Can’t quite recall how I started following the novelist Heather Parry, but I’m very glad I did. This piece is in response to her having recently read Dederer’s Monsters, though I think it notable that she hasn’t named either the book or the author. With a follower count in the thousands, I guess she’s aiming to avoid provoking any sort of mobbing? With my follower count barely in double figures, I’m not going to take that precaution, not least because my having read Dederer is my context of commentary, having not read the other books that Parry discusses.

In responding to Dederer’s chapter on Nabokov’s Lolita, Parry picks up a contradiction in Dederer’s project that I missed: Dederer asks what could possibly have prompted Nabokov to spend an entire book describing this awful character, right in the middle of an entire book devoted to dissecting awful characters.

Parry puts her finger on paradigm of quite deliberate (and, I might add, very selective) unseeing or forgetting regarding the role of the novel, or of art more broadly:

The question of monstrousness and what we do with monstrous people can be addressed in many ways. It can be discussed in a nonfiction book. It can be examined in interviews, or on panels at festivals, or with friends around a dinner table. And, as Yanagihara shows above, it can be explored in a novel, which is a form that we all purport to understand—until, it is, that it transgresses a particular, moving line, one that sits in different positions according to different people. As soon as a novel speaks too directly about something distressing or horrible, as soon as it dares to make the reader complicit by putting them in the perspective of a monster—then, we pretend that we don’t understand the project of a novel, nor the difference between a character and the person that writes him. We are placed in a state of collusion, and we are uncomfortable, and as an emotional response, we reject the novel outright.

The matter of what I think of as the discomfort of complicity is of particular interest to me of late, because I’ve come to see that there’s something that connects this response to art with a range of responses to climate change: anyone painting things in anything less than the very rosiest of colours had better end by laying the blame at the feet of someone as unlike the reader as possible, unless they’re prepared to be cast in the role of the monster themselves.

Demanding that our writers have direct experience of the horrible things they write about can only, in the long run, force writers to ‘out’ themselves in any number of ways, eroding the concept of privacy and feeding the bleak impulse of the publishing industry to exploit a person’s lived experience (which often ends up re-traumatising them, forcing them into a public position from which they cannot be removed) and narrowing the conception of what a novel is or can be. […] A novel is not a secret admission of a writer’s beliefs, nor their life story, nor is it a moral roadmap. It is a piece of entertainment that reflects the world, in both its shadows and its light. We can choose to read it, or not read it; we can dislike it, and critique it, and think the goal of the book a bad one. But a book that reflects darkness is not, itself, abuse.

(It’s not quite the same thing, but the anti-intellectual posthumous pillorying of Mark Fisher that I mentioned a few days back bears a strong family resemblance to this phenomenon.)

I could happily go through Parry’s whole piece paragraph by paragraph, but that would be cheap—so I’ll just say that if you’re at all interested in the literary project in its broadest sense, and particularly in the way it has been shaped in recent years by what Philip Wegner calls the moralising ethical critique, you should really go read the whole thing.