books.

"We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision," Charles said, beating his breast for even greater effect: "We have met the phonies and they are us."

To be a good person these days it is also necessary to attach the word "privileged" to every mention of white males and as you can see above, Charles hit that particular "signaling virtue" nail on the head, too.  Actually,  "privileged" is the currently right adjective for white females, too, but it is best not used by a male.  Any criticism of women, no matter what race, could be viewed as misogyny and one then certainly can't be a good person.

There was a time, Brooks said, when people thought being good meant living up to some external standard of moral excellence.  But not now. "Self display" is where it's at.

If you feel a need, you can signal your own virtue by getting very indignant about this post.

Why Do People Read Fiction -- Beyond For Entertainment?

Why do people read fiction beyond the simple reason that it is entertaining or diverting?

One reason might be to expand one's horizons -- to find out more about the world in a fashion that is less dry or sleep-inducing than non-fiction.

When I lived in England, my chief means of finding out more about the English and their country was by reading their novels.  And when I lived in Japan, I did the same thing -- this time Japanese novels in translation, including "The Tale of Genji," which took me months to get through. Fortunately, there were a significant number of excellent translations of Japanese literature, both classic and contemporary.

But another reason is to find out more about oneself.

"Teenage readers search for themselves in books," said Donna Frietas, an author of Young Adult fiction, in a recent New York Times book review article.

Teenagers aren't the only ones.  When I self-published my first novella, "Manhattan Morning," some of my friends who were kind enough to read it said it wasn't that interesting for them because they could not identify with my protagonist and thus did not find him interesting.  And, indeed, I soon began to realize that much (but not all) of the feedback that I received said more about the person giving me their reaction than it did about my book.

It is a revealing exercise and one that leads to a certain amount of self-reflection.

JD Salinger Viewed As White Male Canon Fodder

With the white population of the U.S. declining toward minority status, the country's cultural traditions are episodically under attack and perhaps nowhere more forcefully than with respect to literature.

It's time to revise "the canon" -- the prevailing list of great books that are not just mostly euro-centric, but heavily the work of white male authors, reformers contend.  The canon, while unofficial, is nonetheless highly influential, particularly when it comes to deciding what books children should read in school or be taught in college.

The latest assault comes from Ron Charles, a white male himself, who reviews books for the Washington Post. He seized upon J.D. Salinger's 100th birthday (Jan. 1, 2019) to bash the relevance of "The Catcher in the Rye," an iconic coming-of-age novel that has sold over 65 million copies since it was first published in 1951.

"We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision," Charles said.

"We have met the phonies and they are us," the critic declared, apparently feeling it expedient to  signal his own personal virtue. More accurately, he might have declared that "he" had met the enemy and it was "himself". Just who are the "we" and the "us," one wonders?

Noting that the U.S. is experiencing a renaissance in young-adult literature -- a topic I have addressed in several earlier posts (search on the label "young adult fiction") -- Charles said it is "no longer tenable to imagine that the anxieties of a white heterosexual young man [Holden Caulfield]  expelled from an expensive prep school capture the spirit of our era." Today's "snarky young anti-hero" is more likely to resemble the black French Canadian boy in a forthcoming book called "The Field Guide to the North American Teenager," by Ben Phillipe, a black male born in Haiti,  he said.

But, as Clark's article makes clear, Salinger and his small set of published works aren't dead yet.  The New York Public Library, he noted, is planning a special exhibition of manuscripts, letters, books and artifacts for October 2019.  And once Salinger dies, the trustees of his literary estate could seek to cash in on the theatrical, film and television demand for his stories estimated to be worth as much as $50 million.

"Don't think it won't happen," Charles said, implying demand for the white-male literary canon still has legs.

As for "The Field Guide to the North American Teenager," the public will in due course decide whether it needs 65 million copies or not.