In a conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Bécquer Seguin discusses his book “The Op-Ed Novel. A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain” (Harvard University Press, 2023). He elaborates on the concept of the op-ed novel, explains the idea of literary populism, advocates for the engagement of novelists in the public debates of historical and national meaning, and discusses some most noteworthy examples of Spanish op-ed novelists.
Bécquer Seguín is an assistant professor of Iberian studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches the literary, cultural, and political history of modern Spain. He is a regular contributor to The Nation, where he has been reporting on Spain since 2015, and has written for Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, where he co-edits the literature in translation and sports sections. The Op-Ed Novel is his first book.
Kasia Krzyżanowska: Let us begin with the main protagonists of your book — the Spanish novelists who penned op-eds to El Pais after the Franco regime has ceased to exist. How do you explain that these writers populated the op-ed columns in high numbers in El Pais, but this is not really the case for other renown newspapers, like The New York Times or Le Monde?
Bécquer Seguin: My book tells a story of five Spanish novelists who, during the 1980s and 1990s, populated the op-ed pages of El Pais. These novelists are Javier Cercas, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Almudena Grandes and Fernando Aramburu. They are a particular generation, but they all started right op-ed writing at different points in time. For example, Javier Marías, who maybe the name that most of your listeners might know, began writing novels when he was a teenager: he published his first novel I believe at age 19. So he was a novelist well before he was an op-ed writer. But then there are other novelists, such as Antonio Muñoz Molina, who’s been widely translated into English and other languages, and who began writing as a journalist and then subsequently very quickly became a novelist. These writers were populating the op-ed pages of the Spanish press shortly after the transition to democracy.
Spain had a fascist dictatorship from 1939 until 1975. These dates are hardwired in people who know anything about Spanish politics, but I think they’re actually kind of inexact. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936. The phalangists, the fascists, or let’s say, big tent extreme far-right political movement launched a military coup d’etat in July of 1936. Many of the areas of Spain fell to the fascists very quickly. For many that dictatorship lasted from 1936 until the new Spanish Constitution was founded in 1978. I would periodize the transition to democracy from around 1973 until 1982. 1982 is a key moment. It’s a key moment in the book, but it’s a key moment in Spanish politics because that’s when you have the first peaceful transition of power from people who were centrists, moderates, who were very closely affiliated with the Franco regime, to a socialist party that was by and large excluded, was in exile during that period. This is a long run-up to say that Spain was in a state of political turmoil.
Before the transition to democracy Franco held a very strong grip on the press. There was no freedom of the press. They were just very kind of strangled in what they could say. There were very good op-ed writers, but they were by and large very limited in what they could say. Then, all of a sudden, you have a transition to democracy, you have Franco’s death in 1975, and then just months after you have the founding of El Pais in May of 1976. All of a sudden, the floodgates were kind of opened upon Franco’s death in terms of freedom of the press, so you have lots of newspapers that were founded at this time.
And these newspapers, obviously, didn’t want to rely on the opinion writing talent that had been created during the Franco regime. These were opinion writers who were by and large right-wing people who were very closely affiliated with the censorship apparatus. They were not going to go – either by disposition or by control – against what the censorship apparatus said. You had just a vacuum of an opinion writing talent that you need to fill a bunch of op-ed pages. So El Pais was founded in 1976, also Diario 16 (or Daily 16, as you would translate it) was another major newspaper that was also created in 1976. Again these newspapers need to find writing talent. And so they looked to a couple of places: they looked to obviously politicians, the new upcoming generation of politicians that was trying to make its mark on Spanish Society.
On the other hand, they looked to people who had writing talent to begin with. Where are you gonna find that? If you’re not gonna find it in people who regularly write journalism because of the censorship and in the Franco state, then you turn to writers, poets, novelists, you turn to other kinds of creative writers. Because of this vacuum that you need to fill, you have a certain set of people who came in to fill it rather quickly. What’s interesting is that in the early days of El Pais you have novelists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winner from Colombia, who wrote regularly for El Pais. You have novelists across Latin America who come to write for El Pais as well, and novelists in Spain. You have very distinct populations populating the op-ed pages. I don’t want to overstate the case. Novelist came to populate around 30% of the op-ed/columnist space, but it still sizeable. It’s certainly outside the norm for what one might expect of Western democracies across the world.
When I was reading your introductory chapter that explained the history of op-ed writing and the position of novelists in the world of political opinions, I had a feeling of missing something. One could argue that a similar process that you described in Spain occurred in the post-communist countries as well — the intellectuals (or, the intelligentsia) there to a large extent maintained they high social position in a democratic society by op-ed writing. It was even more strengthened with the popularization of social media. Would you agree that Spanish and post-communist countries share a similar background history on the position of op-ed novelists?
I don’t know very much about the history of post-communist societies, but there’s a book that just came out by Brian Goodman called “The Nonconformists“. It talks about Czech and American writers: how these writers were intellectuals and treated as much more than just literary figures. do think that there’s absolutely something to be said for that.
I think the reason why you or many other people can see the similarity is precisely because op-ed writing was the currency of political opinion. To get a political opinion circulated in the world, the most effective way to do so was op-ed writing.
You also had a radio and television, but I would say, at least in Spain, and I imagine for many other countries, especially post-communist ones, many people still turn to the print media to find opinions that had certain quality controls. Because in the news media, on the radio, or on television people would say random things that we’re not necessarily able to fact-check on the spot. But if someone prints an op-ed column that goes through several hands before it ever sees the light of day, it is a different story. Readers especially were aware of that. I think that op-ed writing can certainly have that ability to create an intellectual out of someone who may not have a background in journalism or politics just by the circulation of op-eds.
Let us move to the crux of your book. What is an op-ed novel? How does it relate to the different literary genres and their functions? You aptly stated in the book that “readers often assume fiction is meant to be enduring rather than timely” — so what kind of myths does an op-ed novel challenge? In what ways it is enriching to read op-eds and novels as complementary?
There are a number of questions there. The case I try to make is that an op-ed novel is a novel that clearly attempts to intervene in the public debates of its time. So how does a novel attempt to intervene in the public debates of its time? Well, at least in the sample of novels that I’ve chosen, and I think this holds true for other novels that might be called op-ed novels, is that
these novels blend narrative and nonfictional evidence in order to make political arguments through one could say persuasive techniques.
Let me break that down a little bit. Lots of the writers that I study take on literary genres that already have this potential or already have built it into this mix between fiction and nonfiction. So the clearest example of this is Javier Cercas. He is a writer who is born in Extremadura, in the mountain region of Spain, and then his family moved to Catalonia. He grew up as a Catalan whose family came from outside of Catalonia, which is particularly important to understand, given his political persuasion. The one literary genre that he took on, especially from his second novel onwards, was autofiction.
An autofiction is a genre that just by definition blends fiction and non-fiction, blends the self-writing memoir, truth-telling of one’s psyche with a fictional veneer that allows the writer to play with what exactly is true, winking at the audience by not exactly telling what if they are reading a memoir. That’s one genre that I think worked for these writers because it allows them to claim the legitimacy of writing, the truth that can be fact-checked. But it also gives them the escape patch of fiction where they can say: “ah, but this is still a novel, I’m writing truth. I can get the legitimacy of writing truth and people feel as though they’re reading a memoir or reading some kind of account of nonfiction. But at the same time, I don’t always have to abide by the standards, especially the fact-checking standards”. There have been many scandals in the United States with nonfictional memoirs that actually turned out to be more fictional.
Autofiction is one of the literary genres, the novel of ideas is another one, and then I identify a third one that I call literary populism that we’ll talk about in a minute. What I identify in these genres or styles (I don’t know how hard I want to press the idea that they’re kind of consolidated genres, but they certainly are clear literary styles) is that they can blend different forms of evidence and the capacity to allow writers to write persuasively. They don’t often have to hue to just pure literary aestheticism, they can also write argumentatively. They can infuse their characters with political ideas in ways that other genres would not allow. So, an op-ed novel is a novel that attempts to persuade readers. It attempts to directly intervene in the issues of its day.
One can identify that these are purely the themes, right?
What are these novels about? In many cases, the novels that I study are about Spanish history and Spanish political history. The novels are about the Spanish Civil War and the memory of the Spanish Civil War.
There are also novels about the transition to democracy and the memory of the transition to democracy. One of the novels I study is about the coup d’etat that happened in 1981 at the very end of the transition to democracy. These are novels that in thematic terms attempt to revise our historical understanding. It’s just very clear that these novels are invested in a certain political debate and they are frequently published right around the times when these debates are raging in the Spanish public.
For example, Javier Cercas wrote a novel about the 1981 coup d’etat called “The Anatomy of a Moment” — a brilliant title. He published that novel in 2009 — he must have written it around 2007-2008 when Spain was passing its first law of historical memory when people were trying to give value to those who had suffered during the dictatorship and had not gotten their due during the transition to democracy. He sets this novel in the transition to democracy precisely to correct that previous misunderstanding of that transition and what led to the so-called pact of silence that did not allow these war crimes committed under Franco to be tried and investigated.
One of the questions readers would have is: why do they do this? Why blend the narrative and nonfictional elements? What is the purpose of this? The purpose, as I alluded to, is on the one hand to make historically revisionist claims without having to answer for them fully as one would if one were a historian or a journalist in the nonfictional sense – because you can always hide behind the veneer of fiction. That’s number one. But as you mentioned, another reason is because novels are just very long-lasting as opposed to op-eds which are extremely ephemeral: you read it and forget about it the next day. They’re very few op-eds that actually stay with you. Novels can actually produce those similar arguments that op-eds make but have a much longer shelf-life.
The third point that I would make is that these novelists wrote novels because novels in Spain and in many parts of the world circulate much more widely than op-eds do. You would say ‘Well, but an op-ed can be read by 10,000 people a day’. But part of that power is that an op-ed will be read by people on that day, but will never be read again, whereas a novel can accumulate readers over generations. I think that is part of the appeal of blending nonfiction and fiction for these writers.
It’s good that you mentioned the international readership because it leads me to my next question. None of the authors you discuss in the book won international prizes (though Javier Marias surely was acclaimed internationally, translated into many languages). Do you think that novelist intellectuals find it hard to be recognized beyond their country of origin, that perhaps their universal message is buried under the national history difficult to decipher?
I think that it is true that these Spanish novels that I talk about are somewhat… provincial is perhaps too strong of a term but are very focused on the nation and that has a lot to do with their intellectual project. Someone like Antonio Muñoz Molina, for example, won the Jerusalem prize, so he won prizes outside of the Spanish-speaking world, but very few of them, Javier Marias being indeed the lone exception, have appealed so dramatically to an audience beyond Spain. It has to do with their focus on Spanish history, with the debates that are going on about Spanish history and the public.
On the other hand, it has to do with the lack of understanding of contemporary Spanish history by the rest of the world. If you read newspapers and magazines, the one time that they’ll talk about Spain is when it comes to the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century. So, the Spanish Civil War has captivated the world’s imagination so much and for obvious reasons. There were the international brigades, right? Many people came in from different parts of the world to help fight against fascism.
The stranglehold of the Spanish Civil War on the international imaginary has not allowed for a space for contemporary fiction writing from people in Spain to reach that wider audience.
It’s different with the younger generation. I think that these novelists, op-ed novels in particular because they’re so focused on the national debate, have become super important within Spain but also have not gotten outside of Spain.
One of the novelists that I discussed — his name is Fernando Aramburu and he’s the one who came latest to public intellectual fame in Spain — wrote a novel in 2016 called “Patria.” It was translated as “Homeland“, which I think is a more or less appropriate title. That novel was translated into English and became a huge bestseller, sold in over 1.2 million copies in Spain, I think that includes its early translations, especially in German. But when it was translated into English, the New York Times published an earlier review of it and completely panned the novel. And it panned the novel it seemed to me not really for aesthetic reasons, but rather because the review author had no idea why people were making such a fuss about why there was an intractable conflict in The Basque Country.
The novel is about the Basque Country. It features two families: one family is the family of a victim of an ETA terrorist attack. The other family is the family of perhaps, what we’re led to believe, the perpetrator of that terrorist attack that led to the death of the father in one of the families.
The New York Times’ reviewer did not know really what to do with this historical conflict of ETA, and that’s puzzling to me because of course in the same paper you have novelists in Ireland publishing about the Troubles and about the IRA.
Those novels are not treated with the same quizzical puzzlement that the ETA conflict was. There’s just a lack of knowledge of what’s going on in Spain and a lack of understanding of its historical significance. As an Iberian scholar I would say that there’s quite a lot of historical significance and there are many parallels with situations like the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Did you ever encounter accounts of authors that you described who regretted not getting the international fame?
That’s a good question. The novelists that I talk about and the only ones that have reached some kind of international fame are Javier Marias, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Javier Cercas. Their novels are almost immediately translated into English. They do make the literary circuit in the United States and elsewhere. All three of them — well, Javier Marias, of course, passed away in 2022 — but all three of them speak and spoke excellent English. Javier Marias’ father, Julian Marias, was a professor at Wellesley College and other universities, he was a visiting professor at many universities in the United States. He was a philosopher. Antonio Muñoz Molina lives partly in New York. He was the director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York City. Javier Cercas was a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a couple of years and has come to the United States quite often. Part of the provincialism might have to do with their linguistic abilities. Not just the ability of their novels to be translated but them to have a kind of public presence in the United States through their appearances and their writing. These three novelists actually did.
Now, do they regret? I don’t think any of them regrets becoming a writer who is internationally recognized.
Some of them every once in a while, will issue regrets about becoming a Spanish intellectual who has a certain notoriety. But I read that as part of their op-ed novel project.
Their public intellectual project is to offer opinions that they strongly believe through their fiction and nonfictional writing. All these writers were columnists, so they simultaneously wrote columns and novels. That’s the easy way to identify some of the blendiness by reading op-eds and novels alongside one another. What they’re doing when they express regret about becoming intellectuals in Spain is that they’re expressing regret about having to meet the legitimacy standards for rigorous fact-checking and rigorous argumentation that is expected of them in the Spanish public sphere, while at the same time, they wanted to issue opinions without necessarily always meeting those rigorous standards. They think in a much more artistic and creative way that doesn’t necessarily have to meet all of those requirements in their literary writing. Thus, they express regret that people don’t understand what they’re trying to do, that people often read them too literally, that people get frustrated because they just misunderstand the genre. But that’s just an easy excuse, to be perfectly honest.
I think that that’s an easy excuse for not wanting to write the journalism that they otherwise claim to be writing, even when they are writing fiction.
I want to go back to one of your earlier questions. You asked a great question whether I think it’s salient to read op-eds and novels alongside one another. I think that it’s a very challenging thing to do. As literary scholars, you’re always taught to separate the author from the novel itself. Foucault taught us this back in the 1960s. Roland Barthes taught us this also back in 1950s and 60s with the death of the author debates. That was a healthy turn in literary studies. But I also think that people took it too far. Novels are produced by people who have a kind of sociological characteristics to them, who live in a society that interacts with other people, that interact with institutions that have all of this social material that they use to inform their novels.
Sometimes novels aren’t purely descriptive or narrative. They also want to act as social actors in the world — I think that we’ve missed that. We’ve missed that especially when it comes to people who in their sociological characteristics are also treated as intellectuals — is it always a good idea to read an up and novelist’s op-eds next to their novels. Several novelists write up columns and their columns don’t inform their novels, but if you’re a contextualist and you want to understand not only the novels themselves but also the people behind them, I would say in many cases it is a good idea to read those two genres alongside one another if there is something to be found. If you see that there’s a blurring between these two forms of writing — nonfiction on the one hand, and fiction on the other.
It seems that you generally approve or try to objectively write about authors who engage with auto fiction and novel of ideas. At the same time, you visibly disprove of literary populism exemplified in your book by the novel Patria by Fernando Aramburu. Why is it the case?
I would not say that I’m more critical of Fernando Aramburu than I am of the other novelist. But let me explain what I mean by literary populism, which is this term that comes up at the end of the book. I want to say that this literary style really exists. Literary populism occurs in the case of Fernando Aramburu when he tries — as many populists do — to present himself as above left versus right: ‘I am above politics. I’m above this kind of left versus right distinction.’ The way that he does that is that he basically sketches out a dichotomy for you. He says here’s the left-wing family and here’s the right-wing family and I’m gonna spend equal time on both of these families (equal time in terms of page length). Literally, the amount of time you spend reading about each of the families is the same. Therefore, I’m not going to take sides. I’m gonna be above the fray and I’m gonna prove it to you by having a very balanced account of these two families.
But what happens when you read the novel is that one of the families is fully described as it feels like lived people, like real people that you can empathize with, that you can laugh with etc. The other family is very flat. They’re what Marta Figlerowicz, a very good scholar of comparative literature, calls ‘flat protagonists.’ They’re people in novels there that take center stage, but they’re not developed as characters. What’s interesting about that is that you have a balance at a very formal level between left-wing versus right-wing, but yet you have an extreme imbalance at the level of content, and at the level of narration between who the author is invested in telling you about and who she or he is not invested in telling you about. It becomes very obvious where the sympathies of the author are. I find this as a feature of many analyses of populism.
The scholar of populism will tell you that what populists want to do is they want to present themselves as beyond politics. But yet if you look at their political program and their history, it’s clear that they are on one side: either on the left-wing populism or right-wing populism.
That is my spiel on literary populism, and I hope it’s persuasive.
With Fernando Aramburu — it was this was the first chapter of the book that I wrote, so perhaps it is a result of that first chapter not being as measured as the other chapters, but I would say that the other chapters are also equally or similarly harsh on their protagonists and their writers. Take, for example, the novel of ideas — this 19th century genre that then gets revived in the 21st century — by Almudena Grandes (a writer that has unfortunately not been translated very much into English). She essentially was very dogmatic in her political thinking and in the way that she expressed her political thinking in her novels. Her novels would beat you over the head with her political agenda in an extremely literary way. Her novel, which is translated into English as “The Frozen Heart” (“El Corazón helado”) is a beautiful novel. It’s just extremely well written. It’s very entertaining, it’s long, but it keeps you going. When it comes to its political program, it’s just very obvious what it wants to do, and any reader can see through it. I criticize the book very strongly for that — simultaneously wanting to have her cake and eat it too, wanting to present a beautiful literary artifact, but yet also present her political view as kind of true within that literary artifact in a way that is perhaps a little inartful.
The same thing goes for Javier Cercas — I take him to task for accruing all of this legitimacy through his historical autofiction but yet when it comes to debates in the public sphere when he steps out of the of the of fictional realm and tries to debate with historians, he comes up a little bit short. He doesn’t want to engage in these debates as fully as let’s say a journalist or historian would with all of their kind of wealth of citations, quotations and references. He wants to prove that he has done historical research, which he does he does, but he does not want to engage in debates among historians. He wants to use that legitimacy, but he doesn’t always want to follow through on completely on those debates and those arguments that he wants to make in public.
The book, to be perfectly fair, is mostly a critical book. I celebrate the writing of these authors. I think the writing is fantastic and I strongly recommend that people go to bookstores and seek out these novels even in their English translation. I think many of them hold up very well in terms of their aesthetic quality, but at the same time, I think that each of these writers has a very clear public intellectual agenda behind their writing and sometimes it comes through more or less obviously.
You refer to a gripping metaphor devised by Walter Benjamin that compares opinions to oil that lubricates social life. You then go beyond Benjamin’s comparison and pose the question of legitimacy and agency: which social actors are able to pour that oil? There are of course various answers to this problem, but let us focus on the Spanish intellectuals: in what ways they claimed their right to deliver political opinions? How did they manage to convince society to trust them with regard to politics? Perhaps simply the novelist intellectuals responded to social expectations that celebrity writers should answer the national political questions?
Sure. Wonderful. I’ll read that metaphor because I think it might be interesting for your audience. I say the first aphorism of Walter Benjamin’s “One-way Street” ends with a comment on the role of opinion in modern society. Benjamin writes: “opinions are to the monstrous apparatus of social life what oil is to machines: one would not stand in front of a turbine and pour oil all over it. Instead, only a little is applied to the hidden spindles and joints whose locations must be known [in advance].”
I think it is a wonderful metaphor because what he’s saying that without opinions, without this whole opinion apparatus, without opinion journalism that takes many forms through audio televisual written etc., there’s no lubricant to society. Society can’t communicate with itself. It can’t function, it’s stuck. If you see this in an authoritarianism society, socially they are stuck. Obviously, opinions circulate in in many forms. They circulate underground, they circulate covertly etc. But the public society is stuck in a way. So, I think this metaphor is very apt and especially apt for understanding a post-authoritarian society like Spain was in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
The way that these writers accrue this public intellectual legitimacy through their novels is precisely by the themes that they focus on — often political and historical themes. But also, they frequently want to demonstrate all of the research it took for them to write those novels. It gives you a certain academic legitimacy or journalistic legitimacy: look at all of these books that I read, look at all of these people that I talk to, look at all of these archives that I visited in order to produce this novel.
This happens with Antonio Muñoz Molina. He wrote a novel about James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. In his novel from 2014 titled “Like a Fading Shadow” he reveals all of these sources. This is interesting because of course as academics, we just footnote: we quote and then there’s a footnote. It’s very easy to tell through the apparatus of academic writing what those sources are, where they’re from and how we cite them.
But of course, how do you cite a source in a novel? You have to say that on the page itself. But yet if you’re a literary writer, you have to make it entertaining and literary. You can’t just kind of plop a source in the novel.
And so, these novels come up with very creative ways to cite these sources within the novel and to prove that legitimacy and they say: oh, look at this key fact that I knew, or I’ve discovered only because I read so much archival material’. These are tropes that are especially taken from what’s called in the United States new journalism — this is Truman Capote, and the whole movement in 1950s and 1960s. This is the kind of form of journalism that comes about that attempts to narrativize nonfiction. Lots of these novels take certain lessons from American new journalism to heart and new American journalism spread across at least the Western World. You find evidence of people trying to imitate it in France, Spain, Germany, and of course in the UK.
Accruing legitimacy through novel-writing is an art in itself.
Lots of these authors want to prove and demonstrate that research to have the legitimacy that they take to the public sphere and then use that to back up what their opinions are when they write their op-ed columns for El Pais and other newspapers.
What’s your personal opinion on the novelist intellectual that join the debate on sensitive political matters, like historical memory of the Franco regime, but do not pursue academic or journalistic standards?
That’s a great question. I try to conclude with this at the very end of the book. I want to say that yes, the book that I’ve written is very critical and I take these authors to task for various mishaps or arguments that I think don’t hold up to scrutiny very well and for making ridiculous statements that they can’t back up. All of that is true. However, I do think that novelists have a place have a role to play in the public sphere. I have come across many arguments — some of these arguments inspired me to write this book — that criticized many Spanish novelists. Some of them say: “well, when these novelists write about the Spanish economy in their op-eds, they just have no clue what they’re talking about.” And yes, in a technical sense, that’s true. They have no clue. They make very exaggerated arguments.
But one could also imagine a world in which these novelists, despite not having rigorous academic training in economics, can nonetheless opine quite sophisticatedly about the Spanish economy.
The problem that I had when I read these critiques of these novelists is that they would say these novelists are writing very poorly about the economy and Spanish politics. They don’t take political science research into account. They don’t take history into account and therefore they should not write for the public sphere. That last jump is my biggest problem.
I think that novelists should write for the public sphere. What would happen if you only had people who are specialists writing about their own discipline in the public sphere? That’s just academia.
And we already have that. Does academia need to reach out to the public sphere? Obviously. My book is published by a university press, but I’ve tried to write it in a way that appeals to people who are well beyond my field of expertise. I think that everyone, especially in the humanities but also in the social sciences, should strive for that. There’s a role that specialized language plays and that’s wonderful. But I think that I think that these novelists can play a part in describing things for a general audience — just like a scholar who does not just write for his or her narrow field of study and tries to write about that field of study for a broader audience can also write for that that broader audience, can bring the two together. Now, as scholars we are trained in a certain field. I don’t think novelists need to be trained but I do think that they need to be much more invested and much more learned about the fields that they want to examine in public.
I can turn to one excellent example of this. A novelist who opines in public yet whose opinions are very rigorous in the technical sense and in a literary way that appeals to a broad audience is John Lanchester. He is a novelist in the UK. He often writes for the London Review of Books. He has wonderful thoughts about economics and yet he’s also a novelist who’s written a novel called ‘Capital’. It was published during the financial crisis of 2008 and describes the social arrangements that the 2008 financial crisis destroyed, dismantled in a certain sense. He writes about that in this novel very lyrically and very poetically in a way that could not be replicated by someone who is just writing nonfiction. In his op-eds, his columns and his public writing he writes about economics in one way, but in his novel, he writes about it in a slightly different way, but yet there’s a coherent project there that doesn’t attempt to blend the two to get some cachet as a public intellectual but just exercises two different sides of his mind to understand this very big contemporary problem.
I do think that novelists can provide a very different perspective in the public sphere. That would not be accomplished just if we had academics writing about their field of specialty in the public sphere. Novelists can do perhaps better than many other writers as they can use the twin genres of drama and comedy. There are certain situations where it’s appropriate to be dramatized because they’re not sufficiently understood. There are also situations, the inverse of that, when we need to laugh a little bit, when we need to use comedy to understand what’s going on in the world. This is obvious in contemporary society. This has been taken up in the United States by people like John Oliver and his newscasts that are nonfiction, but they’re cracking jokes all the time. They’re using comedic tropes to get us to a deeper understanding of contemporary politics. Novelists can help us do that.
