American intellectual life, like American life generally, finds itself under siege from a second Trump White House. Colleges, broadcast news outlets, and newspapers have knuckled under in stunning fashion before shakedowns administered by Trump’s vain and venal strongman cult as it polices speech and remakes public discourse in its preferred authoritarian image. During past institutional lurches into thuggishness—notably the McCarthy inquisition of the 1950s—American creative writers in the film industry and book publishing marshaled an oppositional response, castigating both federal goon squads and their meek enablers in the universities and the culture industry. Now, however, it’s a very different prospect, with colleges caving to MAGA extortion threats, and publishers and media executives swallowing MAGA libels and empowering in-house censorship boards as writers mostly dither on the sidelines. Where mid-century writers mustered legal defenses for red-baited colleagues and mounted public appeals to discredit the forces of intellectual reaction, their Trump-era counterparts have greeted the great crisis of the present age—a multifront mobilization of state power to enable war crimes abroad and crush all manner of dissent at home—with little more than a collective puzzled shrug.
Accordingly, the American literary establishment has come in for some serious—and no doubt unwelcome—criticism. Pankaj Mishra has written a blistering Harper’s salvo calling out American novelists and literary figures for long-standing habits of imperial complacency and inert acquiescence before White House power, noting David Foster Wallace’s infatuation with John McCain’s neocon bomb-everything agenda and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Obamanian orthodoxies. Viet Thanh Nguyen raised many of the same criticisms in a Lit Hub essay. Both writers have underlined the muted-at-best response of most established American writers to the genocide in Gaza as a telling symptom of the quisling cast of our literary culture; both are appalled by the way big-name novelists have advertised their fealty to Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and particularly by the way they’ve jockeyed for inclusion on Obama’s viral lists of reading recommendations.
As Mishra argues, the depoliticized makeup of today’s U.S. literary culture is a byproduct of its long Cold War dalliance with state power, going back to the CIA funding of literary magazines published in Europe, and the unsightly gathering of literary courtiers around the Kennedy White House. “A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries,” he writes. “Its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.”
Mishra’s indictment singles out the baleful civic fallout from our stagnant and risk-averse institutional literary culture: “Many Americans are demonstrably disgusted, shamed, and angered by their tyrants, but mainstream literary and intellectual institutions seem unable or unwilling to give voice to them.” His critique focuses on the literary world’s incursions into civic life, but a close look at how America’s literary elite has reckoned directly with the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in its own published work shows an equally advanced state of intellectual sclerosis. With nearly a decade’s worth of American fiction that has sought to render the Trump insurgency, the verdict on the strictly literary value that our insular novelist caste has summoned in response to the Trump phenomenon has to be at least as harsh as Mishra and Nguyen’s damning appraisals of their learned imperial helplessness before the runaway authoritarian throttling of our public life.
I’m the Father
These Trump fictions seek to displace the explicit politics of the MAGA uprising into the deeper substrata of American life—specifically, into the overlapping realms of language and family life, where contemporary American novelists are most at home. Perhaps the most representative entry in the genre, Ben Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School, fixates on the slippage of common language into a sort of free-floating political glossolalia, one that seems to jolt susceptible souls into a state of Trumpian belligerence more or less at random. Jane Gordon, the mother in this therapy-steeped family saga, is an author of Oprah-blessed feminist self-help tracts. She recounts telling a close friend about her own damaged relationship with her mother and then experiencing a small discursive aporia of her own: “My speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure like how . . . I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded.”
Literary elites have greeted the mobilization of state power to enable war crimes abroad and crush all manner of dissent at home with little more than a collective puzzled shrug.
The problem of language outrunning its real-world referents courses throughout Lerner’s novel. Adam, the book’s main protagonist and Jane’s son, is both a former nationally ranked high-school debater and an aspiring poet given to the obscurantist formulations favored among the latter group. He has a run-in with a fellow father of a young child who, when Adam approaches him about his son’s antisocial conduct on the playground, goes promptly into surly MAGA mode: “No; I don’t take orders from you; this conversation is over.” Here, once more at the outer limits of language, a physical confrontation looms:
The bad father took his right hand by the wrist and held it awkwardly against his chest as if to still a tremor, tardive dyskinesia, or to keep the hand from striking me of its own volition; I couldn’t tell if this was posturing meant to intimidate me or if it indicated imminent nervous collapse. We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies; we were two sovereignless men in a Hobbesian state of nature on the verge of primal confrontation.
Adam mostly shuns direct engagement with the brute on the far side of the social contract—though the standoff does culminate in a thuddingly symbolic confrontation that drives home the impossibility of genuine communication here. His first response is to adopt some predictably doomed conversational prompts from his own dad, whose therapeutic specialty is coaxing articulate self-awareness from emotionally damaged adolescent boys. But as Adam gathers up his daughters for a less fraught stretch of the playground, he finds that he’s picked up a viral strain of his interlocutor’s belligerence, hissing at his reluctant children to clear out pronto or else go straight home. “I’m the father,” Adam says to himself. “I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.” As his wife turns up to restore a measure of manageable peace to the scene, Adam feels bested by the MAGA lout. “I felt the gaze of the bad father, sensed his sense of victory. I told myself not to turn around and see his smile.”
Leave aside that no one—least of all a harried dad seeking to defuse a tense standoff among small children—thinks of themselves as an “archaic medium” undoing the tacit social contract by which language subdues the threat of Hobbesian male violence. Leave aside as well that the bad dad’s preferred form of linguistic expression is a cartoonish approximation of Hemingway; in response to Adam’s managerial compassion, he just barks out, “Get away from me. . . . Get away from me now.”
Consider instead how Adam goes about trying to channel the bad dad’s anomie into a moment of provisional mutual understanding. “What I’m asking is for you to help the kids play together; I know another parent has already approached you; I know you probably feel incapable of managing your son and don’t know what to do or maybe your marriage is falling apart (why weaponize my father’s empathy?), but I’m not going to let your son call my daughters names.” It’s a clumsy lurch into passive-aggressive therapyspeak that is a hallmark of liberal evasions of political conflict, especially absurd to be coming out of the mouth of a character allegedly attuned to the nuances and recondite meanings of both literature and basic signification through speech acts.
It seems additionally telling that this encounter, which appears to take place around the 2016 general election, pivots not merely on the misprision of language but also on the close-in calibration of parenting stratagems. Hillary Clinton first came into prominence as a children’s-rights advocate and retained much of this outlook in her vision of how government must tamp down public anger and wrenching, polarized conflict. As is the case with the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Adam proves unable to resist another shot at reclaiming his proper authority in a set piece of anger and resistance; and like any politician, his first thought is to revert to debating form:
Instinctually, I went for an element of discursive surprise: I’ve been trying to enlist your help, I said . . . I’ve been asking for your help in making the playground a safe space for my daughters; I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it’s about pussy grabbing; it’s about my fears regarding the world into which I’ve brought them. The bad father, clearly startled by the mixture of passion and dispassion, the tangle of vocabularies, responded: Let the kids figure it out. My boy’s playing on a slide. He’s not harassing anyone. He’s seven years old, okay? No, I said, it’s not okay; the child is father to the man; what the kids will “figure out” is repetition. (I helped create her, Ivanka, my daughter, Ivanka, she’s six feet tall, she’s got the best body, she’s made a lot of money. Because when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. You have the authority.)
Adam’s appeal fails, not surprisingly; in a final reversion to the state of nature, he brings the encounter to an end by slapping the now-inattentive bad dad’s smartphone out of his hand.
The whole set piece is especially charged for Adam because it recalls a tragic high school scene back home in Topeka. One weekend, Adam and a clutch of his male friends bring along a developmentally challenged client of his dad’s, Darren Eberheart, to a senior-year bacchanal where Darren physically attacks, and grievously injures, a young woman. Adam plays an instrumental role in goading Darren on, via yet another breakdown of basic language capacities. As he starts leading a group of drunken underclassmen in gangsta rap refrains, he drunkenly reflects on his
sense of wonder before the mere fact that any kind of formally pressurized language game held social weight, that the masculine types would in this appropriated manner create a theater where speech might be recycled, recombined, however clumsily or outrageously. On this night Adam managed to rise above the stupid violence of the battles and misogynist clichés and enter a zone in which sentences unfolded at a speed he could not consciously control.
Here again, reference-challenged language toggles rapidly into social menace. Darren, a frequently bullied working-class kid, is denied Adam’s high-flown abstractions and epiphanies and takes the group’s rap deliriums to their violent and misogynist extreme. A specific kind of male-sanctioned language is the medium of his initiation into a proto-MAGA cult of male license:
The types placed their arms fraternally around his shoulders as in a football huddle and passed him the invisible mic or conch or talking stick and while he was purely mute the first time, incapable of any vocalization whatsoever, see the terrified smile, they returned to him eventually, and now he spoke, if haltingly. And while his contribution was but a clumsy attempt to repeat word for word what Adam chanted about fists in faces and catching cases, his brothers all shouted their encouragement and amazement and bobbed their heads to the nonexistent beat as though Darren were disclosing new territories of thought and feeling, new worlds, as though he were their Caedmon. For they had always been told to include him and this constituted the zenith of inclusion, the assimilation of Darren to corporate speech, their busted prosodies, and if there was irony, not all of it was cruel.
Both of these studies in domestic male menace underline a central theme of the Trump-curious American novel: that MAGA is an outlying atavism, all the more dangerous by virtue of its archaic makeup. The rancorous energies of the movement can’t be contained by conventional social mores or shaming callouts; once the last niceties of socially constructed language are abolished, all that’s left is high-testosterone violence, or the threat of it. It’s therefore a category error to bend the pieties of liberal inclusion too far in the direction of figures like Darren or the bad dad. Uncontrollable mayhem will almost certainly ensue.
A right-winger might protest that these set pieces are telling displays of rank liberal hypocrisy and bids to justify crackdowns on free political speech with overhyped scenarios of the rage for patriarchal order run amok. Yet what’s striking about The Topeka School, and the broader sweep of novels trying to engage with our contemporary politics, is how deeply depoliticized it is. The failings of MAGA, in these fables of the Trumpocene, are failings of language, etiquette, and aesthetic representation. It’s more than a little dumbfounding that these fictions are almost completely silent on most questions of Trumpian politics and policymaking, from election denialism to DEI moral panics to evangelical militance. Like Darren and the bad dad, the literary stand-ins for the Trump movement in contemporary fiction are hulking, almost tragically mute figures, impelled only by dark instincts and deep-seated cultural animus. They don’t typically train their resentments against an unjust political economy or an out-of-touch neoliberal “deep state”; no, they want an affirmation of existential worth and license that is oddly prepolitical. In the effort to coax MAGA onto the pages of a novel, most American writers end up creating a vast echo chamber, caroming throughout with Willy Loman’s lament of the obsolete and discarded model individualist: “Attention must be paid.”
But that’s just the thing. At the basic level of characterization, these novels are deeply inattentive to the fundamental question of all good literature: What makes even bigoted, impolite, and hate-filled characters tick? The main run of MAGA-affiliated characters in our fiction are glyphs for breakdowns in culture, communication, gender affinities, and racial comprehension—virtually anything, in short, apart from the actual operations of our politics and the conduct of our political discourse. The Darrens and bad dads populating these novels are figures of pathology and pathos rather than civic curiosity or political engagement: they are more to be clinically diagnosed or strategically contained than truly understood or reckoned with on the terms of their own agency. They exist chiefly to symbolize a troubling, but deeply stagnant, state of cultural fixity. Politics can’t help to unstick or otherwise reach them; they are there to be ritually lamented and then hustled off the narrative stage.
Sad Dad Stories
This state of incuriosity accounts for another quirk of the Trumpocene novel: both Trump and the MAGA insurgency occupy marginal spots in the narrative’s main action. In two prominent examples—Gary Shteyngart’s 2018 Lake Success and Hari Kunzru’s 2020 Red Pill—Trump’s election basically closes out the action, as the protagonists wind up hosting pro-Hillary 2016 election night parties that go horribly awry as the hosts and guests learn the election results. (Here I should note that I’m acquainted with Shteyngart, who blurbed an earlier book of mine.) In Shteyngart’s novel, Seema Cohen, his protagonist’s ex-wife—the child of an immigrant Indian family—does glancingly brood on what might motivate the legions of voters who propelled Trump’s rise, only to throw up her hands: “She tried to visualize the hatred of the Trump voting class for herself and people like herself, all those brown and yellow faces on Instagram peeking out of the coolest cafe in the newest city at the latest hour, once hard-won lives spent in merriment and ease. But was it really their fault that they were coming up while white Trumpists were coming down?” After brushing the whole question aside, Seema sets out to recover her ethnic heritage, “wanting to be a little less American and a little more Indian, to search for her roots the way her mother had for her whole life.” Sure enough, she attends a lecture on modern India where she meets the man who will become her second husband.
Reference-challenged language toggles rapidly into social menace.
Both Seema and her ex, Barry, meet the slow-rolling MAGA crisis by turning inward, sparked by a crisis in both the marriage and Barry’s career as a louche hedge fund CEO. Barry sets out on a cross-country odyssey on a Greyhound bus, first to look up a former college sweetheart and then to evade the SEC for as long as he can. His rationale is the old Beat-era refrain of travel as spiritual rehabilitation: “Starting over was what half the country seemed to desperately want. There was a great boredom that coursed through Barry’s body and, he imagined, through that of his countrymen, rich and poor, but all it took was getting on a bus and getting out of town. It wasn’t America that needed to be made great again, it was her listless citizens.”
Of course, grafting a depressed and dissolute hedge funder onto the MAGA revolt in the capacity of anything other than a Trump donor is an experiment destined to fail. Barry is a Never Trump Republican—a social liberal and financial conservative, as he intones throughout the book—who reviles Trump for his cruel rally impersonation of a disabled reporter but who also cleaves to an absurd vision of America as “a nation of shareholders.” His tour of the country imbues him with a new appreciation for the struggles of his less fortunate fellow citizens, but ultimately “he could not trust them in the voting booth because they were not shareholders. They did not understand the thrill and the pain and the obligation of owning a part of their country.”
This is meant satirically—Shteyngart’s book is one of the few entries in the genre composed with humor of any sort in mind. Yet this class myopia serves Barry in good stead, since he’s unable to find any greater cause behind the nation’s ills than ambient cultural boredom, and boredom can presumably be effectively assuaged with greater infusions of cash. That appears to be the sense of the novel’s distinctly claustral, intensely domestic conclusion, which has a chastened and early retired Barry painstakingly repair a luxury watch for his autistic son in a belated gesture of paternal caregiving, driving home the basic lesson that “things could be fixed.”
Lake Success also exemplifies a revealing subgenre within Trump fiction: the sad-dad narrative, a variation on the long-standing impulse among imaginative writers in this country to fiercely sublimate public conflicts into the more superficially manageable, sentimental sphere of family life. During his election-year odyssey, Barry remains haunted by his son’s condition—a plain affront to his reveries of supremely affluent and untroubled family life. Barry’s real-time efforts at parenting are decidedly equivocal: he often ends up trying to bully his son, Shiva, into speech and has little patience with the mood swings and frustrations of a child on the spectrum. Over time, his cross-country odyssey becomes a quest for a surrogate child, as he bonds with the son of his former college girlfriend.
Oddly enough, Lake Success also contains an episode where its outraged protagonist slaps an electronic device—a digital camera—out of someone’s hands; this is evidently what counts as political protest in our mediated discursive age. Barry tells his college ex about a visit to Thailand during the time he and his wife were undergoing a discouraging round of fertility treatments; a group of “European tourist girls” were taking selfies in front of a giant phallic fertility statue, and Barry, tormented by his thwarted drive to reproduce, “just ran over and knocked the camera off their stick.” Here, too, the deeper distemper is a male drive to dominate that can’t properly express itself. As Barry’s ex presses him to explain the point of the anecdote, he shrugs and says, “I just wanted to share something with you.” She replies in turn, “You go around and do things and don’t know why you do them. . . . And that’s the story of your gender writ large.” After the testy exchange, they’re back to fretting over the election: “Anyway, if Trump wins,” she says, “I’m moving to British Columbia. I have a lead on a job there.”
The clear message here, as in The Topeka School, is that the Trump phenomenon is rooted in the cultural plague of retrograde masculinity run amok. There is, of course, much to recommend this broad diagnosis, as any student of Trump’s seamy personal life, fraternization with sexual predators, and hiring of men with a record of assault can readily affirm. Yet it scarcely suffices as a univocal explanation for a political movement that’s drawn consistently strong support from suburban white women, together with growing backing from nonwhite and less privileged women, particularly as Trump defeated two self-identified feminist opponents. What’s more, the practical impact of this theory of Trumpism works out to a literary gloss on the well-worn social media refrain that “men will do anything but go to therapy”—another individualist brand of cultural prescription that carries almost no political weight. This blinkered social vision is why the rearguard domestic resolution of Lake Success feels so forced and off topic. Barry’s belated embrace of fatherhood won’t lift the country out of its fascist despond, but it is a redemptive character arc for the disenchanted hedge fund baron grappling with his sad-dad identity eminently suited to an American reading public conditioned to savor tales of Winfreyesque familial uplift.
Blue Lives, Red Pills
The stolid American retreat into domestic order also supplies the dramatic resolution for the most high-minded literary disquisition into the causes of the Trumpian turn, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a novel plumbing the European origins of American-grade fascism by an immigrant writer that nonetheless repeats all the major themes and domestic preoccupations of the genre. Red Pill’s basic plot outline would seem to make it an unlikely candidate for a redemptive domestic-sphere rest cure. The novel’s unnamed narrator is a struggling belletrist who seeks to rejuvenate his stalled writing career by heading east, in striking contrast to Barry’s trip westward, into the tangled and unsatisfactory heritage of the dead European past. He’s received a grant to spend a year working on his next book—an inchoate tract on lyric poetry and the quest for meaning—at a German writer’s retreat. The specter of fascism is right there on his new expat address: the conference center hosting him is in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where the leaders of the Third Reich mapped out the Final Solution. Wannsee is also the home of one of Germany’s many tortured post-Romantic writers—Heinrich von Kleist, best known as the author of the scandalous novella of aristocratic sexual debauchery The Marquise of O. Unnerved by the open-plan layout of his new writing home and in search of a measure of meditative privacy, Kunzru’s narrator starts taking long walks through the town. He also grinds to a complete intellectual halt, after his vague writing project comes under critical attack from another grant recipient on site who is a die-hard materialist theorist of consciousness in the habit of reducing all mental activity (most particularly lyric poetry) to neurochemical brain functions.
The sad-dad narrative is a variation on the longstanding impulse among imaginative writers in this country to sublimate public conflicts into the more manageable, sentimental sphere of family life.
Red Pill is, in one respect, an outlier in the Trump fiction genre, in that it self-consciously mines the Old World roots of fascist reaction, while developing into a half-conversion narrative. Kunzru’s narrator takes refuge from his unraveling writing project and mental state by locking himself in his dorm room to watch Blue Lives, a luridly violent cop procedural on his laptop. As he binge-watches, he begins to notice that some of the show’s dialogue is inappositely stylized and Old World in diction, featuring bleak aphorisms such as “Man is wolf to man” and “>War is the father of all and king of all.” A Haitian drug lord on the show hauls off with this unlikely reflection, as he stakes out the family home of his cop pursuer: “There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races, man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. . . . Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”
The drug lord’s name is La Mettrie, and when Kunzru’s narrator does some online research, he learns that he’s quoting his virtual namesake, the reactionary monarchist philosopher Joseph de Maistre. At a later party in Berlin, he randomly encounters the show’s American creator and showrunner, a sinister figure with the suitably quasi-satanic name Anton. Anton confesses that he is indeed inserting de Maistre and other reactionary Mittel-European agitprop into the show, as part of its greater Nietzschean inversion of conventional morality. When the narrator complains about the show’s brutal and nihilistic plotlines, Anton insists that he’s only reflecting the real state of things in the Hobbesian abattoir otherwise known as civilization. “You can’t have a state without violence,” Anton announces. “It’s the only way to get people to obey.” Sure, the corrupt and mayhem-prone lead cop in Blue Lives may be an unsettling character, but no social order worthy of the name can dispense with him: “Go ahead, call him names if it makes you feel better. But you rely on him. You know you do. You fear and hate him for doing something you can’t do, that you secretly know has to be done. Society needs fear. It’s our dirty little secret.”
Like the materialist philosopher of mind, Anton and his masscult nihilism rattle the narrator to his core—so much so that he obsessively tracks Anton across Europe and tries to confront him in his remote Scottish beach house. As the narrator unspools further into mental deterioration, he’s hospitalized and finally returns home to Brooklyn, just in time for his family to host their doomed 2016 election night party; as he gloomily watches the returns, he catches a stray glimpse of Anton, a Steve Bannonesque culture lord, at one of the Trump celebrations. While the narrator is reacclimating to the blank rounds of his domestic life thanks to healthy doses of therapy and medication, the dawning reality of Trump’s victory is an unnerving sign that the maladies in his mind are now taking over the world: “I find that I’m not surprised, that it feels like a continuation of all the things that have happened to me this year, as if the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid are clothing themselves in flesh.”
Like his counterparts in The Topeka School and Lake Success, he finds himself caught involuntarily in the grip of a masculinist will to power poised to eviscerate the decent draperies of normal adult life in hyperliberal Brooklyn. Beneath the gauzy veneer of his peer group’s bourgeois routines, he reflects, there’s a “second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us.” Still, like his other fictional counterparts in the MAGA genre, he finds that he’s provisionally able to keep the forces of darkness at bay by reaffirming his love for his wife, Rei, and his toddler daughter, Nina—though in this hyper-self-conscious narrator’s case, it’s more the idea of the family. “Even if I am absurd, and if instead of reading novels and philosophy books, I should have learned to code or short sell or strip and build an AR-15,” he reflects, “I still have the love I feel for Rei and Nina . . . though my intuitions about reality are likely false, and I may be a disembodied organ floating in a vat or a point in the state space of some cosmic simulation, still you’ll have to burn that love out of me before I relinquish it.”
Despite all the epistemic fireworks set off by Kunzru’s narrator, we’re back in the pat, closed domestic circle of the other fables of the MAGA age. More than any other fictional reckoning with MAGAworld, Red Pill presents a Trump movement without Trumpists anywhere on the ground. There are no characters here aligned with the MAGA rank and file, just on-the-make Svengalis like Anton and his allies strewn across the fascist Old World. The Trump movement is a blank abstraction in a cloistered intellectual world teeming with other blank abstractions—a reversion to the mid-century liberal consensus that fascism was a cunning trick played by power-mad elites on a pliable and endlessly suggestible mob. This outlook explains why the narrator’s brushes with the ghastly history of Wansee and Kleist’s overwrought biography likewise feel tacked on, as do his encounters with a settlement of Mediterranean refugees and a former Stasi recruit who now works as a maid in the writers’ retreat. The narrator’s uneasy sojourn back into America on the eve of Trump’s first election retains the same arch sense of unreality; indeed, the social landscape of Red Pill is, if anything, much more foreshortened and flatter than the other Trumpocene novels’ accounts of the way we live now—a version of American life unrecognizable to readers actually living through the displacements of the MAGA age. It’s small wonder, as a result, that the book’s narrator, even while picturing himself as history’s Last Man, can imagine his reclaimed domesticity and his chastened renewal of his intellectual routine in America as a self-insulating force equal to “the cynical operation of power.” That operation—and that power—remains finally opaque to him, in spite of all his existential struggles.
Who Needs Terrorists?
Our novelistic renderings of the Trumpian turn in American politics and culture adopt a fastidious and privileged distance from it all. They diagnose an American lurch into fascist squalor that has chiefly occurred at the furthest cultural extremes, among disaffected or broadly debauched populations sporting motivations and value allegiances that are opaque at best, and more commonly just incomprehensible. MAGA-aligned characters are, most of all, gothic and exotic—usually inarticulate men whose signature grievances and obsessions are both ignoble and savage. Given to elevating passing (or merely ascribed) slights from cultural and political adversaries into the basis of hair-trigger mayhem, they live in isolated deserts, neglected and backward rural communities in the U.S. interior, or in evangelical missionary compounds. This is the antic backdrop for Jess Walter’s recently published So Far Gone, which poses not only a sad dad but a morose, philosophizing investigative-reporter grandpa against his conspiracy-addled evangelical son-in-law in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the seedy mise-en-scène for Jonathan Lethem’s 2018 The Feral Detective, which affects to send its female protagonist into off-the-grid American subcultures curdling into paranoid reaction, but collapses into stereotyped depictions of, well, everything, in a torrent of Brooklyn-pandering twee dialogue and implausibly apocalyptic plot twists.
Despite all the epistemic fireworks set off by Kunzru’s narrator, we’re back in the pat, closed domestic circle of the other fables of the MAGA age.
Amid the steady drumbeat of these exoticized accounts of the Trumpian interior offered by male writers, it’s perhaps no surprise that the most compelling fictional effort to conjure with the MAGA takeover of the republic is the work of a female author—Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Ducks, Newburyport. The book is in every way a departure from the central preoccupations of the genre. For starters, there is no bravura journey into the exoticized heart of MAGA darkness, since the novel’s narrator is already stuck there, as an Ohio mother and housewife trying to make ends meet by running a contract baking concession out of her kitchen. There’s likewise no effort to track the Trumpian will to power to the outer extremes of cultural allegiance; instead, Trump and his apostles turn up in the narrator’s stream-of-conscious reflections on her struggles and domestic trials, which run across more than a thousand pages, interrupted only by the account of a mountain lion’s movements across Appalachia as she tries to track down her missing cubs. Here, the specter of an American apocalypse isn’t an off-road set piece created by demented millennialists or demonic culture lords; it’s the stuff of anxious reflection between baking orders:
the fact that if the world ends, the fact that I shouldn’t think such things, dear me, cannibalism, the fact that I don’t know where that came from, the fact that it’ll affect the pies, the fact that he has a very sulky face, Trump I mean, the fact that he’s like a kid who breaks all his toys on Christmas day and then wishes he hadn’t, the fact that Trump’s toys are kind of dangerous though, the fact that Mommy and Daddy didn’t live to see as much of Trump’s face as we have had to, the fact that they never had to watch the end of the world, but we might
Ellmann (whom I’ve known for some time and recruited as a Baffler contributor) also has a gender-driven critique of the Trump movement, but it doesn’t revolve around the quest to bring wayward alpha males back into the orbit of domestic life. It’s rather of a piece with the armed terror that men everywhere are visiting on women: “the fact that in response to the slightest financial hiccup [men] just murder their families, the fact that how is that the answer, the fact that shooting your estranged wife or girlfriend’s become the new normal, the fact that it’s getting so that it’s surprising when men don’t shoot their exes.” Also, when this sort of unhinged bloodlust finds political expression, Ellmann recognizes that it’s not a male-exclusive trait:
the fact that Hillary Clinton laughed about General Qaddafi’s death, after he was torn limb from limb by a mob, the fact that nobody has any manners anymore, Hillary, Trump, mobs, the fact that mobs have no manners, the fact that Hillary often seems to laugh inappropriately, the fact that she’s friends with Kissinger, the fact that that girl in that song rejects some guy’s offer of marriage, he drowns her in the Ohio and off she floats . . . the fact that sometimes male logic seems no better than the logic of dreams, but I wouldn’t ever say that to [my husband] because that’s bad manners
Ducks, Newburyport also features a climactic violent confrontation with a Trump supporter, but, like most of the rest of the book’s action, it takes place in the narrator’s kitchen—not at a pitched, heavily symbolic inflection point in the fringes and frontiers of American life. And the perpetrator isn’t a cult leader or an Armageddonist; he’s a hapless local cable TV addict and right-wing meme enthusiast named Ronny, who delivers feed for the narrator’s backyard flock of egg-laying chickens. In the wake of the incident, Ellmann’s narrator doesn’t gratefully lapse into the warmth of her reconfigured family; she’s haunted by the thought that she, like Hillary Clinton, has picked up the viral dream logic of male destruction: “the fact that it’s all Ronny’s fault, the fact that he’s corrupted my mind, the fact that he’s taught me to be a raging, violent crazy-ass threat to humanity”; “the fact that, boy, everything’s life-and-death with me now, black and white, the fact that it’s all a fight to the finish, and everything’s about guns and killers . . . the fact that this is how I think now.” Pondering the psychic fallout from Ronny’s failed domestic siege, it’s impossible not to note that he shares a first name with Trump’s most notable ideological forebear, the fortieth U.S. president, who was also recruited from the entertainment industry to serve as an all-purpose merchant of Manichean right-wing grievance.
Ellmann’s novel is in no way a polemical work, so it’s all the more striking that it’s able to summon the Trump movement’s continuities with the broader ills of America’s predatory political culture, regardless of their major-party branding, in the narrator’s epic slurry of personal remembrance, family worries, popcult associations, song lyrics, and dream narratives. This narrative choice, combined with Ellmann’s focus on how permeable and viral the violent urges underlying the American saga prove to be, reverses the dominant impulse of other fictional treatments of MAGA to locate the roots of the movement far outside the common American civitas, in the hopped-up, paranoid hinterlands.
And for all the novel’s sweeping, allusive immersion in the running inner monologue of its narrator, it never indulges the conceit that the country’s civic derangement is somehow traceable to the instability of language or a covert brainwashing campaign in popular culture. Indeed, when the narrator takes up the language problem, it’s only in the context of the cascading fears she struggles to overcome as part of daily life:
I think that’s why people invented language, so they wouldn’t feel all alone with their terror, the fact that, I mean, we’re all so terrified, who needs terrorists, the fact that the terror of being alone is enough to floor you, never mind the fear of mortality, fear of failure, the fact that, heck, just the medical bills have me cowed, without suicide bombers and school shooters muscling in
Ducks, Newburyport is much too idiosyncratic and far-ranging to serve as an all-purpose gazetteer for America’s MAGA-era transformation—but that’s not the role of good politically minded fiction in the first place. The best American political novels, such as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place and Sinclair Lewis’s eerily prophetic thirties account of surging American fascism in a distinctly Trumpian key, It Can’t Happen Here, chart the ways in which the messy upheavals in our public life undo and distort baseline ideas of the quarantined pursuit of private happiness. Over the sprawling course of Ellmann’s novel, the narrator’s reveries of an untroubled domestic life in the heart of Trump country are well and truly blasted out the picture. After Ronny’s siege of her house, she’s shocked to hear the local cops chastise her and her family for lacking a firearm in the house and failing to send their home invader to his eternal reward. Indeed, they counsel her that “the backlash about that would have been worse if any of us had been killed”:
the fact that what is going on with people, the fact that you lose a family member in a shooting and all the other shooters in the country pile on and threaten you with death, the fact that everyone hates on you, just for mentioning that your loved one got shot, and for not immediately shooting the shooter back, the fact that it’s almost like we’re in a war or something
Perhaps we are. If so, it’s hard to think of another such conflict where a group of literary followers of the zeitgeist have gone so far out of their way to know so little about the enemy. And that dilatory outlook is no small reason that Trump’s cultural takeover has been locked and loaded from the moment he swore his second oath of office.