Chris Lehmann, "American Gothics: The Failures of the Trump Novel," in _The Baffler_ #81

I ALWAYS LOOK forward to reading Chris Lehmann, but the response of U. S. fiction writers to Trump and Trumpism has not been as inadequate as he claims in his piece in the most recent issue of The Baffler. I would take issue with him on several points.

(1) The novel is not a good genre for hot takes, because novels take a long time to write, and the gaining of genuine historical perspective takes even longer. The best American novel about the country’s potential for fascism in the 1930s is not Sinclair Lewis’s estimable but flawed It Can’t Happen Here but Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, written sixty years after the events it imagines. For similar reasons, the best novel about Europe in the Napoleonic era, War and Peace, was written more than fifty years after Waterloo. We will likely not live to see the truly great novel about Trumpism. 

(2) For now, no one novel is going to do the whole job of making Trump and Trumpism discernible. We have a lot of excellent non-fiction books devoted to that undertaking, by (for example) John Ganz, Kristin Kobes du Mez, Quinn Slobodian, and Laura Field, but no one of them does the whole job all by itself. Similarly, the novels by Ben Lerner, Hari Kunzru, and Gary Shteyngart that Lehmann criticizes do focus on aspects of Trump and Trumpism rather than all 360 degrees of that phenomenon; take them together, though, and we begin to get a convincing picture. 

(3) Lehmann objects that these novelists focus too exclusively on Trumpism’s “failings of language, etiquette, and aesthetic representation” while staying silent on “most questions of Trumpian politics and policy-making, from election denialism to DEI moral panics to evangelical militance.” I think Lehmann is mistaken in thinking these are two separate domains. The unforgettable playground scene in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School does focus on language and etiquette, but it does so in a way that reveals the worldview underlying election denialism, DEI moral panic, and a lot else. Making these connections visible is what the greatest novels do. 

(4)I am very glad Lehmann praised Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, one of the great American novels of this still-young century. I hope he will get around to The Unfolding by A. M. Homes, whose “Big Guy” gives us a portrait of Trumpism at the other end of the class hierarchy from Ellmann’s Ronny. Nicolás Medina Mora’s América del Norte makes a contribution too, showing us Trumpism from the perspective of a resident non-citizen. 

 

The complaints of Lehmann and others notwithstanding, the novelists of the United States are on the case. 

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 2: At Odds with His Time

 Continuing my section-by-section notes on Tanenhaus's new and excellent biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.:

(1) Tracking down a reference, I discovered that John Judis, author of the 1988 book that up until now has been the most thorough biography of Buckley, granted Tanenhaus access to his archive of interviews.  This had to have been an invaluable resource--for one thing, I imagine at least some of the people Judis interviewed died before Tanenhaus would have had a chance to talk to them. 

What a generous thing to do. Judis must have known that Tanenhaus's book would replace his own as the go-to on Buckley, but still shared what he could have hoarded, in the interest of a truer, more comprehensive history. As someone who spent a career in academia, where a lot of policing of territory occurs, I was impressed at Judis's selflessness.

(2) Like a lot of promising Ivy grads right after World War II, Buckley was invited to work for CIA, and yes, he did, for a while, in Mexico. Not surprising, really, but the real twist in the story is that during Buckley's brief stint as a spook, he met and befriended E. Howard Hunt, later one of the (ahem) masterminds of the fateful Watergate break-in.

(3) Buckley's emergence was well-timed. American conservatism was on the ropes in the thirties and forties, what with (a) the popularity of New Deal innovations like Social Security, collective bargaining, and the 40-hour week, (b) the fascist overtones of the "America First" movement, and (c) the Republican party's embrace of relatively moderate presidential candidates like Willkie, Dewey, and Eisenhower. The campaign against Communism perked things up a bit, but the tawdriness of McCarthyism soon clogged  the wheels of that effort. 

American conservatism needed an advocate who was young, intelligent, articulate, and energetic--and lo, one appeared.

(4) Buckley's energy was prodigious. A lot of Part 2 is about the launching of the National Review, a daunting undertaking, but one Buckley was equal to and that in a short time rearranged the landscape of American political commentary. That alone was a breathtaking accomplishment. But he also found time to found Young Americans for Freedom, a nationwide association of young conservatives, and (along with great friend and brother-in-law Brent Bozell, who ghost-wrote The Conscience of a Conservative) to get off the ground a campaign to elect Barry Goldwater President.

(5) National Review placed its marker firmly on  the pro-segregation side of the civil rights question, most (in)famously in Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail." This we knew. But Tanenhaus has made the further and truly eye-opening discovery that the Buckley family also funded a segregationist newspaper in Camden, SC, its hometown-away-from-hometown. The first issue carried a "Statement of Principle" by the newly-formed White Citizens Council. 

Cole Swenson, _Such Rich Hour_

 COUNT ON COLE Swenson for an original and surprising starting point for a collection, in this case the famously gorgeous late medieval illuminated manuscript, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, commissioned in 1411 by the duke himself (third-born son of King Jean II) but not completed at the time of his death in 1416--not completed, indeed, until 1440, by hands other than those of the originally commissioned painters, the Brothers Limbourg, who also died in 1416. And then the whole thing was lost for a few hundred years, to be rediscovered in a girls' boarding school in Genoa in 1855.

The manuscript is organized around the months of the year and depicts a serene, prosperous, well-ordered world, which the territory and court of the Duc de Berry supposedly was. Actually, early fifteenth century France was anything but serene, prosperous, and well-ordered. A lot of its territory was occupied by England, whose royal family was aggressively pursuing its claim to the crown of France, and the French royal family was enmeshed in a bloody intra-familial feud worthy of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, rival popes...that 15th century.

Swenson's poems represent both the beautiful world seen in the manuscript's illuminations ("the forest whole in its gentle bow / mirrored in color / love was something we invented/ / and perfectly enacted") and the terrible world in which the book was produced ("Choose a bridge in broad daylight, The Yonne drifting / by below while Tanguy du Châtel / simply kills him. Others lean / on the railing and watch"). Often the poems represent as well the processes that producing the book required, vellum and brushes and paints, the material bases by which it exists at all.

The book follows the manuscript in being organized around the months, but the poems do not make the mistake of trying to sound or look like facsimiles of 15th century poetry. They are thoroughly contemporary, disjunctive and paratactic, sometimes in ways that suggest erasures. The further I got into the book, the more sense this choice made, as it seemed to reflect how our knowledge of the world of 15th century France was necessarily fragmentary, composed of brightly colored but disconnected pieces that we had to assemble as best we could on our own, imagining our way into the lacunae, the empty spaces. Such Rich Hour steers well clear of pastiche, finding its own way to recreate the beauty of the art and world it honors. 

Catherine Lacey, _Pew_

THIS SHORT NOVEL teeters between realism and parable. 

Some small town churchgoers find the narrator asleep on a pew one Sunday and decide to take him--or her--in, temporarily, until they figure out where the stranger belongs. Pew, as they decide to call him or her, is of indeterminate gender and ethnicity and probably in their teens.

Pew does not answer any questions as to their name, sex, background, or anything else; they rarely speak at all, actually, save to a few people who themselves seem marginalized within the community. 

A few days go by--the action of the novel covers exactly one week--and Pew is taken around  to meet various townspeople. Lacey does an extraordinary job of conjuring up the ethos of the town in Pew's encounters with a variety of its citizens. Everyone wants to be charitable and welcome the stranger, but they also want to know exactly what kind of stranger they are welcoming. Then, too, there is something about Pew that compels them to open up a bit, to reveal more than they probably planned to reveal.

The undecidable aspects of Pew's identity start generating controversy, and some citizens grow belligerently insistent on getting answers to the questions about Pew's sexual, ethnic, and class identities.

The rising tension over who exactly Pew is coincides with the preparation for the town's annual Festival of Forgiveness, which will be held on Saturday. Lacey refrains from revealing exactly what happens at this festival while dropping dark hints--for instance, the townspeople want to squelch the rumor that it involves human sacrifice.

What it does involve, we learn, is the town's collective purging of its own hypocrisy, its own airing of the contradictions within its own supposed first principles, its confrontation with its own internalized lies. No one actually gets killed, but the scene of the festival in the final chapter does remind one a little of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," maybe a bit too of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or (on a different cultural plane) Grace Metalious's Peyton Place or (on some other plane altogether) David Lynch's Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, or any depiction of the sinister capabilities that can lie just beneath the calm and idyllic surface of an American small town.

Pew gets out, as do a few other unassimilable types, thank goodness. Lacey's epigraph is from Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and we no more where Pew is headed than we know where those who walk away from Omelas are headed. One is relieved that they have gotten away, though, even if it turns out the next town down the road is just another Omelas.