Uneasy about the future, bookworms turn to dystopian classics
ALEXANDRA ALTER
New York Times News Service,
January 28, 2017
Last weekend, as hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the novelist Margaret Atwood began getting a string of notifications on Twitter and Facebook. People were sending her images of protesters with signs that referenced her dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” which takes place in near-future New England as a totalitarian regime has taken power and stripped women of their civil rights, was published 32 years ago. But in recent months, Atwood has been hearing from anxious readers who see eerie parallels between the novel’s oppressive society and the current Republican administration’s policy goals of curtailing reproductive rights.
In 2016, sales of the book, which is in its 52nd printing, were up 30 percent over the previous year. Atwood’s publisher has reprinted 100,000 copies in the last three months to meet a spike in demand after the election.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is among several classic dystopian novels that seem to be resonating with readers at a moment of heightened anxiety about the state of American democracy. Sales have also risen drastically for George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984,” which shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list this week.
Other novels that today’s readers may not have picked up since high school but have landed on the list this week are Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” and Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here.” On Friday, “It Can’t Happen Here” was No. 9 on Amazon; “Brave New World” was No. 15.
Interest in “1984” surged this week, set off by a series of comments from Trump, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, and his adviser Kellyanne Conway, in which they disputed the news media’s portrayal of the crowd size at his inauguration. To many observers, Conway’s remark that Spicer had not lied about the crowd size but was offering “alternative facts” evoked Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian society in which language becomes a political weapon and reality itself is defined by those in power.
Of course, it is not the first time that readers and pundits have invoked “1984” to criticize a government. It is such a standard trope that Orwell’s name has become an adjective.
“It’s a frame of reference that people can reach for in response to government deception, propaganda, the misuse of language, and those are things that occur all the time,” said Alex Woloch, an English professor at Stanford University. “There are certain things this administration is doing that has set off these alarm bells, and people are hungry for frames of reference to understand this new reality.”
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