“Watchmen” was almost a photonegative of Trumpism, in which white nationalism was a guerrilla insurgency rather than a ruling ideology. “Succession” is the story of an overbearing right-wing media mogul and his weak-willed children. “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a nightmare about sadistic patriarchy. The great shows that have come out over the past four years have largely been riffs on our national calamity, not counterpoints to it. As Vanity’s Fair’s TV critic Sonia Saraiya wrote, “The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to ‘The Sopranos.'” I’d have thought that dramatic television would flourish in a time when reality has become so toxic, but instead it feels like Peak TV has, well, peaked. When you are living through a baffling, all-encompassing drama, it becomes harder to lose yourself in other, unrelated stories. The conceit that there’s a gonzo writers’ room scripting current events is partly about astonishment at how crazy everything seems, but it’s also about a fantasy of narrative coherence - that one day all of this will make sense. “And that is so different from how we read fiction, because it’s about the desire to stay in this world, to be suspended in this world.”īefore Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out. “Right now it’s all about, ‘How will this end?'” Wolitzer said. It wasn’t, but she still feels the manic churn of current events fraying her concentration. “I saw these stories and I thought, ‘How am I going to return to reading these tomorrow with the great attention and hope that I need to give them?'” she recalled to me. Novelist Meg Wolitzer was a co-editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2017.” She described sitting in her apartment after her husband had gone to bed on election night in 2016, story submissions scattered around her. It’s a phenomenon experienced even by some who’ve made literature their lives. “Trump taking up space in our brain and crowding out our ability to think about anything else is definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon,” she said. The decline in fiction sales began before this presidency, but during the past four years it accelerated. “Fiction lost out to nonfiction since 2015,” said NPD’s Kristen McLean. But these books, and their blockbuster popularity, made it harder for other work to break through. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun.I’ve read many of these books and greatly appreciated some of them. “The focus must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. She is an on-air contributor to MSNBC, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian and many other publications. Her first book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and her second won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize and the J. She is the author of three books: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, and The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. Michelle Goldberg has been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since 2017 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.
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