Read on Twitter
There is no greater virtue signal than complaining about virtue signaling
It's really too bad that the recent pieces lamenting literature preoccupied with being a "good person" (Oyler, Rothfeld) only take the case cynically. The literature they describe is so much more earnest than they admit.
Or they'll concede (or complain) that it's so earnest as to be naive—and yet! at the same time, posturing, cynicism, market angling, safe, pablum. As if what it means to be a good person isn't a real preoccupation for a generation inheriting a post-secular apocalyptic world
If these authors weren't invested in the question of what it means to be a "good person," they wouldn't be novelists, I don't think. They'd write think pieces, opinion pieces, or Ovels (a la Ooks vs. Books) that are essentially disavowed, NDA-compliant booklength personal essays
Of course the internet and social media strongly shape what people think it means to be a "good person." Being a good person usually means being good to your community, and people are very confused about what "their community" means on platforms like Twitter...
....where people glom together according to affinity, not region, or class, or religion, or family, or religion. People are continually prompted to ask themselves: what is my relationship to this person, these people?
It's so easy to complain about the tendencies of any one group to project and proselytize its conception of goodness—"Now all the eponyms read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle" (how dare!). So hard to grapple with the fact that this is an actual existential/moral concern?
So much easier to pretend it's all cynicism, piety, and driven by a (dark! shameful! greedy!) ulterior motive ("these people want fame! to be LOVED! not as authors but as people!"). As if those who are "good" after their own fashion do not want the same things.
A real tell, I think, is the snide "gotcha" of accusing people who want to be good of hypocrisy. "You say you're a communist, but it is YOU who are the beneficiary of capitalism! And saying you know it—that makes you only more contemptible!" Like, yes, OK. What?
Half of these books' audience is upset that the books don't narrate their way out of this bind and instruct them on how to be good. The other half holds them in contempt for even trying.
Can this literature "boring" or make you feel "trapped," as a reader, as Katy Waldman said? Yes! Does it describe an actual conundrum/paradox in the world? Also yes.
What is interesting to me is that the readers and critics who dislike these novels tend to dislike them because they are tired of the social phenomena—the patterns, the questions—the novels describe. Which, to me, is very legitimate and relatable! So don't read a novel about it?
What I find disappointing is that, as critics, they tend to neglect other very interesting aspects and qualities of these novels by overemphasizing the "goodness" question. Like really, truly, you would not know from the reviews that these novels are well written.
Anyway, I get it, what you think is "the left" (people on Twitter) is too moralizing for you. But the breakdown of this conversation is also a product of what @omediochieng called a "vulgarization" of left theory and philosophy
most people on here who complain about the deployment of terms like: intersectionality, blackness, lived experience, systemic, "a politics," etc. are responding to vulgarized forms used online. That makes sense—it's "the public sphere"(?)—but I expect more of our intellectuals
Anyway, write a group review that doesn't include Sally Rooney challenge (and I love Sally's novels! she's a natural talent. You can't deny it, even if you dislike the characters or the milieu, which I don't)
