A Time Outside This Time

If Trump Wins Again, What Will Writers Do?

The Indian Express has published today a slightly different version of this piece.

When Trump won the presidency the first (and, one hopes, the last) time, I started work on a writing project immediately. You will remember the mantra that came from Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” In the Trump era, I was interested in lies. Even before Trump took oath, I was recording daily in my notebook one salient falsehood that the victorious candidate had placed in the public sphere. And soon I discovered that I was working on a novel that later became A Time Outside This Time. This novel allowed me to process what was happening during the Trump rule; it also allowed me to fashion what felt like a protest against the bad fiction called fake news.

But what if Trump wins again in 2024? I can’t obviously start writing another novel. (I saw a question on social media the other day: “What will liberals do on the day after Trump wins? 1. Organize a brunch? 2. Organize a march? 3. Blame those calling for an end to genocide in Palestine?” My question is a different one.) What will writers do that is different if Trump wins?

The above tweet appears in A Time Outside This Time. My narrator is writing a novel “about fake news and journalistic excavation of truth”—the narrator’s title of choice is, naturally enough, Enemies of the People. When the pandemic arrives, the World Health Organization warns that what is also being unleashed is an “infodemic.” Satya, the narrator, in each successive chapter enters a new struggle to parse the truth. A riot during Satya’s childhood in Patna; an encounter with an alleged terrorist after 9/11; an interview with an informant in Bengal; a police shooting of a Black college student in the Hudson Valley; a lynching outside Delhi … the idea is to find a language and a form adequate to the task of representing what is taking place in the real world. Satya doesn’t always, or even ever, succeed; his wife, Vaani, a behavioral psychologist, has quite a few theories to explain why people do what they do. Those theories interest Satya but they don’t seem to capture the complexity of human life. Nevertheless, the events around him exert a pressure that results in Satya’s coming up with a story.

That particular need, the urgency—the desire to provide “a shimmering assault on the zeitgeist,” which is how the New Yorker described my novel—will not have diminished if Trump returns. However, this time around, I cannot imagine doing what I had started doing in the dying days of 2016. There seemed to be a narrative wholeness to the beginning and the ending falsehoods that marked the Trump presidency—see below what I wrote in the author’s note at the end of A Time Outside This Time, a second tweet from Trump closing my novel—and I find it exhausting to think that one could possibly be forced to open and close such circles of craziness once again:

When the pandemic was upon us, my friend Sloane Crosley got to the material first by writing an op-ed in the New York Times that seemed to say, on the surface, that we shouldn’t yet be writing about this new era that we had all now entered. She thought it okay to make notes, though. I remember reading the Crosley op-ed when it came out—and continuing to work on my novel, not least because I distrust quick takes in op-eds. If there is a second Trump presidency, I hope interesting novels are written about it, even while our days and nights are still radioactive with a horrid orange glow. I appreciate fiction because, unlike op-eds, fiction has greater scope for entertaining ambiguity and contradictions. It can be expansive and open possibilities. (In comparison to novels, op-eds strike me as reductive and often like bad faith posturing.) I imagine there will be fiction where some of the frisson of the real will sneak in through the invocation of a name or a current event; then, there will be others that even without invoking anything current will nevertheless carry the dread and the charge of what is still happening.

I have suddenly remembered how, during the lockdown, after several days of not writing fiction, a very short story had come to me out of nowhere. I was on my way to the grocery store when the outline of this brief fiction took shape in my mind. In the parking lot, still sitting in my car, I wrote the following piece which I then put in A Time Outside This Time:

I remembered the above story, or the story about writing this story, because I think that is how it will be for me, as an artist, if Trump wins: I’ll feel that I’m in a lockdown, that a plague has spread across the country and maybe the world, that I must focus on survival, and, crucially, that a part of that survival is the ability to write about it—and that, as in the little story above, I must be able to imagine pleasure, perhaps even love, in the midst of the raging plague.

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P.S. Thanks for reading. There will be terrible consequences for women and minorities in a second Trump administration: cuts in children’s health programs, loss of eligibility for free school lunches, elimination of programs that invest in affordable housing for low-income communities, programs for funding heating the homes of the poor, shrinking the job corps, substantial cuts in the food stamps program, restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions. I would rather not be writing a novel about this new America.