How to simulate literature

The stations of the cross for literary strivers

Do people not read Native Son anymore? I was never assigned it in school. We had to read Black Boy instead. I’d be surprised if any schools still assign Native Son, since it’s impossible to read it today and not think “This book is pretty racist”. It’s not merely that the book is about a Black man murdering the daughter of the kindly white man who takes him in. It’s the whole gestalt, where every Black character is so violent, brutish, and ignorant, and every white character is so saintly and understanding. And then, of course, the whole courtroom aspect of the book, where Bigger’s lawyers argue that because of his social conditions he was doomed to become a brute and a rapist and a murderer.

It’s always been a controversial book, particularly amongst Black writers. It sold 250,000 copies within three weeks of its release in 1940. It was the first Book-of-the-Month club selection by a Black writer. For many white readers, it was probably the first time they’d read a fiction by a Black person, and to have that fiction be something that really didn’t humanize Black people at all—I think it was very hard to take.

Anyway, our book club recently read Percival Everett’s Erasure, which is the book American Fiction is based upon. You know the movie / book I’m talking about. It’s about a well-educated Black writer from a well-off family who becomes so frustrated at the failure of his erudite works of fiction that he writes a work of ghetto fiction called My Pafology—the latter becomes a huge bestseller, etc. What enlivens both the book and the movie is that they’re not really about that premise at all! They’re mostly about this trio of high-achieving siblings who come together to take care of their mother and release their own expectations about the paths their lives ought to take.

I personally do not think the book and the movie are that different. They have similar plots, tone, beats. The main difference is that the book includes what is apparently the whole of My Pafology—the joke novel that achieves unexpected, breakaway success.

The thing about My Pafology is that although it’s not good—you probably wouldn’t read it for fun on its own—it’s not bad either. The novel is about a drop-out named Van Go who’s living in the inner city, has four kids by four different women, and wanders around getting in fights and having angry fantasies about hurting his mom. He’s eventually given a job by a wealthy Black family—the daughter of the family, a Stanford student, flirts with him and goes out on the town with him, but then things go terribly wrong, and he’s arrested.

What’s interesting here are the strong similarities between Van Go and Monk Ellison, the ostensible writer of My Pafology. Monk is angry, perpetually single, gets into fights with his family and his love interests. Both are peripatetic and uncompromising and, although they outwardly disdain it, both are desperate for recognition from society at large. In fact, both stories end the same way, with Van Go / Monk exclaiming “I’m on TV.” To me, it’s clear that although he attempted to sell out, Monk couldn’t help transmuting some of his living essence—the same impulse that underlies his esoteric, poorly-selling fiction—into the more salable form of My Pafology.

Because of the movie’s release, I’ve read a number of retrospective reviews of Everett’s book. Almost all of the reviews say that he was satirizing the 90s trend of hood fiction (best exemplified by Push). But almost none of the reviews note that actually the book-within-a-book is a beat-for-beat recreation of the first half of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

To me, that really deepens Erasure’s critique. Everett isn’t concerned with transitory publishing trends: it’s about this much deeper temptation—a temptation going back fifty or a hundred years—to pander to white audiences.

I also think it makes the critique more challenging, less easily assimilable, because, for all its faults, Native Son is a work of true art. Like, you want to hate it. You want to say it’s racist and awful and shouldn’t exist. But even after almost a hundred years, it still captivates.

While composing the book, Richard Wright had to battle his fears over how it would someday be read:

Like Bigger himself, I felt a mental censor – product of the fears which a Negro feels from living in America – standing over me, draped in white, warning me not to write. This censor’s warnings were translated into my own thought processes thus: “What will white people think if I draw the picture of such a Negro boy? Will they not at once say: ‘See, didn’t we tell you all along that niggers are like that? Now, look, one of their own kind has come along and drawn the picture for us!'”

He talks about hearing the voices not just of reactionary whites but also of middle-class Blacks, who say, “But, Mr. Wright, there are so many of us who are not like Bigger! Why don’t you portray in your fiction the best traits of our race, something that will show the white people what we have done in spite of oppression?”

But he comes to feel that he must write Bigger exactly as he is, because to do otherwise would be to surrender and to become a Bigger himself. That the fear of others, the fear of being unveiled, is exactly what creates a Bigger. And he closes the essay by saying:

The writing of Native Son was to me an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience…I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.

This is clearly a real artist and a real writer at work. If you’ve ever experienced creation, then you cannot doubt that Wright experienced it himself.

And yet almost since the book was written, it’s been accused of pandering and dishonesty. As James Baldwin put it most famously:

All of Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed his manhood. Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement, of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.

I don’t really know how to reconcile those two claims: the feeling by many writers, white and Black, that Native Son is a bad, meretricious piece of work, and my own feeling that the book is obviously a work of genuine art, deriving from some real emotional experience. At stake is the nature of artistic creation itself. The critics of Native Son seem to be saying, art must be honest, must be true, must be uncompromising and yet if it makes me uncomfortable then it is not real art.

But what’s hard is that although I accuse them of wanting a book to be easy and predigested—this is exactly the same sin of which they accuse Native Son! They say the book is too easy, too simple, too predigested! But I say if it’s too simple, why are we still so troubled by it?¹

What draws me to Native Son is precisely the identification I feel with Bigger Thomas—the sense of being trapped, being angry, wanting to lash out—the fear of emancipatory violence and of the release I’d potentially derive from it. Strong, unpalatable feelings, but surely the appropriate subject of great art?

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I’ll be honest. I identify with Richard Wright as well. All through my career I’ve been dogged by those same claims: why write this protagonist? Why write them this way? Always, always, lurks the specter of my work not embodying ‘good representation’. I’ve never written a book where I wasn’t accused of writing for ‘them’ and not for ‘us’.

That’s one reason why I tend to approach each book release with so much dread. I read in

Andrew Boryga

lately how it’s a downer when authors complain about the dissatisfaction that comes with publishing a book. I agree with him, and yet…when I have a book come out, my main emotion is just a strong desire for it all to be over.

For many authors, this dread is the result of social anxiety: they hate putting themselves forward, doing events, performing for an audience. That’s not the case for me. I love doing events. I love being interviewed. Love giving interviews. Especially love podcasts. In my case, a certain madness comes over me when I do a podcast and I just start saying crazy things that I’d never commit to print. I’m like…what, is someone gonna listen forty-five minutes into this podcast and transcribe what I said and tweet it out just to cancel me? No.

What I hate is the feeling of failure: the sense that my book, specifically, underperformed and failed to give readers what they wanted. And in my career, that’s largely been my experience. I’ve usually had good publicity, good buzz, but when the book finally released, people were like…this isn’t what I expected and desired from this book.

That was most notable for my second young adult novel, which is both my highest-selling and my worst-reviewed book. It hit right at the moment when people were looking for a sweet romance about two queer bisexual PoC boys. And I definitely intended to write the book people wanted! I wrote my boys not as messy or problematic faves, but as ideals. I’ve always felt like Nandan and Dave were the best possible teenage boys—if they were any better, they would be worse, because they’d no longer be believable. But most readers felt like their romance wasn’t…I dunno…sweet and heartfelt enough or some shit?

Admittedly, I did make decisions that I knew would harm the book: after the editor acquired the book, I added a whole motif about how the boy felt like he was just pretending to be gay in order to be popular. I knew people would hate this. I was surprised the editor let me put it in. But I just felt like…this character, in this moment, would have exactly this fear, and when else is anyone going to write about that?

For me, the experience of writing and publishing books is only 25 percent creativity. The vast majority of the writing process consists, for me, of grappling with the boundaries of what the industry is willing to publish and what readers are willing to purchase. For instance, I recently started working on a book called The Conformist, which is a kind of spiritual successor to House of Mirth. Near the end of Wharton’s novel, Lily Bart tries to accept the marriage offer of her long-time Jewish admirer, Simon Rosedale, only to find that although he still loves and supports her, he can’t marry her with her reputation damaged. Then he starts giving her practical, cold-hearted advice on how to blackmail her biggest detractor, with the implication being that if Mrs. Dorset retracts her allegations about Ms. Bart, then the way will be clear for her and Rosedale to marry.²

In the novel, Lily is repulsed by Rosedale’s proposals, but in my version she (or an updated contemporary version of her) accepts his proposal, carries out the plan, marries him, and tries to rehabilitate her reputation and his.

I wrote about ten thousand words of the book, but I realized…who’s gonna publish this? Like Wharton’s original novel, it’s too ambiguous in its view of the subject: is it against antisemitism? Or is it antisemitic in itself?

So I abandoned the book, as I’ve abandoned dozens of others.

I don’t know. The rhetoric in literary fiction is that it’s all about the writing: if you string together the words well, using complex syntax and strong images and occasional flights of metaphorical language, then you can write anything. I’ve tried and tried to find this magic key—“the writing”—that somehow unlocks the coldest editorial hearts, but I’m not sure it exists.

Because the thing about this nice, wonderful, apolitical “writing” is that if you can write anything beautifully, then why not write beautifully about what is safe? If it truly is about form and rhythm and diction and syntax and not about content, then why should we allow anything disquieting within the content itself?

Personally, I don’t really believe in either form or content. I think at the heart of each book there’s some kind of living impulse, and that this impulse, like the impulse that animates each human being, can express itself in different forms or even in entirely different stories. I can take a story, rewrite it completely, change the characters and setting and plot, and yet to me the living impulse is the same.

It’s very rare to capture that living impulse. It can’t be summoned up on command. But once I’ve got it, my job is to somehow put that impulse into a form that a publisher will agree to print and bind and put on bookshelves. My function is much the same as a good literary agent’s—to prod the impulse into producing a salable book while doing as little harm as possible to the impulse itself.

I realize this is not how any other writer on earth (so far as I can tell) thinks of their work. But most writers who’ve gone through what I have—lost editors, lost agents, lost book deals, failure after failure—have quit and stopped writing! I hear it all the time, especially from debut literary writers, “Oh I could never do what you do—I could only write what I have to write.” I’m like…sure, you can write the first four or five or six books purely for yourself, but by the time you’re writing your fifteenth, you either adapt or you perish.

I think what’s difficult is that so many people are such liars and so full of humbug, and in their interviews they’ve shat the bed so comprehensively that people don’t know what the truth looks like anymore.

For instance, I was doing a podcast recently, and the host said something about how in literary fiction you’re supposed to embrace ambiguity. “Write to the question, not the answer". And he was basically saying that my work was didactic, that it tells people what to think. I told him, “Sure the rhetoric is all about embracing ambiguity. But look at the books themselves. They all have incredibly bland, boring, safe liberal politics. Like, you’re not gonna read in Ocean Vuong that maybe America’s involvement with Vietnam was good actually. You never find anything surprising or challenging in these books.” I, on the other hand, think very carefully about how my books might be read, because I know that my politics don’t align perfectly with safe liberal politics, so I have to figure out exactly how far I can go and still remain publishable.

All of the advice in the writing world—particularly in literary fiction—is meant for one kind of person, the earnest striver. And the earnest striver needs to learn, more than anything else, how to simulate the appearance of literature. So they learn the stations of the cross:

1. I never read stories about myself growing up.

2. I spent ten years working on this story.

3. I don’t write for white people, I write for my people.

4. I care about the integrity of the language.

5. It’s all about the writing itself, that’s all that matters.

6. I start with an image and see where it takes me.

7. I hone each sentence until it sings.

8. I believe the imagination should be absolutely free and unrestrained

9. Once I started writing for myself, without worrying about an audience, that’s when success came.

10. I reject the cookie-cutter program fiction that comes out of MFAs

11. I’m not here to offer neat lessons wrapped up in a bow

12. This is the story that I needed to tell, and I would’ve walked over broken glass to tell it.

And yeah, is any of that stuff false? No, absolutely not. It’s all true. But you can say the words all day long, without actually living by them. You can talk all day long about being uncompromising, because it’s only a performance. Because you haven’t actually produced an uncompromising book, you’ve just produced a book with the words “uncompromising” stamped on its cover.

The thing is, the earnest striver believes that when you follow these twelve steps perfectly, you’ll produce a book that readers, critics, editors, etc, will love and respect. But in real life, the average reader is turned off by the kind of book that the twelve steps produce. Anything that’s strange or different just reads to them like “bad writing”—as if you simply don’t know how to write a good book that fulfills their expectations. If I really wrote a book that wasn’t “for white people” then…white people wouldn’t actually like it! If I really wrote a book that was “about people like me”—trans women more privileged than 99 percent of the world’s trans women—then other trans women wouldn’t like it! If I really didn’t offer neat lessons, then people would wonder “Is this book racist?” If I really ignored what I learned in my MFA program, then the book wouldn’t even read like literary fiction at all, and no literary editor would touch it.

The person who cries out against compromise is, I find, the person who has compromised most deeply of all—they’ve compromised to the core of their soul, so that when they put down the bucket down the well, it only brings up the water of acceptable opinion.

In every single book I’ve done things that I knew would hurt the book’s chances. For my first book, editors wanted me to tone down the protagonist so she wasn’t a habitual plagiarist. I refused. For my second book, I added in the controversial theme I mentioned earlier. In my third book, I wrote in considerable transphobia and doubt, particularly from the protag’s family, even though I knew the audience for queer books wants only light and happiness. My upcoming book is full of the protagonist’s discomfort at being a trans woman around cis women—her worries that she’s invading their space and hurting them. Trans women will loathe this, and I know that. No amount of pretty words would’ve made any of these ideas more palatable to the intended audience for these books, and it’s a sham to pretend otherwise. Sometimes people hate your book not because they misunderstand it, but because they understand it all too well, and it portrays a reality that they do not want to face.

So to me, writing isn’t about words, it’s not about honing sentences, it’s not about some abstract commitment to vision—it’s about the day-in-day-out struggle to stay true to the living impulse of the book and get it into print without compromising too much. And when the moment of publication comes, it’s always quite bittersweet, because inevitably I find that the book is praised precisely for its worst qualities and criticized for its best ones.³ I keep waiting for the literary world to surprise me—to recognize what is good and to discard what is bad in my own work. But I’m never surprised. Each publication day, I come to the same realization: the book would be much better received if I’d only compromised just a bit more.

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Updates:

• My SF book launch will be on May 30th at around 6 PM at the Ruby on 23rd and Bryant.

• I have a New York event at P&T Knitwear (apparently the name of a bookstore?) on June 6th

• The Default World was in this list from Alta Magazine.

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Oh! And the book got a starred review from Foreword. My first-ever starred review! For those not in the know: the trade journals—the journals that review a sizeable number of each season’s new releases—will give stars next to books they think are particularly worthwhile. I’ve had probably eighteen trade reviews in my life and have never gotten a star, so I am happy. The review reads:

Naomi Kanakia’s sparkling novel The Default World exposes the shaky foundations of community, love, and found family in post-capitalist San Francisco.

After being cast out by her conservative Indian parents and struggling to build a life in Sacramento, a young trans woman, Jhanvi, infiltrates a social circle made up of privileged San Francisco techies. She has known one of the roommates, Henry, since college; she hopes to use his affection for her to convince him to marry her, giving her access to his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

The friends run an underground play party that they see as a manifestation of the values they hold dear: social justice, inclusivity, and loving community. Jhavni sees these beliefs as little more than self-protective rhetoric used to hide the guilt the roommates feel about their own privileged place in society. But soon, despite her best efforts to scorn their faux activism and self-indulgent behaviors, she is drawn into their alluring world of drugs, polyamory, and underground sex parties.

Jhanvi is an intelligent and perceptive narrator. Her dark humor cuts to the heart of contemporary social dynamics. Her interior experience is given precedence in the novel’s structure and language, which strikes a careful balance between complexity and clarity. The roommates, who make up a majority of the book’s cast, are distinctive and complicated. And although the novel often strikes a satirical tone in its exploration of performative politics, the values, behaviors, and desires of all of them are taken seriously and interrogated rather than condemned.

Both incisive and sincere, the novel The Default World exposes the hidden transactional dynamics within progressive social circles via a quest for belonging, love, and security.

This is probably one of the best reviews I’ve ever gotten. It basically captures what the book is about. So don’t just take my word for it, you also have the testimony of Bella Moses, the reviewer assigned to this book by Foreword Magazine.⁴ You can preorder it on Amazon or on Bookshop.

1. Of course the easy rejoinder is that a burning cross is troubling, but that doesn’t make it art. It really is a hard thing to work through logically. It’s difficult to create some universal standard by which both Native Son and Baldwin’s Go Tell It On A Mountain are both great art. Even Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which bears a superficial resemblance to Native Son (because both culminate in act of murderous passion) is really quite different in tone and treatment of its subject. And the fact remains that if Native Son was written by a white man, we probably wouldn’t discuss it. In fact, the South African version, Cry, The Beloved Country—which has a very similar plot to Native Son—was written by a liberal white man, and the book is an even bigger embarrassment and even more unmentionable today than Wright’s novel. On the other hand, maybe Wright’s Blackness is precisely what allows us to see the artistry in the book (personally, I liked Cry, The Beloved Country too!) Ultimately I don’t think you can create formulas for art. You know a book is good if a number of people with good taste read it and says it is good, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true—a person with taste can easily dismiss a book unfairly as being bad. And what is taste? Nothing more than the ability to agree with other tasteful people on what books are good and what books are bad. If you think too hard about it, this becomes very circular, but I can’t help that—if taste was simple, it wouldn’t be worth discussing.

2. Here’s a nice longer article about the antisemitism in House of Mirth: “My Favorite Anti-semite: Edith Wharton”.

3. As an example of a book being praised for its worst qualities, in all of my books one of my last editing rounds will be a thematic pass, where I give readers an overt narrative of what the book is about. In The Default World, for instance, I played up the financial gulf between the protagonist and her friends, to create a kind of upstairs / downstairs narrative. I don’t really care about this, and it’s not a huge part of the emotional core of the book (a kind of joke in the book is that Jhanvi is from essentially the same social class as her college classmates—she’s not working class, she’s just on bad terms with her upper-middle-class family). The marriage plot that forms the core of the book’s marketing campaign is just a gag, a bit, a dodge—Jhanvi freely acknowledges, to herself at least, that she doesn’t think anyone will take her up on it. And yet inevitably when people talk about the book, it’s as if the book is some sort of Robin Hood story about her getting a pound of flesh out of some rich assholes. That’s not at all what the book is about, but you’ve gotta put something in for rubes! If you don’t do it, then the rubes will just put the book down, because they’ll have no idea what they’re reading.

4. Yes I realize the fact that my book got a good review undercuts the entirety of my post, but so what? I still mostly feel dread.