Here's how it might unfurl, like a sinister flag of bigotry.
Maybe I'm out with a group of friends and acquaintances at a restaurant. Over a shared dish of Ethiopian lamb, everyone's getting to know everyone. Someone sitting across from me mentions Pacifica radio fundraiser tonic and concerned author Arundhati Roy. 'Did you read The God of Small Things?'
No.
'Well, you should, it's beautifully written; very lush and sensual.'
Lush and sensual, sometimes served with a side helping of 'exotic'. I imagine dream catchers dangling from rear view mirrors, the (almost literally) liberal use of the word karma and a general sort of mush-headeness.
Did I mention this was a prejudice? It is. I'm working on it.
It's fun (but wrong!) to stereotype 'world lit' readers. But my bad mental habits don't stop at the borders of 'lush sensuality'; I think nearly all novels are useless.
But why?
Norman Rush, writing for BookForum, explains:
...
Last time I met her, we were in a restaurant together. She slammed down the menu and screamed, "I hate reading!"
— Pamela Anderson on Paris Hilton's distaste for the written word
Paris Hilton's aversion is an extreme emblem of conditions obtaining in the evolving readership for novels of all kinds. Everybody knows the statistics: numbers of books read and books finished, scene length, vocabulary (vocabulary employed and vocabulary of readers)—all the indicators point down. The results of the UK's National Year of Reading campaign have just been released: Two actual authors appear in the list of the top ten things read by teenagers, J. K. Rowling and Anne Frank, behind Heat magazine, online song lyrics, and Internet sites "that helped you cheat at computer games." For the political novel in particular, the weakening grasp on actual history is a burden: A majority of young Brits think Winston Churchill is a fictional character and Sherlock Holmes an actual one. So when it comes to possible readers, the outlook's not good.
Today, we live in Late Capitalism, a world system characterized by parliamentary styles of governance, accompanied by the undeclared hegemony of the limited-liability corporation and by the evaporation of any significant advocacy for an alternative system based on collective ownership—which was the core of the radicalism prevailing among political novelists until just about the other day. Protest against the existing economic order goes on in the form of fragmented populism, of ethical campaigning against assorted injustices. Maybe this sort of resistance will turn out to be a good thing—who knows? The great impediment to the absolute consolidation of Late Capitalism is the development of militant, chiliastic, antimodernist Islamic movements. Might Islam and Late Capitalism reach some grand accommodation? It's under way in the realm of international banking, for instance, and tepid forms of Guided Democracy (as in Indonesia under Sukarno) are getting tryouts in some of the more forward-looking Muslim autocracies.
The above might be a rich scene for a political novelist to anatomize and dramatize, no doubt, but there is a problem. And the problem is . . . doomsday. The environmental crisis, a mosaic of threats to human flourishing that grows more complex by the day (global warming, acidification of the seas, water shortages . . . ), has a tendency to throw a dark shadow over the human arena. This crisis, it seems, is a summary outcome of humankind's most innocent endeavors, to get and spend and to tame the planet. And the doomsday shadow tends to make the social struggles traditionally addressed by political novels seem parochial, in a way. It's tough, these days, for what Lawrence called the one bright book of life.
<http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2459>
.d.