I’m very grateful to Chris for reviewing the book, even if he didn’t appreciate all the choices I made in it. I think he’s a very good writer.
I certainly won’t use this to launch any kind of aesthetic rebuttal - that is never a good move for an author - but I do think I ought to make a small point about my politics, and those of the book, given that ‘the author’s sympathies’ were mentioned so explicitly. I am, for what it’s worth, a big, cuddly leftie, who is appalled by the treatment of the innocent people of Palestine and has little time for the wave of right-wing revanchism that seems to be sweeping the world. UK audiences seem to have understood this instinctively, and read Shibboleth as a criticism of a certain kind of bourgeois etiquette, uncomprehendingly imported to the UK by rich kids, that turns people into empty husks of themselves, unable to relate to each other, be friends with each other, love each other. Hence the slight stiltedness (or as I like to call it ‘Britishness’). For various reasons, US audiences don’t seem to get this so intuitively. They seem tempted to bring all kinds of other ambient associations and conflations to the novel: ‘DEI’ for example, which was literally never an issue in UK university admissions. Which is of course their right. But if my novel is just a political screed, it’s at least not quite the one Chris is implying.
As I say, this isn’t a criticism of TMR or Chris - just a trend I have noticed, and which I feel demands some clarification.
Hey Thomas! I appreciate this response to my review. When reading Shibboleth, I tried not to speculate on what your own politics might be since that shouldn't matter and novels should be taken for what they are, in and of themselves. By "the author's own sympathies," I was referring to what I sensed was your personal disdain for elite identitarian social progressives (a disdain I share!), which I know can come from the left, the right, and everywhere in between. I hate the idea that anyone who isn't onboard with this kind of ideology must automatically be a right-wing revanchist, so I definitely wasn't trying to imply that you were, though I also understand why you'd want to clearly state your beliefs here. I'm genuinely looking forward to your next novel.
As John McWhorter has noted, Rachel Dolezal et al (recall she was not sui generis but at most a trendsetter) would not have been a phenomenon had their performances not been incentivized by the systems in which they found themselves.
Minority cachet does differ between left and right, though I haven’t exactly thought through how. Vivek — educated, articulate, conventionally attractive in the way that (say) Candace Owens is — could likely have been a proper darling of the right had he played his cards differently. Instead, he let his presumptuousness get the better of him and antagonized a whole bunch, culminating in his self-memeification during the H1B brouhaha: “Big tech needs to import software engineers bc American kids can’t math.”
The timeliness aspect (which you’ve touched on elsewhere) is an important part of the meta-conversation. With social media, people are often sick of certain topics before they have had time to actually make sense of them. There seems to be — among all who would participate in “the discourse” — this underlying anxiety that the moment may evanesce before one can plant one’s flag on the timeline. But usually, good things take time. Not even the benefit of hindsight, necessarily, but just the time to process things. I’m not sure how a veteran could have offered an account of the Great War — so unprecedented that it was supposed to be the war to end all wars — with any emotional coherence without something like the amount of time EMR or Hemingway took.
Which is all to say, I don’t think there needs to be a deadline on works about wokeness, even if the fever has decidedly broken. But “a series of familiar archetypes colliding in predictable ways” is something that could come straight from the hot-take factory; that sort of thing doesn’t need time to marinate, and is really best consumed when still on trend. I don’t have a novelistic bone in my body, so I’d be the last person to suggest to Mr Peermohamed Lambert what to write about, but I do think that if one is going to come late-ish to the party, it’s best to bring some heart and not mostly just snark.
"By turning his characters more into arguments than real people, Lambert renders his story predictable. Each scene becomes another showcase to display the author’s own sympathies and not much else."
This dilemma reminds me of the excerpted opening chapter of Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor. Wyeth paints black people inserted into famous film scenes, but these are derided as sterile "thought experiments, not paintings" by his friend (full quote below). Looking forward to reading Minor Black Figures to see how Taylor deals with this dilemma.
"Early in the spring, Wyeth’s friend Bernard had said to him that his black people were always hypothetical and that this gave his work a sterile air. They’re cut off, Bernard had said, from real black life as it happens in the real fucking world. You make thought experiments, not paintings."
I get that I am much older than the target audience for this novel, but it does sound as if it might have been better suited to a manga or webtoon format?
EDIT: Oh... and does the TMR crowd ever review novels that aren't composed of a series of "conversations" between "characters" that have all the depth and resonance of Twitter spats?
I’m very grateful to Chris for reviewing the book, even if he didn’t appreciate all the choices I made in it. I think he’s a very good writer.
I certainly won’t use this to launch any kind of aesthetic rebuttal - that is never a good move for an author - but I do think I ought to make a small point about my politics, and those of the book, given that ‘the author’s sympathies’ were mentioned so explicitly. I am, for what it’s worth, a big, cuddly leftie, who is appalled by the treatment of the innocent people of Palestine and has little time for the wave of right-wing revanchism that seems to be sweeping the world. UK audiences seem to have understood this instinctively, and read Shibboleth as a criticism of a certain kind of bourgeois etiquette, uncomprehendingly imported to the UK by rich kids, that turns people into empty husks of themselves, unable to relate to each other, be friends with each other, love each other. Hence the slight stiltedness (or as I like to call it ‘Britishness’). For various reasons, US audiences don’t seem to get this so intuitively. They seem tempted to bring all kinds of other ambient associations and conflations to the novel: ‘DEI’ for example, which was literally never an issue in UK university admissions. Which is of course their right. But if my novel is just a political screed, it’s at least not quite the one Chris is implying.
As I say, this isn’t a criticism of TMR or Chris - just a trend I have noticed, and which I feel demands some clarification.
Hey Thomas! I appreciate this response to my review. When reading Shibboleth, I tried not to speculate on what your own politics might be since that shouldn't matter and novels should be taken for what they are, in and of themselves. By "the author's own sympathies," I was referring to what I sensed was your personal disdain for elite identitarian social progressives (a disdain I share!), which I know can come from the left, the right, and everywhere in between. I hate the idea that anyone who isn't onboard with this kind of ideology must automatically be a right-wing revanchist, so I definitely wasn't trying to imply that you were, though I also understand why you'd want to clearly state your beliefs here. I'm genuinely looking forward to your next novel.
"Nobody wants to be saddled with a downmarket identitarian brand. Like a Vivek Ramaswamy." Ha! Nice review, Chris.
Yes, a gangsta comment.
Muslim beats Indian in any Wokemon battle.
As John McWhorter has noted, Rachel Dolezal et al (recall she was not sui generis but at most a trendsetter) would not have been a phenomenon had their performances not been incentivized by the systems in which they found themselves.
Minority cachet does differ between left and right, though I haven’t exactly thought through how. Vivek — educated, articulate, conventionally attractive in the way that (say) Candace Owens is — could likely have been a proper darling of the right had he played his cards differently. Instead, he let his presumptuousness get the better of him and antagonized a whole bunch, culminating in his self-memeification during the H1B brouhaha: “Big tech needs to import software engineers bc American kids can’t math.”
The timeliness aspect (which you’ve touched on elsewhere) is an important part of the meta-conversation. With social media, people are often sick of certain topics before they have had time to actually make sense of them. There seems to be — among all who would participate in “the discourse” — this underlying anxiety that the moment may evanesce before one can plant one’s flag on the timeline. But usually, good things take time. Not even the benefit of hindsight, necessarily, but just the time to process things. I’m not sure how a veteran could have offered an account of the Great War — so unprecedented that it was supposed to be the war to end all wars — with any emotional coherence without something like the amount of time EMR or Hemingway took.
Which is all to say, I don’t think there needs to be a deadline on works about wokeness, even if the fever has decidedly broken. But “a series of familiar archetypes colliding in predictable ways” is something that could come straight from the hot-take factory; that sort of thing doesn’t need time to marinate, and is really best consumed when still on trend. I don’t have a novelistic bone in my body, so I’d be the last person to suggest to Mr Peermohamed Lambert what to write about, but I do think that if one is going to come late-ish to the party, it’s best to bring some heart and not mostly just snark.
"By turning his characters more into arguments than real people, Lambert renders his story predictable. Each scene becomes another showcase to display the author’s own sympathies and not much else."
This dilemma reminds me of the excerpted opening chapter of Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor. Wyeth paints black people inserted into famous film scenes, but these are derided as sterile "thought experiments, not paintings" by his friend (full quote below). Looking forward to reading Minor Black Figures to see how Taylor deals with this dilemma.
"Early in the spring, Wyeth’s friend Bernard had said to him that his black people were always hypothetical and that this gave his work a sterile air. They’re cut off, Bernard had said, from real black life as it happens in the real fucking world. You make thought experiments, not paintings."
I get that I am much older than the target audience for this novel, but it does sound as if it might have been better suited to a manga or webtoon format?
EDIT: Oh... and does the TMR crowd ever review novels that aren't composed of a series of "conversations" between "characters" that have all the depth and resonance of Twitter spats?