A guilty pleasure

One of my character flaws is that I enjoy a well-written 'problem' novel. These are books whose aim is to persuade you to take a side on some particular social issue. For instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book that was written to explain why slavery should be abolished.¹

I've had many people claim to me that problem novels are always bad, and that any political or social aim is incompatible with literary quality. My rejoinder has always been, "But then...why am I able to perceive goodness in some of these novels?"

That's the thing, I am not trying to argue that this type of novel can be good; I am just describing the fact that I do indeed perceive literary quality in many of these books.

A few months ago I read Dorothy Canfield Fisher's 1924 novel The Home-Maker. This book is about a shrewish house-wife who goes to work in a department store after her hen-pecked husband takes a fall that cripples him.

Fisher wrote the book to illustrate the point that some people have a character that is suited for work, and some people have a character that is suited for home-making. This housewife is unhappy because she's forced to expend her ambitions on baking and child-rearing, resulting in a brittle perfectionism that makes her husband and kids miserable.

The novel begins:

She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times! Warned him, and begged of him, and implored him to be careful. The children simply paid no attention to what she said. None. She might as well talk to the wind. Hot grease too! That soaked into the wood so. She would never get it clean.

Similarly, her husband is a dreamer, and he learns, when he's injured, that he really enjoys spending time with his kids. His youngest son has been wild and unmanageable, but when his father starts to pay attention to the kid's internal life, the kid suddenly becomes more tractable.

Here's the father discovering that his youngest son has been anxious for months because his mother had threatened to take away the son's Teddy-Bear:

Lester was so horrified that for a moment he could not speak. He was horrified to see Stephen reduced so low. He was more horrified at the position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his and the child’s.... “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!” he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by the extremity of his fear—fear for what he loved! Fear for himself would never so have transfigured Stephen, never!

Personally, I found this novel to be good. Yes, I already agreed with the core premise, which is that different kinds of people are suited to different kinds of work. But I was engaged by the fervency and frankness with which the author moved through the beats of this argument.

If you read enough books like this, you realize there's a certain art to them, just like there's an art to everything. The characters need to be types, but they also need to be individuals. And these books work better if there's no villains, or if the other side isn't completely villainous. That's one reason Uncle Tom's Cabin was so good—in that novel, many of the slave-owners were good people, and yet even the best intentions couldn't make slavery good.

Similarly, in this case, the villain is simply this couples' unthinking adherence to social norms. Both mother and father are doing exactly what they've been taught is right, and it's making them both miserable.

The transformation in character is also very adept. This mother at the beginning is so intolerable! She is so brittle and shrewish and annoying. But once she goes to work in the department store, she really grows into the role and is able to become a leader.

The ending is also quite cunningly-crafted. The father recovers from his injury, and we realize that it'll ruin their lives. This small New England town will allow a woman to work in order to support her crippled husband, but it won't allow a woman to work in order to support an able-bodied man who just loafs around at home.

But the day is saved because the man suffers a relapse, and he goes back to his wheel chair. We're not sure whether now he's consciously faking his paralysis or if it's just some kind of nervous, involuntary psychological complaint, but either way, everyone in the story agrees it's for the best.

I read a few works by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, because I was trying to investigate what sort of stories typically got published in Women's Home Companion and Lady's Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and the other women's slicks. These were magazines that flourished for about a hundred years between the late 19th and late 20th-century. These journals published fiction, first-person essays, and reportage of various sorts, but from a distinctly feminine angle.

You could certainly publish in these journals and be considered a serious writer: Dorothy Fisher is evidence of that. She was not only a best-selling writer (The Home-Maker was one of the top ten bestselling novels in 1924, the year it was released), but her stories would get reprinted in Best American Short Stories, and she corresponded with a number of well-known writers. Within the literary world, she was probably most influential as the editor of the Book of the Month Club between 1926 and 1951. This book club was essentially a mail-order subscription service that practiced an opt-out system. They'd tell you what books you were going to get, and unless you opted out of a certain selection, they would send it to you.

As a result, this book club was a huge driver of book sales and literary fortunes. Their most famous pick was Richard Wright's Native Son, a book that Fisher championed--something that seems mind-boggling to me. Kind of hard to believe that they really mailed this book about a Black man raping a white girl to hundreds of thousands of white middle-class households.

Fisher was a classic early 20th-century progressive. She herself was the daughter of a University president, and she had a PhD in literature from Columbia. She was married and had children, but she seems to have devoted a lot of time to various progressive causes: she was an early proponent of Montessori education; she founded an orphanage in WWI to help French refugee children; she served on a panel in 1921 to pardon conscientous objectors who'd been jailed for refusing to serve in the war; she got very involved in prison-reform efforts; she was a trustee of Howard University and supporter of the NAACP.

Of course, being an early 20th-century progressive does not mean you held the same views as a 21st-century progressive. A few years ago, Canfield got 'canceled' (an award in her name was renamed) because of her association with the eugenics movement.

I know many of my readers would say that problem novels continue to be written. They would say that in fact the last ten years of literature have been marred by too much focus upon social issues.

Personally, I think that while many novels over the last ten issues have featured characters who faced discrimination, very few of these books were genuine problem novels, because the problem novel is usually tied to some sort of movement for social change. In a problem novel, there is a sense that if you demonstrate the problem clearly, then you can persuade people that it ought to be fixed.

But with contemporary novels, even if they feature social issues, that sense of communication is missing. For instance, Detransition, Baby is about two characters: a trans woman whose life is affected by transphobia and a detransitioned person who seems somewhat-content. The book does not make a particularly strong case that transitioning is a beneficial act that ought to be enabled by the state. If the detrans person had gotten super depressed and committed suicide, it would've been more of a problem novel.

In a problem novel, the situation of the book is chosen in a way that leads the reader to the author's favored conclusion. But contemporary literary novels generally avoid that kind of overdetermination. Indeed, they often cut against it, by having protagonists who are self-destructive or messy or otherwise not 'ideal' victims of discrimination. Nothing in a contemporary literary novel is ever as straightforward as 'discrimination ruined my life'.

And that's fine—this way of writing is true to the conventions of contemporary literary fiction.

But, if discrimination is bad, then surely it must ruin some lives, no? Like, somewhere out there, we must have ideal victims who have all the ingredients for success, but...they're discriminated against, and as a result they come to a bad end.

Portraying that reality, so long as it's a reality that the author genuinely believes in, doesn't strike me as dishonest or manipulative. But it would not be a simple task to get that kind of novel published. Even in young adult literature, where I began my career, it's difficult to get a straightforward 'issues' novel published (and, to be fair, teen readers really don't seem to care for 'issues' novels either).

Some of the problem-novel energy has lately been taken up by nonfiction. For instance, a few years ago I read a nonfiction book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, about the author's Yale college roommate, a Black man from a poor background. Robert Peace seemed genuinely exceptional—like someone who, if he had come from a different family and grown up in a different zip code, would've made a mark on the world. But instead he died at age 31 in a drug-related shooting.

Honestly, now that I am thinking about it, maybe this kind of narrative nonfiction is a better vehicle for the problem novel, because it has the benefit of being literally true, so you're not as open to the charge that you're manipulating the reader.

Of course these kinds of narrative books do manipulate the reader all the time, like in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, where a Black woman's unhappy life (and that of her family) is juxtaposed against the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of research that's been enabled by using her exceptional cancer cells.

At the end of the Henrietta Lacks book, the reader is certainly gung-ho to do something about this injustice, but it's not really clear what can be done. The cells have no value without the scientists to study them. And creating some kind of property right--where people have the right to earn money from IP created using their cancer cells--would only slow down scientific research and wouldn't result in much public gain.

Now, I didn’t always believe that ‘problem’ novels were good. When I learned to write, I was taught that you have to let the characters dictate the story. You invent a bunch of characters, make them as real as possible, give them contradictory desires, and watch the conflict ensue. To get in the way of that process would be to create something overdetermined and not really artistic.

But about five years ago I realized that I’d read every novel that was supposed to be good, so I made a concerted effort to read all the books that were supposed to be bad. And I think it was after reading Richard Wright’s Native Son and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my feelings about the problem novel shifted. It was hard to ignore the power that resided in these books.

You might say these problem novels were blunt instruments, but many highly-regarded artifacts from the past (the Pyramids, Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain, the speeches of Winston Churchill) are equally blunt—to say they’re ‘not art’ seems to miss the point. If art isn’t capacious enough to hold books like these, then the concept of art is itself flawed and incomplete.

I’ve also realized that the creation of these stories doesn’t differ too much (from the author’s perspective) from the creation of more-traditional fictions. I’ve now written many stories that are meant to illustrate a point, and I tend to write them the same way as I write my more-traditional stories. In each case, the story has a certain internal logic, an internal coherency, and so long as the story remains true to that logic, then it is good.

My main point is that there’s an art to rhetoric. We still read Cicero's speeches. We don't read them because we are worried about the Catilinarian conspiracy, or because we care about the health of the Roman Republic, we read them because they are so well-crafted.

Similarly, novels like The Home-Maker possess an art that I value.

There's been an endless debate, for hundreds of years now, about whether it's more important for a work of literature to be good, true, or beautiful (the most famous summary of this debate is Tolstoy's What is Art?). Ideally, literature has all three of these elements, but in any era, there is one that'll be more valuable than the rest. Right now, what's most valuable is beauty, but in the late 19th and early 20th-century it felt like the war was really between truth and goodness.

You had novelists like Sinclair Lewis who wanted to show the truth of what America was really like, and then you had novelists like Fisher who had a sunnier, more optimistic view of this country, and she wanted to show what it could be like.

The debate between these two camps has been forgotten, because they both ended up losing, but I'm sure it'll be re-staged someday, and perhaps with very different results.

P.S. I have some travel and some deadlines coming up, so there’s a possibility that after this Thursday I will take the next two weeks off, in which case I’d be back October 14. But I also might not do that.

1. I re-read Uncle Tom’s Cabin earlier this year, and I came away quite impressed. The term ‘Great American Novel’ was literally invented to describe Uncle Tom’s Cabin.