Too many novels are lacking in moral vision

Let's imagine a young man of about nineteen—a sophomore in college—who's deeply lonely, drinking too much, certain he's a monster, and yet uncertain what sort of monster he might be: a sociopath, a narcissist, an alcoholic, a schizophrenic. He doesn't know! But he's pretty certain he's unfit for human society.

However, another option does present itself. Perhaps he's merely an alien because of his first-generation college student status. His dad was an HVAC repair-man; his mom was a home health aide. The kid went to a nice school, a Catholic school. His parents earned money. He doesn’t think he’s that different than a lot of other kids at his university. But still, maybe this thing is the reason! Coincidentally, a week ago a residence dean had come to his dorm and given a talk, organized by his RAs and residence staff, about how first-gen students are a vulnerable population that needs extra support.

So Andrew, the young man, sends out a drunken email to the residence dean: Hey there, we met at the talk you gave for my dorm. I was wondering if you have any ideas for who can help me? I just feel really afraid, like I'm falling apart and maybe I shouldn’t even be here. A lot of days I just get drunk and don’t even leave my room. For a while I could show up at tests and still do okay, but I just failed one, and now maybe I’m failing the class. I really liked your talk about feeling lost as a first-gen student. What do you think I should do? What helped you?¹

The email was inchoate, but heart-felt and not rambling. After about two weeks, the young man received an email back, but when he started reading, he noticed something was off. The response wasn’t really addressed to him!

It was to his dorm's resident advisor, a senior named Kevin. And the man he’d emailed, Dean Gutierrez, wasn't the sender. Instead, it looked like Dean Gutierrez had forwarded the email to someone, who'd done a search on Andrew's name, found the name of his dorm, and had looped in Andrew's academic advisor and a bunch of other people to talk about him. Then, somehow, this man had made a mistake in his response and had accidentally CC:ed Andrew.

It looked like at some point Kevin, the RA had written back, "Andrew was going through a hard time because of a bad grade on a test, but I'll keep an eye on him." That seemed to be the end of the thread. They’d just wait and see.

They never realized they’d accidentally emailed Andrew. Meanwhile, Andrew waited for his RA to say something like “Hey man, are you okay?” but he never did.

Years later, they met at a party in San Francisco, and Andrew asked the RA (who was now a doctor), "Do you remember getting some emails from Dean Gutierrez about me?”

"What...oh, uhh...I guess?"

"It sounded like you guys talked about me a lot."

"Oh yeah...people were worried, you know."

"But...nobody ever reached out."

"Oh...I, uhh...I don't know about that."

"You didn't say anything."

They talked like this, looping around and around, with Andrew getting more and more heated until someone asked him to leave. He never saw the RA again.

This story is a fact. It's something that happened. It has no moral vision. Everyone behaved exactly as you'd expect. A problem arose, and then the bureaucrats passed the buck endlessly between themselves until the problem finally solved itself.

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Now let’s imagine this scenario for a second time, but now it’s years later, and Andrew has become the staffer at a prominent Senate committee with oversight for higher education and Title IX enforcement. The Republicans are planning to make an example of this Dean, who's made a career out of speaking out on behalf of DEI. The Dean sends out a heartfelt email to the Senate committee, saying every time they mention his name it results in death threats, and he's worried about his family’s safety. Andrew reads the plea and brings it to his boss's attention.

Andrew says, "You know I sent this guy an email once exactly like this? Asking for help? And he fucking ignored me!"

He explains the situation to his boss, and the Senator uses this exact example (Andrew still has the emails) to crucify the Dean. Andrew isn’t actually white, but the Senator makes it sound like the Dean ignored a young man’s distress because that young man happened to be white. The Dean becomes a laughingstock, loses his job, and commits suicide.

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Now let's imagine this same story for a third time, but a few weeks after Andrew gets cc:ed on that email thread, someone knocks on his door. It's not the RA, obviously—the idea that an RA might actually help someone is too absurd even for fiction. This guy is a completely different, other person. A man. A staff-member at the housing office. He sees that Andrew's desk is covered in red solo cups, that he's dirty and unkempt and hungover.

The man asks, "Do you smoke?"

They smoke a cigarette. The man takes Andrew out to lunch, and he says the school is thinking of rusticating Andrew, forcing him to take a year off. The man explains that because Andrew sent that email, now if he does something like kill himself, then the university is worried it’ll be liable, so they’re going to take action by kicking him off campus and making him someone else’s problem.

The man says, "You can't let them do it. I'm sorry. That guy, Dean Gutierrez, he is such a fake. Everyone knows it. Someone will fuck that guy up someday, but right now he’s got power and he’s screwing you. I’m sorry. But you have to fight it.”

The man gets Andrew's number, checks on him, takes him to lunch a few times, and gives him the name of a lawyer who'll represent him for free at the hearing to kick him out. The university hadn’t even told Andrew about this hearing yet, because they wanted to put together their case first, but after an email from the lawyer, the case disappears, the way these things usually do.

Andrew stays in the area, ends up working in local government, in the office of budgeting and finance for a nearby city. He hears about how Dean Gutierrez has moved on to bigger and better things, how he writes books about nurturing the whole child and making higher education into a safer, less punishing place. The Dean is a hypocrite, and someone ought to take him down, but what're you gonna do? Andrew is angry about it, and it influences his political opinions (he hates DEI talk and thinks it's all hypocrisy), but the experience isn't a lodestar. He’s got a career, friends, hobbies—other things he cares about. He wouldn’t ever say “I got over it”, but he has in fact gotten over it.

As for member of the housing staff who reached out and who helped him? Well, that man took another job, in a different state, and he and Andrew don't really talk anymore. But still, it was a nice thing to do, and Andrew tries to do nice things for other people in turn.

---

Let's imagine the same scenario for a fourth time, but there's no email chain. Andrew has no idea who, if anybody, looked at his email. It was just swallowed up and ignored. He gets drunk, misses another test, flunks out of college and has to move home. Years later, he sees that dean mentioned in the New York Times, and he concocts this plan to hold him hostage and to look through his emails, to see if he actually read it or not.

Andrew finds the guy's address, and he buys a gun. He watches the guy's house for a little while—the Dean seems to mostly work from home—and Andrew doesn’t think anyone else lives with him. But when he finally knocks on the door, gun in hand, there's a little girl, and he sees her look at the gun, sees the moment when her illusions of safety, the illusion that someone will take care of her and keep her safe, vanish forever. He sees her throat rise, sees the slight parting of lips, and he wants to live inside that moment forever, just like he wanted, that semester when he finally failed out, to live inside those drunken nights, to stay up hour after hour, taking anything to stay awake, just so the morning would never come.

And that's it. That's the fucking story. It's over.

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That fourth version—That’s a shitty story! That's not a good ending!

I would argue that the first and fourth versions of this story are, in actuality, the same. They both lack moral vision. The fourth vision aims for some strong emotional effect. It's hoping that there'll be some kind of haunting, some catharsis, on the part of the reader.

But...we as readers are so familiar with that effect that it's become kind of tedious. Moreover, it's an abrogation of the author's responsibility to...I don't know...actually say something about the world! Like...what kinds of things should people do? Why do people do bad things instead of good things? In the first, second, and third versions of this story, we see that there is something wrong with the system in which Dean Gutierrez operates. That this system encourages diffusion of responsibility, so it's very difficult to actually help anyone or even treat them like a person.

But in the fourth version, we don't have that. We have no idea why the Dean didn't respond. Maybe he just didn't get the email? Maybe it got spam-filtered. All we see are platitudes: the Dean is a dad; to this girl, he's the most important person in the world. And, obviously, you shouldn't go to someone's house and kill them, even if they're a dick who wronged you. So what? We already knew that.

But too many authors these days are telling the fourth version of this story. Basically, they are sentimental. They are cheap. They go for effect. This kind of story is much more sentimental, in my opinion, than the third version of story (where the guy from the housing office intervenes extramurally and helps Andrew). Because the truth is...people often do intervene. They often do help other people. That's something that happens, and it really isn’t that unusual.

And yet if your work has a moral vision where that kind of thing can happen and should happen, then somehow it comes off as sentimental, because we've come to expect that authors simply won't affirm anything at all!

There's definitely other versions of the story that it's possible to tell. I told a much harsher version in the second telling, when Andrew gets justice in a different way. But even in that version, we understand that it is justice. The Dean sked for an understanding from Andrew that he himself denied to others, and that's why he's being punished. You can have other moral visions, and there's definitely visions where justice does not get served (in the third version, the Dean never gets his comeuppance).

But I'm tired of authors who tell stories where right, wrong, and justice simply...don't exist. Stories that affirm the status quo and insist that any kind of anger against it is immoral or sick. Oftentimes the stories have an overtly left-wing or liberal politics, but the people in the stories are never allowed to actually feel righteous or have a sense of justice. Instead their grievance is undercut or ironized, with the result that the story as a whole seems both nihilistic and under-imagined.

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Afterword

I criticized Rejection for this same problem, but my post is actually inspired by Emma Cline's The Guest, which we read for my book club.² I liked Emma Cline's first book, The Girls, quite a bit, and I think she's a clean, precise writer at the line level and paragraph level—there's not a lot of flowery description (something that I also like about Tulathimutte's work).

But...good writing is meaningless if there's no moral vision. In The Guest you've got this character who I guess you could call a sex worker, but really she's a young woman who's trying to work the angles. She's good at reading and manipulating people, but she finds herself compelled to push them too far, and they inevitably ice her out. The portrait painted by Cline is great. I personally really liked and sympathized with this woman, Alex. To my mind, this woman ks trying to connect with people—she really wants someone to see her, and to see some value in her that goes beyond just her body or whatever emotional needs she's able to satisfy in them.

It's an episodic narrative, with her going from scheme to scheme over the course of six days, but her situation gets more and more desperate. She'd like to get back with this wealthy guy she was dating, but the reader understands that this is not going to happen. So what will happen instead? How does her story end?

Well...the book just ends. She goes to a party, where she glimpses her wealthy ex-boyfriend, and there is a poignant, understated moment, and then the book is over.

This is exactly the ending I was expecting, because within the moral universe of this novel, there's no room for Alex to have any ending besides a bad one (she gets murdered).³ And that would obviously be a huge downer and not really that surprising of an ending.

But the obvious, to me, ending is that Alex should just meet some guy and fall in love. He doesn’t need to be a rich guy. He could just be…some guy with an apartment! This is a girl who is so ripe to fall in love with anyone who's actually nice to her and wants to get to know her. Not only is it what would actually happen, it's also an ending that would've made the novel extremely popular. But why can't you write it? Because it wouldn't be serious? Why? I have no idea!

There's definitely a way of making a happy ending seem serious and getting away with it. Look at The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. How did that book end? Nathaniel P found a woman who was hot, who didn't challenge him intellectually, but who was still a good partner for someone like him (she wrote lighter, fluffier books) and he's gonna get married to that woman. It's exactly what would happen to someone like Nathaniel P, and it's what should happen. This guy needs to be married. He cannot go on the way he's been going! It's a great ending.

So ending a book with an impending marriage is definitely doable!

I'm not saying all books need happy endings—I don't think the second version of my story (the one where the Dean commits suicide) is a happy ending.⁴ It's pretty dark. But...it's a real ending. It's not a cop-out.

That's all I'm saying: we need more real endings, and fewer cop-outs.

And we should stop being so respectful of cop-outs. It's not a valid aesthetic choice; it's the opposite. It's basically selling out. It's the author's refusal to present an affirmative vision that might be distasteful to some subset of high-brow critics. It's a choice that avoids criticism, because it doesn't say or do anything at all!

P.S. Just a reminder that on Nov. 1st I will be posting my novella, Money Matters, which I think has a moral vision of some sort, although its a bit ironic that I'm the one advocating for moral fiction when most readers find my own long-form work to be quite cold and amoral. I see their point, I just think my own moral intuitions are quite different from those of the average reader of fiction. Oh well!

1. Some of you might say…oh, but colleges have counseling centers they can refer you to, etc, and there’s so many resources for kids these days. I mean…yes, that’s true, but whose job is it to actually go and speak to someone in distress? That’s the whole question! It’s so aggravating that everything gets professionalized and systematized. It’s all about who has the “training” to deal with “people in crisis”. But nobody sees it as their responsibility to answer a fucking email! Nobody is capable of saying, “Hey…let’s talk. Come to my office.”

Of course there’s also very valid reasons for ignoring folks who are in distress. Basically, what if they turn violent? What if they become angry and harassing? What if they start feeling like you’ve wronged them in some way and make it their mission to correct that wrong? That’s exactly why people generally don’t respond to emails like the one sent by Andrew.

2. I realized that sometimes I talk about my book club kind of casually, and it might be confusing to my readers. Many Substackers run book clubs for their subscribers. This is not that. My book club is just a group of seven friends who meet at a restaurant for brunch and discuss books. I couldn’t even tell you how I know most of them. I think I went to college with some of them? I’m genuinely not sure. But most are not writers, and all are wonderful people who've become good friends.

3. There was a serial killer on Long Island who murdered women exactly like the heroine of this book. And within the book there is a drug dealer who is angry with her, and who’ll probably kill her at some point after the book is over.

4. Although I do think there should be more happy endings than there are! Like, why can’t those two kids from Normal People just get married and be together? Seems arbitrary that they’re forced apart. It’s definitely something that could happen in real life, but they could also just as easily decide to be together, since they’re clearly in love and are quite well-matched, socially and educationally-speaking. The ending of Normal People is not a cop-out though! It’s a totally okay ending.