Pandering

Sometimes, I wonder why the mere reading of some books stirs in me the irrepressible appetite of writing. Like just yesterday, when I watched with an old friend of mine a French movie about the creation of the first restaurant, Delicious by Éric Besnard, and we ended up so hungry that we checked if we had enough butter on the fridge. Lucky me, the craving vanished, otherwise I would have ruined my one-meal-a-day diet.Nonetheless, I swear I was hungry until I fell asleep reading Erasure by Percival Everett on which is based the highly recommended film American Fiction. And this morning, at the crack of dawn, while the first drops of rain after a drought were cleaning my dusty window, I was furiously writing –as it should be!– keeping in mind the inspiring words of Whit Burnett to the young and ambitious Salinger, “are you willing to devote your life to telling stories knowing that you may get nothing in return?” For the sake of the argument, let’s say all of you already have watched the aforementioned film played by Jeffrey Wright. And if not, press stop right now and quit listening, given that I’m going to be specific about the plot.It's all about the ups and downs of fiction that veers depending on sales and nothing else. There was a time when publishers were the guardians of quality standards and good taste, at least I believed the spirit of Max Perkins from Scribner’s was hovering among them. But not actually. And since the invasion of dumb-phones and the subsequent collapse of sustained reading, I begin to think there will be much worse each day passing because of the poverty of imagination that includes. We have this fine black author with a jazzy name –Thelonious Monk Ellison– trying to teach American fiction to snowballs in a Californian college ridden by the Woke fever and its radical extremes, with a female student outraged by the use of the N-word that denounces him to the dean, and he receives a disciplinary sanction that he uses to visit his family in Boston, where he is dealing with the problems of a middle-aged man, like the slow descent of a mother into senile dementia, disturbing revelations about his late suicidal father, and the sudden mortality of his sister, who has been the caregiver for years.The combination of these situations and the rejection of his last erudite book for not being black enough pushes him to write the Hood lit that the book industry wanted so badly –or fiending their black trauma porn– under the false identity of an ex-convict, recreating all the stereotypes white publishers think are genuinely black, including Afro-American vernacular English. Namely, drugs, ghetto life, deadbeat dads, and rappers.So, he tackles with this Faustian bargain all his problems at once, cashing with the help of his savvy agent all the money he needs to take care of his ailing mother. And a juicy Hollywood deal to free him once and for all from the servitudes of the academia he has endured... Until the plot twists and he is invited to be a member of the jury of some prize where the prank he churned out is the unstoppable winner with the F-word as a title. During a recess of the deliberations, he has the chance to confront his nemesis, a young black female author, who possesses an intellect similar to his own, even if it’s not on display in her work, with no problems catering to such tastes if that is what the market demands. Precisely the excuse of a drug dealer, as he points out.All that lovely plot, reminded me of the fate of my last editor after the dawn of the MeToo movement, compelled to publish young women's romantic fiction not because she wanted to but because it was the new niche. Of course, the authors must be young women too, so the female readers can easily relate with them, through Instagram and TikTok clips, abounding the idea that if you are not a woman, you cannot write about women, which is against the imagination and the creation that fuels any fiction. I really believe Gustave Flaubert must be revolving in his grave. Do you remember his joyful statement? "Madame Bovary c'est moi!"I think we are living in the best of worlds. We have the internet and access to a wonderful variety of cultures that our ancestors didn’t have. However, the audience became at the same time dull and stupid.How come? Is there a correlation between these two things? I wrote about my long strife to have mighty books close to me when I was young and the immense delight of reading them all that went far beyond entertainment. It was a cultural pursuit. All I wanted was literary books without tags full of universal and riveting characters.Now we have tags on supposedly literary works. We have Hood lit, Metoo lit, Sick lit, Victimhood lit. As Percival Everett describes is just an unashamed pandering for commercial purposes.The only legit tag I know is the original language the author uses to write. But I couldn’t care less about his race, gender, sexual orientation, social status, or citizenship. It’s irrelevant. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe