It's my lunch hour and I'm thinking about red reading. Yearning for red reading. The longing arises out of both my monthlong (and possibly only halfway over) inability to read as I wait for my eyes to stabilize after cataract surgeries and my lifelong (adult life, anyway) search for quality fiction that either illuminates the class struggle or at least -- well, it's the at least aspect that I'll comment on for now.
Because really, I have pretty minimal requirements. I have to, or I'd have nothing to read at all. I generally read one to three books a week (all hail the New York City transit system, whose conductors, drivers, track crews, etc., do all the work while I sit with book in hand until suddenly I've arrived at wherever I'm going). Are all those one to three books, about three-quarters of which are fiction, stirring evocations of miners' strikes like Zola's Germinal, or of revolution like Gorky's Mother, or of struggling early-20th-century immigrants on the Lower East Side like Gold's Jews Without Money, or the criminal slave trade like Johnson's Middle Passage, or the subjugation of women like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? No indeed. I do not require that a book take one or another aspect of the struggle for justice as its explicit topic. I certainly don't require that it be explicitly about or on the side of the broader battle to build a socialist society.
All I ask of a work of fiction is that it not ignore these struggles, or the inequity and oppression that give rise to them. Sometimes, if the writing is enjoyable enough, I ask even less than that. Just don't take the other side. Don't offend.
Minimal, like I said. Shouldn't be hard to find books that fit the bill, right? Sadly, it is pretty damned difficult. For every book I read through to the end I'd say there are another three to five books that I start reading and then stop somewhere in the first 100 pages. Sometimes it's just the writing. Way too often it's the casual racism--I can't count the number of books I've slammed shut in disgust at some passage that mocks or stereotypes a person of color, often in just a sort of throwaway by-the-by aside that assumes the reader's complicity with the writer's world view--and almost every time that happens it's a book I picked up because it got a good review in the bourgeois press, which means the reviewer never noticed or didn't care about or shares the author's assumptions and attitudes. Many books have lost me when their male-centeredness became too much to bear. And yes, I do often get to the point where, no matter how great the writing, I just can't sit through another story of middle-class white angst, you know, the pain of divorce in the suburbs, of the middle-aged professor, of the banker who's lost his joie de vivre.
All I ask is good writing in the service of a story that tells the truth. I'll ramble some more about what I think it means for a novel to tell the truth in future posts. Also how and where to find such fiction.
