Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls, it's a mixed up world

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon

I thought my choice of fiction this winter had been all over the place, but I found a common theme in these three novels I read over the past couple months. All three are about underground organizations, politics and love, and they all tie in with our current atmosphere of heated sexual politics and bonkers governmental politics.

Off the grid

"The Feral Detective," by Jonathan Lethem (whose work I have written about often on this blog) is quite explicit in the way it places itself in our current climate. It is set mostly in those awful weeks between the U.S. election in November 2016 and the inauguration the following January. It is told from the point of view of Phoebe, who walked away from a somewhat promising career in New York media because she couldn't pretend all was normal after the election. She works at the New York Times, and quits after the paper invites the president-elect to the office. "I think I won Facebook for that day, for what it's worth," she says.

Phoebe ends up flying to Southern California in an effort to track down the missing college student daughter of a friend. She hires the titular detective to help her and they begin searching for the young woman among a group of people living semi-communally off the grid in the desert. They also begin an affair.

In addition to its political explicitness, there's also some very graphic sex. In today's climate, it's a little strange to read a male author writing from a woman's point of view, especially when it includes sex scenes. I could imagine the outraged tweets as I read these scenes. However, the theme of "The Feral Detective" is the difficult dynamic between men and women (and yes, in particular cis-het men and women) in an age when the world appears to be ruled by the male id. You might argue that Lethem has to go there, if he's going to be true to his theme.

In the thick of it

In "Sweet Tooth," Ian McEwan tells the story of Serena Frome, a young woman who works for the British secret service MI5 in the early 1970s, working in a secret program to promote anti-communist thought among intellectuals.

Maybe my description attributes more agency to Serena than it should. In fact, she's a surprisingly passive character. The smart, beautiful daughter of a bishop, who is distant with her, and a mother, who is determined to mold Serena into the bold, independent woman she would like to have been, Serena seems content to let other people make big decisions about her life. As a student, she has an affair with a much older professor who grooms her for a life of the mind, giving her books to read, and a taste of the life she could lead.

When she first meets him, she describes him this way:

"Men like him came to our house to visit the Bishop from time to time. They were annoying of course to anyone under twenty-five in that post-sixties period, but I rather liked them too. They could be charming, even witty, and the whiff they trailed of cigars and brandy made the world seem orderly and rich. They thought much of themselves, but they didn't seem dishonest, and they had, or gave the impression they had, a strong sense of public service ... Let these men rule the world. There were others far worse."

There are a lot of things going on here. One that jumped out at me was a memory of McEwan's "Saturday," which struck me as a thinly veiled defense of the invasion of Iraq. The author seemed to be saying that our leaders were decent people with good intentions and that they were doing the world a favor by removing the evil Saddam Hussein. The dangerous naivete of this view was apparent even in 2005, when the novel was released. It made me so mad, I avoided McEwan's writing for years. I think this is the first of his novels that I have read since then.

But another thing is Serena's passivity. She's happy to have these old white men run the world, even to have them take her to their bed.

When the men of MI5 learn that Serena is a voracious reader of fiction, they assign her the task of recruiting an up-and-coming writer. She says she represents a literary foundation and gives him a grant so that he can pursue his fiction writing, with its vaguely anti-communist bent. And, wouldn't you know it? The two fall in love.

The story is told, more or less, from the vantage point of 40 years later, meaning today. It doesn't have a lot to say about our current politics, really. Perhaps I'm expecting too much of what was billed as a comic novel. (Although to be honest, I didn't laugh once.) But as with "The Feral Detective," it was hard for me to read it without thinking in terms of the #metoo movement and the feminism of the social media era.

There's an element of these sexual politics that works as meta-fiction in "Sweet Tooth," but that doesn't reveal itself until the end of the novel. I can't discuss it here without giving major spoilers, but let's just say it would be fun to read this in a book club and argue about what it all means.

I know what you are

Unlike the other novels I've written about in this post, R.O. Kwon's "The Incendiaries" is written by a woman, and a non-white person. Still, the weird dynamic of a man writing a woman's story is here too. It also ties in with some hot-button political topics such as North Korea, terrorism, evangelical Christianity and abortion. 

Beautifully written, "The Incendiaries" is mostly told from the point of view of college student Will, who had been an evangelical Christian before losing his faith. For him, the loss is worse than a bad breakup. At school he meets and falls in love with Phoebe, a popular girl with her own painful background. (And look at that, we have another character named Phoebe in this blog post.)

We get a peek of what will happen in the first pages of the book. Phoebe joins a small Christian cult that turns toward terrorism. Although the chapters alternate points of view between Will, Phoebe and John Leal, the cult leader, Will's voice tells most of the story, and his chapters tend to be the longest and most beautifully written. I got the sense that Will was telling Phoebe and John Leal's stories, too. 

In my paperback copy of the book, there is one of those reader's guide things that is supposed to spark discussions at book clubs or whatever. It asks a question: "Is Will an unreliable narrator?" I think that's one way to look at it. Another is that he's a self-interested narrator in the way that most of us are. He wants to tell the story in a way that paints himself as basically a good guy, and to protect himself from blame for how Phoebe ended up. 

I saw this most clearly after a terrible scene in which he gets drunk and sexually violent with Phoebe during their long, slow breakup. The way he writes about it, it almost sounds like a mere misunderstanding. Later, he runs into a friend of Phoebe's on a New York Street, and at first the friend avoids him:

"Julian, I said. I thought I saw him flinch, but he didn't respond. He'd have kept walking if I hadn't said it again, taking his arm. Julian, hello, I said, but the face he showed me might have been a stranger's He had on glasses. The reflected sunlight hid his eyes. He looked down at the hand I'd put on his arm, and I lifted it.
"I want nothing to do with you, he said. I know what you are, Will.
"I don't understand.
"With his glasses leveled at me light lights, he said Phoebe had told him what I'd done." 

Reading this passage, I thought back to all the times in Will's narrative when he portrayed himself as a nice guy who is simply misunderstood by women. I also thought of all the times he mentions drinking. By the end of the book, I started to see how even Kwon's eloquence in the Will chapters can be seen as the Will's pretty mask to cover up the uglier aspects of his character.  

But if Will is not what he seems, neither is Phoebe, and neither is John Leal. That's one of the themes of this remarkable book: We manipulate other people by telling them stories about ourselves. We lie to ourselves so that we can lie to other people.