I apologize for the lack of recent text posts. My eye has made reading and writing difficult for the last few weeks. I'll try to make up for it by making this post ridiculously long and boring, thus reminding you why you prefer
vlogs to blogs.
A couple of weeks ago, a librarything user named ChemChick posted a comment on
my librarything profile:
"Welcome to librarything! I've enjoyed both your books and am entertained nightly by Brotherhood 2.0. I'm wondering if you would explain why you classify Looking for Alaska as Christian fiction."
Librarything allows you to tag each book in your collection. As a random example, I tagged Rebecca Goldstein's
Incompleteness "nonfiction, math, godel, katherines-related" (the last because incompleteness figures into
An Abundance of Katherines). So anyway, I tagged
Alaska as Christian fiction.
A few weeks ago, I was at some kind of event at which liquor was served (the details escape me), and a writer came up to me and said she was teaching
Looking for Alaska in a young-adult literature class.
She asked, "Is there anything you'd like to tell the class about the book? Some new way of approaching it?"
"I always thought of it as Christian fiction," I answered. "Tell them that."
The woman laughed so hard that I felt too embarrassed to tell her that I was serious. But I am serious. Well, to claim a book with drinking and smoking and oral sex and disapproval of authority as Christian fiction is part provocation. But what is
Alaska about, ultimately? It's about whether we are greater than the sum of our parts. It's about the kind of forgiveness that happens even though it is not possible.
I recently spent a weekend with M. T. Anderson at a conference in Kalamazoo. (
He is a criminal.) He said a number of things that have stuck in my head, including that he is no longer opposed to fiction teaching lessons. I am inclined to agree. I just don't believe that writing can be apolitical (or, for that matter, amoral). Maybe books can be written apolitically, but they cannot be read apolitically. Good fiction can never be merely political, of course. But I no longer thing it can be apolitical, either.
In some ways, I've done a poor job of talking about the politics and morality (and religiosity) of my books, because authors generally worsen their books whenever they talk about them, and also because I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that fiction teaches lessons. But I think it does. Mark Twain said it well a century ago when talking about humor writing: "Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever." And then, both kidding and not, he added: "By forever, I mean thirty years."
If 30 years is forever to humor, then 10 years is forever to YA novels. So, yeah. I'm trying to preach in my books--because A. all my favorite books teach and preach without doing so professedly, and B. writing can't be apolitical anyway, and C.I want to be in print in the forever of 2017.
