Writing and truth in the literary Dark Ages
“Fiction is where I go to tell the truth,” the late, great Pat Conroy once said. In his acclaimed novels, Conroy cut close to the bone, exposing human truths that left readers breathless with painful recognition.
Lucky for him and his readers, Conroy’s death in 2016 meant he was spared the pre-publication censorship that fiction writers face today. He escaped the full force of the steamrolling appropriation-and-sensitivity movement currently in vogue.
“Publish or perish” in this new age of you-can’t-say-that has been retooled as publish and perish. Certain words are essentially verboten — “plantation,” for one. But at the heart of the new restrictions is the notion that novelists can’t (or shouldn’t) write in the voice of someone whose experience and heart they cannot know. This means that whites should write only about white characters, Latinos about Latinos, Asians about Asians and so on.
Most writers and agents agree that America’s new literary Dark Age began with Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt.” This 2020 novel, about an undocumented immigrant to the United States who was forced to flee Mexico with her son after her journalist husband exposed a local drug kingpin, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a New York Times bestseller that sold 3 million copies worldwide in 37 languages. What could go wrong?
Everything. Some Mexican Americans panned the book for containing stereotypes. Perhaps most egregious, Cummins wasn’t Latina enough. She’s from New Jersey, and her only connection to her protagonist is a Puerto Rican grandmother. Her book tour was canceled.
Such developments might be well-intentioned, but you know what they say about the road to hell. When Alberto Gullaba Jr. turned in his first novel, “University Thugs,” about a young Black man with a criminal record trying to navigate an elite university struggling with race issues, his agent was excited. That is, until Gullaba told him, “Hey, no, man, I’m not Black, I’m Filipino.”
“Oh.”
A British sensitivity reader with the correct pigmentation was brought in to read Gullaba’s manuscript, whereupon his agency asked, “By the way, can you make the main character Filipino?” Gullaba elected to adopt the pen name Free Chef and self-published on Amazon.
Yes, of course, I considered not writing this column. Why invite the wrath of the overly sensitive? Because truth demands it. The books I’ve read (and reread) that hold a place in my heart hurt me, made me cry, made me laugh and kept me awake long past the last page. “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner” clobbered me. Could William Styron be published today? He wrote in the voices of women, Jews, African Americans and plantation owners. How could he know their hearts and minds? The way writers always have: by employing their fertile imaginations, mining their own experiences and applying their craft to find a deeper way of seeing things so that readers might also see them (and ourselves) better.
Publishing-world paranoia isn’t restricted to race or ethnicity. When Robert Dugoni’s Tracy Crosswhite series featured a female protagonist, he was asked how he could write as a woman. His response during a 2020 Q&A was a bracing blast of oxygen:
“I never try to write from the perspective of a woman or of an African American man. I think that would be fatal,” he said. “I write from the perspective of human beings who have been injured in their path and are just trying to forge forward with a life for themselves and those they love. They want to be respected in their jobs and respected at home. I think those are universal truths that transcend race and gender.”
What are we losing when we curtsy to identity demands? Instead of protecting young people, why aren’t we teaching them to think? Psychology informs us that emotions are information. They’re our invisible guides in the human quest for meaning. We must learn to navigate life’s lessons without imagined or self-imposed trauma or we may eventually lose our ability to communicate.
Many writers seek appropriate readers to check for verisimilitude, though this isn’t always enough.
When Rebecca Bruff, a Methodist minister, wrote a historical novel about South Carolina’s Civil War hero and U.S. congressman Robert Smalls in “Trouble the Water,” the big publishing houses passed on it for fear of backlash. Who was she to tell a Black man’s story?
“Who was I to withhold the story?” she said to me in a phone interview.
It seems to me that all readers lose something when life’s realities can be told only by select voices. Conroy used fiction to tell the truth. The question is, who can do the same now?