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.