Why write a novel? There were the requisite answers: to think through questions that agitated thinkability—what is truth, what makes a livable life, who suffers and who injures, what is it to be in a world one didn’t choose, et cetera. On the contrary, the news coming out of North America as of late was, in a sense, an ongoing refutation of the novel, of anything that wasn’t direct action, that didn’t have to do with an immediate insurgency against those whose disregard for the livability of the oppressed amounted to a politics of socially engineered mass death. A novel, then, could be an
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