Pity the Novelists

Listening to President Trump announce the joint air strikes against Syria last night, I could not help wondering about what his effect will be on the literature of the United States in years ahead. His characteristically mixed message- that the strike was in the furtherance of a vital national security interest, but that the Middle East is a "tragic place" which the U.S. should leave well alone- was a study in incoherence to rival his announcement that America might rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade alliance he had previously characterized as "raping" the US). What kind of character is Donald Trump? How will auteurs of future generations recast him in fiction?

Do not search for him in the literature of the past. A story built around him (or someone like him) would be too pointless to tell. Picture this: our hero enjoys sex, status, and celebrity but cares and knows about nothing else. He is deeply insecure and craves attention, thus though he has many half-formed opinions and enjoys braying them at the top of his lungs, they change regularly in response to what he perceives will garner the approval of those around him. Living this way has had few consequences, thanks to his possession of vast inherited wealth.

It is a story too shallow to be tragic and too pathetic to be comic, lacking either sound or fury and signifying less than nothing. Any novelist trying to justly capture Trump in prose would be forced to eschew all of the effective potencies of narrative. Such a story would have to lack plot, meaning, or theme; otherwise it would not merely be a fiction, but a dangerously aggrandizing distortion. A work of Pynchonesque incoherence would not be nearly nihilistic enough to capture the complete venality of Trump the man or his Presidency.

It is a challenge for any aspiring literati, and not one likely to win warm appreciation in its achievement. The author that writes the perfect Trumpian novel, a book that distills the current cultural moment for us in deathless prose, will produce a text that rambles and stalls, lurches and drags, stopping at a seemingly random point at which nothing has been resolved because nothing has really happened. The perfect response evoked by such a novel would be a vague sense of shame that one had thought to crack its cover in the first place. If only that feeling had been more common in the non-fictional world, our future novelists would be spared this pitiless task.