Can literature move the needle in an election year?

Also, I just saw the movie American Fiction so I'm thinking about that, too.

Though I’m originally from Memphis, TN (shoutout to the Bluff City), I have lived in Washington, D.C. for many years, a town filled with lawyers (this is not just anecdotal; 1 in 12 DC residents is a lawyer, the highest rate nationwide). In the early years of my residence here (I’ve lived here for over two decades), I was considered the cocktail party anomaly. Because I wrote fiction instead of journalism or nonfiction, I was even more of a curiosity. I’d listen quietly as lawyers, nonprofit veterans, and Capitol Hill types talked policy with a fluidity that eluded my reach. I loved learning from these conversations, but I also believed I was outside of them.

Over the years, people have often asked me if I think literature, namely fiction, has the power to shape society. Usually, I answered with an ambiguous “not really.” After all, we’re not legislators. We’re not policymakers. Our books don’t feed the hungry. And for the vast majority of novelists, our readership is quite small in the grand scheme of things.

While answering questions recently for a magazine based in Croatia, I was asked this question once again. Thinking of how an international audience might read my response caused me to think about the question more carefully, to recall how my position on this possibility has changed over the years. What power does fiction really have to influence a world with so many critically important issues happening? Ooh, let me tell you, this question is serious enough to make me sit down for a moment.

I recently saw the film American Fiction starring Jeffrey Wright, Erika Alexander, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling Brown, Issa Rae, and Leslie Uggams. I promise no spoilers here, but if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to watch it. I’ve seen a couple of interpretations on the internet about what the movie was suggesting, but if anyone has read Percival Everett’s novel Erasure which inspired the film, you know the context of the novel’s publication in 2001, when Black writers were contending with a publishing world that did not believe a Black literary writer could find an audience. There’s a lot more to say on that, but I’ll begin here because what we’re ultimately talking about is the value of art.

There are a lot of ways to approach this question of literature’s influence and power. I’ll stick with fiction since that’s what I know.

We can consider the value of a liberal arts and humanistic education, and the kind of fiction that comes out of this grounding.

We can consider literature vis-a-vis politics and frame it as a debate over “political” novels vs. “aesthetic” novels.

We can consider the role of writers in a democratic state, how public discourse can be shaped by stories.

Ultimately, I choose to enter the question through this final approach—how books inform the conversation. As a person in the Washington bubble (or maybe you’re in the academic bubble or in the corporate bubble or in the middle-class bubble) it’s easy to lose sight of where conversations in a democracy take root. I like to think of the kitchen table as a metaphor for these grassroots dialogues. Other folks might refer to public spaces such as a cafe or community center. Either way, critical conversations certainly don’t begin on cable news shows.

One of my favorite essays on the power of the kitchen as a center for political conversations was Paule Marshall’s 1983 “From the Poets in the Kitchen” published in the New York Times in 1983. First of all, I love Marshall’s elegant consideration of “ordinary speech.” But the conversations that can occur in a kitchen among women are far from ordinary:

“The basement kitchen of the brownstone house where my family lived was the usual gathering place. Once inside the warm safety of its walls the women threw off the drab coats and hats, seated themselves at the large center table, drank their cups of tea or cocoa, and talked.”

In Marshall’s world, the women gossiped, yes. But they also discussed important issues of the day—such as the economy and war and the workplace. I read this essay years ago, and I never forgot the reverence Marshall expressed for those late afternoon conversations. She credited those women as her literary inspirations, and I knew that, for me, I could also name the folks in my childhood who gave me a sense of the power of talk.

In my creative writing workshops, I often ask my students to give me the roots for the word “dia-logue.” They always guess the second half correctly. Logos is Greek for word. But the first part of the word my students often guess incorrectly, saying dia means two. (An easy mistake to make. No shade on my brilliant students!) Actually, dia comes from the Greek for through, across. A dialogue can occur between multiple people, not just two people. So when I teach fiction writing, I remind them to think about how words create pathways of meaning between two or more people. My hope is always that this will open them up to the possibilities of exchange in dialogue.

A friend recently informed me that Biden’s campaign has gone viral on Tiktok for his “kitchen table conversations” he is hosting around the country. I’m not on Tiktok, but I can’t help but be struck by the ways in which social media, with all its distraction, information gathering, bickering, and illusion, still manages to be a space of everyday conversations are created.

Call me an old-timer, but I still think there is nothing that compares to good old face-to-face conversations. It’s what I love about bookclubs (even the virtual ones are better than the anonymity of social media). It’s what I love about taking the city bus (once, the entire bus was arguing about why so many folks in the DC area are Dallas Cowboy fans), and apparently, it’s also why the late playwright August Wilson loved taking the bus in Seattle. Talking to someone in person forces us to listen in ways we cannot replicate on social media.

One more thought: My high schooler recently read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark for her high school English class, and hearing her wax passionately about the invisibility of blackness in American fiction (for her, a newly discovered idea!) reminded me of the sometimes caustic and always unreserved political commentary of Morrison. I hope today’s younger writers will recall how Morrison influenced the conversation in multiple ways—as editor, essayist, and fiction writer. There was this wonderful op-ed in the New York Times in 2019 written by the brilliant Farah Jasmine Griffin and Angela Davis that urged me to think more carefully about the possibilities of the pen in the wake of Morrison’s transition:

“Toni believed the writer had the duty to take a public stance. The novel was but one tool for doing this.”

Here’s what I want to suggest. Invite some folks over to your place, order a couple of pizzas (or make some easy spaghetti and salad) and a really good dessert. Send everybody a reading two weeks before the event. It can be as long as a novel/memoir (keep in mind that everybody has constraints on their time so don’t pick a 700 page doorstop) or as brief as a short story/essay/poem. You don’t need a bookclub or any other formal association. Invite neighbors, co-workers, friends. It doesn’t matter.

See what the reading sparks. Don’t try to force it. Don’t intentionally pick something that’s contemporary or topical. Just invite them over, eat, get everyone seated, and open up the discussion. You can prepare discussion questions if you’d like. If you don’t feel comfortable beginning the discussion and have a tv in the room, share a brief Youtube video of the author. If none of that works, open the discussion with patient silence and see what happens.

In this election year, we can host our own kitchen table conversations. Using ordinary speech. Talking about these extraordinary times.