Monday Notes

In a very unusual turn of events, someone I voted for once—Bernie Sanders—is in the news. I will not be voting for him now as he has joined the Democratic Party. Sanders has always had problems as the Vermont's socialist party, Liberty Union, will tell you ("Bernie the Bomber" wants to get re-elected, and he voted identically to Hillary Clinton over 90 percent of the time while both were in the Senate) but let's just say that there is very little to do in Vermont, especially when I was living there, and voting and going to a town meeting was actually a weird little trip.

The #blacklivesmatter campaign made an intervention at one of Sanders's speeches and while Sanders handled it with some aplomb, the vulgar left followers—nearly all white people who have never even been to Scandinavia but have heard that it is really neat—went apeshit. Nothing is more terrifying to a white pseudoleft than the vision of a black woman yelling at him. At him! Anyway, Sanders made a good move—he had his staff write this pretty good page, with plenty of SEO-bait, on racial justice. Of course, adding copy to a web page is one thing, actually doing something is quite another. But it was interesting to see a little bit of the ol' left instinct kick in despite decades of selling out: acknowledge the polemic, make a change. Stay tuned next week for the next sell out though.


In shorter notes, Skyhorse has product pages for my two 2016 novels:

The Last Weekend, with author's preferred text, comes out in January.

I am Providence, my first murder mystery, comes out in early August.


Another thing I've been pretty interested is the fallout over the inspirational romance about a Nazi, For Such a Time by Kate Breslin. The critiques have been coming in from all over, and most of them are spot-on. The book, which loosely retells the story of Esther, features a blonde-haired blue-eyed Jewish woman falling in love with the Nazi concentration camp administrator who basically owns her. (If she disobeys, it's back to Dachau.) Thanks to the help of a magical Bible that inexplicably appears when our heroine needs some inspiration, she convinces the Nazi to rig an escape of some sort and thus save some of her people. Jesus and his story of sacrifice features prominently, though I don't believe that the main character converts to Christianity as some reports have claimed. The book was on nobody's radar until it was nominated for a pair of RITA Awards.

So, what's going on? Well, basically, evangelical Christianity is going on. EC's believe that Christ is active in history—hell, EC's believe that Christ is active in helping them find a parking space at the mall if they remember to ask for one in advance with a pre-ignition prayer—and yet here we go with the big problem of evil. (Western Christianity in general ties itself in knots over theodicy, as they are all heretical devils.) So the solution in this case is basically to rewrite the Holocaust. It's Inglourious Basterds for pew-renters. Find Christ somewhere in the Holocaust narrative, and the anxieties over the question of evil—and the thorny issue of what to do, theologically, with the persistence of Judaism—resolves itself emotionally for a few minutes. This dovetails very nicely into the "requirement" that romance have a happy ending for the romantically-linked couple, but is pretty tasteless.

Of course, romance, as it demands a happy ending, just isn't very fertile ground for huge spiritual questions of agency and the metaphysics of history. And the writing is awful: at one point the heroine frets over the possibility of having to eat pork at a fancy Nazi dinner party, which "her people considered traif." It's unintentionally hilarious, and the traif line shows how alienated the writer is from her own character.

Ultimately, the question of the book is a religious one. It can be as bad as it wants to be, so long as it relieves the anxieties of its evangelical readers for a few minutes. Mission accomplished. Much of the criticism of the book involves how offensive it is to Jewish readers and secular readers. But what does that criticism boil down to? "This evangelical Christian book isn't a secular pluralist book!" Indeed it is not. The romance genre is limned with political and cultural reaction, but it is often pluralist reaction, so there is some level of detente.

But some of the criticism seems off-base. One claim I saw was that book doesn't qualify as a romance because there can be no consent—except that dubious consent and non-consent utterly litters the romance genre. Any genre where the lines are so strict—it has to have X and Y in A and B mode—except that the lines can be ignored if it's hot enough, is going to have massive political problems (What does a crime novel need to have? An SF novel?)

Why can't the book just be a bad romance written for an audience with a peculiar subset of culturally powerful (and formerly dominant) anxieties? I'm not much for "culture war" narratives, but this controversy is the best example I can remember of an actual front in the culture war.