This week I reported on the willingness of large swaths of the population to blind themselves against the facts of science for reasons of tribal loyalty. I am afraid I have to add to that report describing the willingness of many other people to remain blind to the futility of voting rights legislation. Democrats assume that if the voting rights bills in question are thoughtful and fair (and miraculously passed, a whole other story,) they will not be rejected by the Supreme Court. This, of course, is a belief born out of despair over how far we’ve sunk, and in no ways supported by anything we know to be true of this Court – read the not-so-fine print of the decisions of the last years. A concise and non-technical analysis of the status quo of voting rights and the future of the American experiment can be found here. The essay is a short, worthwhile read, ending with the observation that nothing but an expansion of the Supreme Court is potentially going to rescue our democracy.

I am bringing all this up because I have had churning reactions to two books I read this week, one that came highly recommended and that I intensely disliked (why, so often?) and another that I chanced upon and devoured. They both made me think about what affects change and the scale of personal involvement, from ethereal withdrawal into a universe of feeling (if that) to the justification of taking personal action, violence included.

What are you going Through by Sigrid Nunez and White Tears by Hari Kunzru have one thing in common: they both integrate a systemic conflict, the climate crisis for the former, racism and exploitation of Blacks for the latter, into the narrative.

Nunez uses it as a cardboard foil for her larger subject of presence or absence of hope and empathic attachment. Her story is told by a woman who is asked by a distant friend facing terminal cancer to accompany her on her last weeks before actively ending her life with pills. The narrator is all over the map, in a dithery fashion mostly describing other women, from close friends and relatives to mere acquaintances or public figures in faintly, irritatingly misogynistic ways. She herself remains a stick figure, not imbued with any reason for us to root for her, least of all a deplorable tendency to name drop literary greats, with paragraphs of precise quotations.The only names, by the way, offered at all. The story’s inhabitants are all nameless, a successful distancing device. Well, that’s how I reacted. Others disagree (the linked review is typical of the praise the novel received.) In fact, Nunez conveys less a woman racked by feelings – the break-up with an ex-husband, a life without children, the newly blossoming attachment to her friend overshadowed by the impending suicide – than a woman trying on those feelings for size to see how they can be told as stories. An eternal distancing, from the fragility of close human interactions to the large scale one of the intensity of the climate threat. Drifting with willful oblivion along in the wake of death.

Kunzru’s novel is the polar opposite. The characters are so vividly drawn you might as well have met them in real life, even though for most of us they live in a realm somewhat outside our comfortable White middle-class existence. Two young people embark on a search for musical authenticity that leads one of them from New York City to the South, get into huge problems along the way, drawn into events of the past that reverberate into the present and future. The story evolves in ways that manage to surprise and shock, and hook you onto empathizing with the narrator(s) in a way that lures you into a complete understanding of their decisions even thought these eventually include unjustifiable acts.

Bits of magic realism seamlessly fold into a contemporary setting. The deeper issue, the systemic exploitation of Blacks through slavery, prison labor and a music industry commodifying traditional Black music, emerge as a core challenge to our thinking, rather than a foil. It is a novel that explores the toxicity of White appropriation, of the systemic degradation of anything Black – which is of course why it links back to my musings at the beginning of this blog on the chances of a voting right act to come into existence as one of the many ways needed to change race relations. Every page contains complex psychological material, an invitation to think difficult things through while simultaneously offering a grand mystery and real action, compared to the flat vignettes of observed fates in the first book. Here is an insightful review that provides you with details of the narrative.

Neither protagonist, the passive narrator of Nunez’ novel, suffused by diffuse reactions to the world around her, floating in a private universe of sadness, or the active protagonist of Kunzru’s tale, driven into mad acts by a revenge fantasy fed by assumed guilt and responsibility, can be our role models. The question of personal agency and efficacy towards bringing about change, if “only” to the size of the Supreme Court, remains unresolved. More books to read. And this.

Music today is the Blues, given its huge role it plays in White Tears. Photographs from South Carolina, providing a glimpse of the South now.