The Stagnation of the Literary Left

On Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’

Arkhip Kuindzhi, After a Rain, 1879, Oil on canvas

The world is worried about fascism. Across the U.S. and Europe, conservative, nationalist, or populist movements are on the rise. The rhetoric is intense. Many people, including politicians in power in the U.S., have likened Donald Trump to Hitler. We’ve seen what appeared to be a Nazi salute from a major tech mogul. Other tech guys fell in line — they want to keep doing what they’re doing, after all. Not all the people who voted for the current administration are bigoted, misogynistic racists, of course, but some of them are. Most of them — or at least the ones I have contact with — just wanted better wages and cheaper groceries. But also, books have been banned. Especially in South Carolina, where parents are worried about sex (not the same people who are worried about fascism) and bad words. High school kids should not be able to read about sex! Because, then, you know. Also, they might become gay. Or trans. Or whatever. There’s a slow trickle of weirdness, mixed with danger. Many of us teachers think: but the students have the internet, right? And we’re worried about books turning them gay? And yet in the middle of this, people have been rounded up, deported, students sent away, and now, masked men have shot and killed citizens.

There have been several novels over the past 10 years that predict a coming civil war (or retroactively envision a disunion), the rise of a kind of fascism, the disintegration of countries, violations of privacies of all kinds: Omar El Akkad’s American War is one. Set in the future, it’s about a person being radicalized to the right, in what the novel calls the Free Southern States, a part of the U.S. that has seceded over fossil fuel policy. Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X also depicts a U.S. in which, in 1945, the South seceded from the Union and has become a theocracy. There’s a western territory, too. But rather than focus on this fascistic, southern theocracy, X is mainly about the literary cliché, popularized by Bret Easton Ellis in the ’80s, that you can never truly know another person. George Saunders’ Liberation Day is another example, where several of the stories are set in some fascistic, dystopian future. There are so many preceding this, of course. We have 1984, though we live in a version of reality closer to Brave New World. There’s Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (which are reminiscent, at least in premise of American War, where climate issues are primary causes of destabilization, which in turn is not unlike Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake). There’s Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the attendant TV show. There are many more than this, but here, at least, are a few of the main players.

One could say that the rise of fascism is an ever-present threat, and that artists and novelists need to be ever-engaging with this threat. One could also say these repeated tales are part of the problem. The narratives don’t seem to be getting through — they’re not making an impact. Why is that? One could deem Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, written in the ’90s, with its elected figure using the phrase “Make America Great Again,” as prescient. Or one could call it ignored. Perhaps art has never really made an impact, not in any real way, not on the political scene. Or maybe it’s that some of the narratives on the left have stalled out, repeating themselves like bad memes — shouting into the void or, worse, the echo-chamber. Too many of our current novelists seem to think they can persuade a reader to believe a certain set of morals, the correct way to empathize, and in turn, convince the reader (if they weren’t already convinced) of which side of history one should be on.

But empathy can’t be taught — it has to be experienced. A person has to find their own way toward it. For educators, teaching empathy is fraught: saying how to be empathetic is not the same as displaying it, nor the same as allowing students to figure it out on their own. It behooves the teacher to be wary of the fact that they might be trying to convert people to their worldview, especially if the point of, say, a writing assignment is to “teach empathy.” That same wariness is needed for the artist. My question in this essay is not can art awaken a person to the horrors of fascism — it clearly can. My question is: is there a point when repeated narratives stall out, lose their power in the endless repetition of certain premises, and read more like propaganda than a real story or real life? What does a novel look like that has this stalled quality?

Enter Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a humorless novel about a dystopian Ireland where a fascist regime has come into power by declaring a state of emergency. The plot is simple, and for the most part, compelling. The book begins with Larry, Eilish’s husband, being interviewed by what are essentially Gestapo agents, and then being detained. Eilish is left to care for their four children, of varying ages, ranging from baby all the way to young adult. Most of the plot asks: what should Eilish do, stay or go? Leave Larry behind? (She cannot contact him, knows not where he is.) She decides to stay, bad things befall the family, and eventually she is forced to leave, feeling that she’s failed the family by neglecting to act earlier. If the opening of this essay was amusing and weird, please be warned: this book is neither amusing nor weird. It’s deadly, deeply, darkly serious. Very, very dark. Dark that gathers. If America is currently tipping toward fascism — and that’s, as they say, a big “‘if” — it’s been a slow, stupid, infuriating, weird, degrading, ridiculous, mundane, comical, harrowing, cheap tip. There seem to be signs everywhere. Not so in Prophet Song.

Prophet Song is a curious book. It’s overly sentimental, cinematic to a fault, and has only a basic understanding of human psychology (Eilish begins as a person and ends as a thing, an arc that was foretold by soothsayer and mystic, Carole, in the middle of the book), but is interestingly plotted. By which I mean to say: though we don’t really know who any of these people are — Eilish is “mother/wife” — we want to see how things end up, not unlike the latest Mission Impossible movie. There are some very good action sequences, as when artillery break the family’s house apart late in the book. There’s an exhilarating and frightening sequence in which Eilish is hunting down one of her sons, Bailey, trying to figure out which hospital he was put into. There’s a bureaucratically confusing pandemonium to this sequence that feels apt. But it’s not in action that Prophet Song falls flat, rings false. It is in style and voice, and it’s in the depiction of people, of consciousness.

The problem with the style and voice of Prophet Song is that Lynch seems to be too clearly aping one of his influences on the one hand (I won’t even go into who that influence is — you’ll get it right away if you’ve done any reading), while on the other, he relies on cinematic tropes rather than the novelty of actual life to depict his dystopian world. This causes the novel to feel sentimental, focused on darkness as a literary tick, inauthentic, contrived, and weirdly unreal.

But Prophet Song has a certain power. Lynch’s novel makes you forget that its aesthetic is contrived and characterization poor: the stakes, the politics, the horrors of a fascistic regime wipe from our minds the literary and artistic failings of the book. The sentimentality, the loss of one family member after another, the bombings, the hunt for milk, the one-dimensional bad guys of “the party,” the dry toast, the eventual shelling, the cement dust in the air, the constant confusion, the constant sense of loss, the constant sense of being unmoored, the ever-encroaching darkness, the darkness that seeps into the house, into the self, into the soul, vacuuming everything into its nothingness — these things so move us and are made to seem so impossible and possible at once that they seem new, that we fail to see that Prophet Song is essentially a domestic thriller dressed in the clothes of literature, with a clear and banal political agenda. It’s a book about the rise of fascism for the Goodreads era.

But Prophet Song has other, stranger problems. Let’s begin with the prose. One day at her office, shortly after Larry has been detained (she’s not heard from him at all and won’t for the rest of the book, presumably because he’s dead), Eilish watches the news on her computer at work. People are being beaten by batons. Tear gas is shot into a crowd. The protestors of this new regime crouch and huddle. It’s pretty standard stuff. So cinematic, so precise in its imagery gleaned from other images of such a situation. As a reader, we aren’t witnessing the real thing here. We’re witnessing a version of a version of a version of it. But, it’s also serious. This is serious: it could happen to us, we are made to think. Which yes, it could, but this is not nonfiction, and it’s not news — it’s a novel. It’s not propaganda warning about the possibility of fascism, it’s art. We watch Eilish become panicked and feel she must leave work:

She sweeps her security pass and her belongings into her bag, steps through the office sleeved in one half of her coat, the stairwell reverberant with the smack of her shoes and then she is standing on the street with her phone to her ear, Larry’s phone does not answer and when she rings it again his phone is turned off. It is then she looks up and it seems as though the day has come under some foreign sky, feeling some sense of disintegration, the rain falling slow on her face.

Here I’d like to introduce the operating principles of Lynch’s prose style. The ever-present present tense, quickly sketched images, a psychology of abstract concepts (“some sense of disintegration”), as well as the unfortunately cinematic style: this is an image of a panicked, suffering woman looking up into the sky as rain falls on her face. We can feel the camera angle, almost sense the cinematographer choreographing the shot. It’s a cliché, of course, but what’s so interesting about the passage, and much of Lynch’s writing, is that he works really, really hard for it not to be a cliché. He tries to out-prose the cliché. Nonetheless, the passage remains a cliché, and the heavy reliance on the language of the literary — “the day” coming under “some foreign sky” and Eilish feeling “some sense of disintegration” — only belie the fact that an overly used, overly cinematic image is being hidden. Also, does she ever get her other arm “sleeved”? I kept seeing her panickily standing in the rain with her face upturned with her phone to her ear with her jacket only half on. The imprecision of the prose is astonishing because the prose wants us to think it’s so precise. Only one arm is “sleeved” — my god, we’re meant to think, look at the stunning and inventive precision of his prose, that singular detail. We’re not meant to see any of the other stuff.

More to the point, the passage reveals the problem of the rest of the book: up until this moment, Eilish has sort of seemed like a person. Before his detainment, she debates with Larry what they should do in the face of this new regime, how Larry should respond to the interview with the Gestapo-like force, etc. But here, as happens in the rest of the book, she becomes a reaction. As the book continues, she even further becomes a reaction to situations. She might be a microbiologist, but that never really matters. She goes to her workplace as a matter of course. She and her children bicker, while the war begins to emerge around them. One son runs off, but Eilish is in charge! No Ma’am, no longer, this son informs her. More such contestations — conflict and story that is born out of circumstances, as though these are the reactions of any family (except those on the other side), completely universal, nearly abstract, lightly dressed in the clothes of specificity.

Likewise, Eilish’s inner world is often abstract: she has at times “this feeling of possibility giving rise to hope,” when things look up for a moment, but after more bad news arrives, this “hope” quickly leads to “this feeling they are falling towards something that cannot be defined by anything she has known in her life.” Why the use of “this”? There’s no telling. But more importantly, this is not the specific content of thought, emotion, or consciousness. These examples, and many more, are abstract inner formulations, which serve the narrative well in a certain sense: Eilish is not a person, but an everyperson. Lynch can do these inner abstractions all day, and he does. At another point, after learning more bad news about the regime and its hold on the state, Eilish “does not know why she remains so calm, another door has been opened, she can see this now, it is as though she were looking out upon something she has been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in her blood.” Lynch doesn’t worry too much about mixing metaphors. On the one hand, some sort of inner “door” has been opened in Eilish, and on the other hand, this inner door is also an “atavism awakened in her blood.” Or is she looking through the opened door at the atavism awakened in her blood? No worries — it sounds so literary, so lyrical, so poetic.

The real problem is that we’re in the realm of psychological concept, not psychology itself. This isn’t how people experience their own minds — it’s how an author fashions a character literarily. When we do get specific in thought, right after the opened door/awakened atavism, we see Eilish “thinking, how many people have watched upon war bearing down on their home, watching and waiting for their fate to come, entering into silent negotiation, whispering and pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the spectre that cannot be directly looked at.” This is Eilish thinking. This, finally, is specific thought, specific consciousness, rather than abstracted consciousness. But also, it’s Paul Lynch writing. This isn’t thought, this is literary thought. I simply don’t believe Eilish thinks this way. The reason Lynch can’t write an actual psychology — a real person — is because no real people can exist in this world, in which the regime is evil and the people of “the party” are essentially voids, not actual human beings. Eilish and her family, too, are only tropes.

The book’s political message, which is so simplistic as to be laughable — that fascism is evil — leaves the characters devoid of life. Flat, unreal, and merely reactive. It is not the characters that matter; it is the notion that we, the readers, should be worried this is coming for us. That’s fine. There’s a place for that kind of message. Unfortunately, the place for that kind of message is in a newspaper, maybe an opinion column. The question that this book brought up for me is this: what is art for, especially political art? If Prophet Song is any answer, it’s that one should know one’s position fully, and expose the evils of one’s society, in order to tamp them down. In this way, art, and political art in particular, is not about asking questions, it’s not even about having a question. It is about knowing which side of history is right and being on that side. It is currently, depressingly, a major strain of the liberal position, and a position of liberal art, and I say this with the caveat that the answer to this problem is not “right-wing” art, but is instead art that asks different questions, and marks out a new territory, a new path.

So, Eilish is an everywoman. But of course, she’s not an everywoman, she’s a particular woman living in a particular society. Lynch disregards this: not only is Eilish an everywoman, but her oldest son Paul is an every-son, her middle son Bailey another every-son, and her daughter Molly an every-daughter. These are not characters, they’re types, and they exist as types throughout the book. Eilish and those of her ilk are good types, while the book tells us quite clearly that the rest of the world are bad types. This is what happens when a book is more interested in political correctness than reality. Everyone who is part of “the party” in this novel is less than human. Their less-than-humanness is written all over their grimacing, greedy, beady-eyed faces, all descriptions Lynch actually uses. The two agents who detain Larry might as well be evil automatons they’re so obviously inhuman and bad. When Eilish looks at Paul Felsner (her new boss who is part of “the party”), she sees an “abyss.” A soldier’s face is described thusly: “the angry brow aslant over the green eyes, the weaponed body that speaks absolute force.”

There’s a dreamy vagueness to the way Prophet Song is written. Eilish will be doing something, like say watching “online the growth of the protest” (why is so much of this book written in Yoda-speak? Watched have I online the growth of protest) but we don’t see her sitting anywhere. We don’t see her in her room or in the kitchen. We have no idea if she’s watching on her phone or her laptop. Suddenly, she can see “Larry’s face looking up as though in expectation,” though we have no idea what Larry looks like and can’t conjure him ourselves. Then, in the same paragraph, it’s a new day, Saturday, and “Molly comes into the kitchen dressed in white.” Dressed in white because, you know, that’s the color of not-the-regime. But white what? We talking pants and a shirt? It’s Saturday now? What day was it when it wasn’t Saturday just before? Part of the problem here is that Lynch writes in huge, sectional paragraphs. He just moves from thing to thing. Beneath the problem of the huge paragraphs being consistently vague, it’s not clear why Lynch is writing huge paragraphs, why he’s not separating out dialogue, why he’s doing any of it this way — I can’t see any reason for it, except that it appears literary.

This is distressing to me personally. As another author — admittedly much less well known — who writes in big paragraphs and doesn’t separate out dialogue, Prophet Song bothers me. I worked for years to understand why I write the way I write, and why the pages of my books should look the way they look. I eventually understood that because I was attempting to represent consciousness, and because consciousness doesn’t separate out visualization now, action now, dialogue now, I had to find a way to put it all together. To try to mimic the operation of the five skandhas. I would still use tags, but dialogue wouldn’t be separated out because a character was experiencing this all at once, as one big thing, through consciousness itself — I was, in sum, writing the mind.

But Lynch is not writing the mind. In fact, he’s mainly writing action (still that same Saturday, talking to her daughter):

Eilish turns to the table and lifts up a magazine and puts it down again. For goodness’ sake, she says, where are my glasses? Your glasses are sitting on top of your head. Well, she says, aren’t I a right eejit? When she turns around Molly is watching her strangely and then her mouth wrinkles as though she might cry. I want my daddy back, she says, I just want him back, why aren’t you doing something? Eilish looks into her eyes seeking for something, she does not know what, something from the old Molly to hold onto, some sense to give, but Molly instead is pushing at her, pulling on some lever.

The worst part of all this is I have to talk about the word “some” now (please do notice that word in two previous quotes). I wish I didn’t have to talk about the word “some,” but the novel has made me have to talk about the word “some.” In the last quote, we once again have the abstraction of inner self, with “some lever” being pulled on. What lever? Some lever. A specific lever. But also, not a specific lever at all. The lever never returns. The lever — so specific that it requires a “some” to identify it — is a mysterious lever, not your typical lever, the strange, dark, sad lever that “some” seems to suggest. And “some” continues to suggest this throughout the novel. Here are some examples of “some” from page 203 of my copy:

The fighting has passed through Connell Road like some ferocious grabbing water pulling the walls and the house fronts into rubble . . .the white dust faint upon the sycamore that stands unvanquished outside the school with half its trunk scorched to the neck as though some vandal had tried to set fire to it . . . this street that looks like two places at once as though some filmed transparency of a foreign war has been placed upon an image of a city . . .

We’re witnessing a literary tick. A formulation the writer loves, which I understand. We all have our little tricks we like. But this formulation is so frequent in Prophet Song that I felt pulled out of the reading experience.

Prophet Song made me think of another book that also begins with a missing father and the rise of a fascistic regime, Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness. The difference between these two books is stark. Fatelessness, about a 14-year-old who is imprisoned first at Auschwitz, then at Buchenwald, and for a longer duration at a camp in Zeitz, is a direct, intelligent, non-poetic, thoughtful book. Georg’s father is sent to a labor camp, and what Georg feels, more than anything in this opening, is embarrassment — embarrassment about how to act, how to proceed, how to show his father affection before he leaves, as well as embarrassment when he discusses the labor camps with a girl, her melodramatic reaction contrasted with his stoically ignorant one. In other words, Fatelessness is funny. There’s an absurd humor in Georg’s father going away, packing a knapsack. It’s a dark humor, of course, but it often makes the reader feel amused, sometimes even laugh, and because of this, a looming poignancy arises. In fact, even once in the camps, Georg tells jokes, so do others, laughs at his friend, Bandi Citrom, that is until he is too weak to laugh, too near death. My point here: absurdity, and its attendant, humor, are part of this dark landscape. This is all absent from Prophet Song.

More importantly though, Fatelessness, for all the seriousness of its subject matter, never gets sentimental, never becomes overly cinematic (perhaps due to when it was written), and always tries to remain very direct and honest about what’s going on within its main character, Georg. The policemen and guards in the book are sometimes very, very cruel, and sometimes also show Georg and others some decency. Unlike the void, darkness, and emptiness in Prophet Song, those existential noumena are properly aligned in Fatelessness, and written in a plain, direct way that adds to the specific reality of the situation, as when Georg has been in a camp for some time and is literally starving:

I had felt hungry at the brickyard, on the train, at Auschwitz, even at Buchenwald, but I had never before had the sensation like this, protractedly, over a long haul, if I may put it that way. I was transformed into a hole, a void of some kind, and my every endeavor, every effort, was bent to stopping, filling, and silencing this bottomless, evermore clamorous void. . . . But I did try [to eat] sand, for instance, and anytime I saw grass I would never hesitate; but then, sad to say, there was not much in the way of grass to be found. . . .

While the darkness and voidness is symbolic, poetic, lyrical, sentimental, and abstract in Prophet Song, it is experienced as a direct fact in Fatelessness — it is real, a real aspect of a particular, specific life, and portrayed here with more directness, understanding, and emotional and psychological depth for that directness. It is just this kind of directness that Prophet Song needed more of. Lynch, in attempting to artfully get some words around the ineffable qualities of life and death, forgets that sometimes things are transparently what they are, and in their plainness, in their directness, amazing truths are revealed, as in this passage toward the middle of Fatelessness while in the camp at Zeitz:

[I]magination remains unfettered even in captivity. . . . I usually found myself back home. True, make no mistake about it, I was no less audacious in doing that than I would have been with, say, Calcutta; only here I hit upon something, a certain modesty, and, I might say, a kind of work that compensated and thereby, as it were, promptly authenticated the effort. I soon realized, for example, that I had not been living properly, had not made good use of my days back home; there was much for me to regret, far too much. . . . There had been dishes I had been fussy about . . . there was the whole senseless tug-of-war between my mother and father over me. . . .

What’s remarkable here is that though the reader is in a concentration camp with Georg, though we are in a situation here that we’ve never been in, though this seems so extreme and we’re so far from it, we recognize, immediately, that a realization like this is authentic because we’ve had similar realizations too. No such realizations come in Prophet Song, and that is because, rather than being an individual who can think, Eilish is a reaction who reacts, until she sort of doesn’t. Everything is political, everything is about fascism, everything about the regime and the very basic consequences of that regime: people being unmoored from their lives, their homes. People dying. It’s probably unfair to compare Prophet Song to something like Fatelessness, but I offer it here because I don’t think Prophet Song approaches the reality of such a situation in the correct way — it may even do a disservice to it. While its politics are admirable, though never risky — we all know a fascistic regime would be awful, and we all know it is important to be reminded of real-world horrors so as not to repeat them — novels are novels, not sets of propaganda. Never once in Fatelessness does there seem to be a message about how awful and unmooring and how bad fascism is — it’s far too inquisitive for such simplicity.

Prophet Song is extremely readable, goes quickly, and I did want to know what happened to Eilish and her family. But, I never stopped to consider. I never put the book down and thought. Mainly, the thoughts I had, besides will he let them live or die?, were, this is overwritten, this is out of a movie, this feels inauthentic, and this feels clearly ideologically driven. In other words, I could see the author all over the novel, hands everywhere, shaping things; it seemed to me, in fact, that the author was so taken by an overarching political perspective, so rigid in that perspective, that he had no new thoughts about any of this and was simply regurgitating things he had learned were bad. In this way, Prophet Song is a symptom of the current Western cultures it has come out of: cultures of clearly divided opinions, starkly drawn lines. Even though Lynch never really gets into the specific politics of this dystopian Ireland, we easily feel the “left” and “right” of how this is all working — and those on the right, they’re barely even people (though, to his credit, Lynch makes a nod at grey areas later when a rebellion arises and those folks are violent too). The book almost seems to say: you, your family, that is what is real; everything else, that is political machinery, machinery of war, the machinery of the regime, and should be regarded as such. Fatelessness, on the other hand, was a book I read slowly, pausing, often confused, not by what was happening, but by how the main character was responding, growing, living. I even forgot it was fiction. This was, to me anyway, the ingeniousness of Fatelessness — that Georg is never mere reaction. He is always Georg, an individual, even when he’s being reduced down to nothing. His individuality always remains. Eilish, on the other hand, in much less intense circumstances, quickly becomes a shell.

If only Prophet Song had looked back to literary forebears like Fatelessness, there might have been a chance for it to have been a great book, a book that explored the more confusing, taboo areas of such a situation. It might have actually raised some questions, rather than seeming to constantly be driving its point home about how awful this all is. In Fatelessness, at the end of the novel, when he has survived the camps and returned home, Georg is frustrated upon seeing his family again, who want to hear of the “nightmares” of the camps, the “atrocity” he has suffered through. He’s so angry he can’t say anything. He escapes onto the street. He vows that if he’s ever asked about it again, he will tell others about “the happiness of the concentration camps.” An incredible, moving ending. This doesn’t mean that the camps were pleasant places — they weren’t, people died, and Georg nearly did too. But he also grew up there, had friends, experienced moments of kindness. Experienced the growth, even, of his own sense of himself. Not just his identity, but his innermost nature. What is that nature? Fatelessness leaves it mysterious, because it is. Prophet Song, on the other hand, despite its insistence on the ineffability of existence, tells us everything. It made me re-state something to myself I had forgotten, and may serve as a way forward for literary novels of the left to try to see beyond their own increasingly static ideological predilections: just because a novel reads quickly, has good morals, the right stance, a compelling story, and a propulsive quality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great novel, and in fact, it may not be a work of art at all.

Alan Rossi is the author of two novels, Mountain Road, Late at Night and Our Last Year. His stories and essays have appeared in many journals. He lives in South Carolina with his family.