Great Books and/vs. the Right Positions

12 Jul, 2026

When a book leaves me feeling vaguely ambivalent, the would-be-writer me should probably ask why; was it something about the book’s style, the subject matter, something else or both or more that had me finish it without experiencing any strong emotion or conviction of any sort? Note, this isn’t a situation in which I’m left unsettled, say by some uncomfortable truth being reflected back at me, being burdened with some unpleasant emotion I want to ignore and avoid. Instead, I might just declare it fine, maybe wonder for a few seconds why it got so many glowing reviews, and move on.

This is what’s happened with Karen Russell’s The Antidote, which I picked up at a trusted bookstore last week after I heard two employees gushing about it, then saw it propped up on the staff recommendations shelf. National Book Award Finalist, celebrated as a “national bestseller” on the cover, and apparently featuring extreme weather; sure, I’m in.

It was fine, and now I’m wondering why that’s all I have to say about it. Two initial possibilities are popping up: for one thing, most contemporary US fiction has never resonated with me. Even though I was born and have spent most of my life here, I’ve somehow felt more at home with—more engaged by—European and South American, and increasingly, Japanese, literature. I’ve never been able to describe exactly what’s going on here, and a few of my favorite fiction writers are stand-out US Americans, like David Foster Wallace. Maybe there’s a typical American practicality or straightforwardness, even what I’ll call willed blindness or optimism, in its literature that leaves me wanting more, both as a reader and as a citizen; wanting something that tunnels down more deeply, and in weirder, more off-the-map ways, with more adventurous vocabulary.

You’d think, if that’s the case, that The Antidote, with its haunted camera, its temporarily sentient scarecrow, and the existence of prairie witches with whom you can confidently deposit your memories and forget about them, would leave me with more than a “fine.” But the fact that it didn’t might be due to the second possibility I’ll need to think about: the prospect that it's probably hard to write great literature that delineates a correct moral position.

I can’t deny that something like this book, a couple of whose characters come to an understanding of their personal role in the displacement and attempted genocide of Native peoples, will be what causes many a reader to think for the first time about the unforgivable events upon which this country is grounded, and maybe even about those that continue to sustain its wealth. No question: there’s all sorts of value in that. But I’ve gone through a mental review of the novels alone (not including short stories or poetry) that have stayed with me; none features what I can only inaccurately call an overt desire to right a social wrong. Hopscotch, House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Milkman, The Third Policeman, The Luminous Novel, The Rings of Saturn, Great Fear on the Mountain, Ducks, Newburyport, … All have you thinking about human folly, in ways that leave socially engaged novels like The Jungle in the dust. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novels that take up Colombian history, especially The Shape of the Ruins and The Sound of Things Falling, feature conflicted, fallible human beings, not characters who possess the right answers or stances. Julio Cortázar (author of the first novel on the list above) did try to incorporate politics into his writing—Libro de Manuel managing to walk the fine line between literature and political engagement—but when he let that impulse take over, as in his Nicaragua: So Violently Sweet, the writing fell flat, the sentiment became a bludgeon. Reading that one, I kept thinking about the scene in Stardust Memories when the protagonist wants the aliens to answer the big questions, and to tell him what he should do for the messed-up world. Their response? “You’re not the missionary type… You’re a comedian; you wanna do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.”¹

Maybe there’s something to the fact that I just cited a film to deal with how best to get people to look at and understand injustice and what to do about it. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen it—thirty years, probably—for me to responsibly reference Dances with Wolves, but sentimental and truly problematic though it was, the director could let the visuals, including actors’ gestures, stances, and facial expressions, do a lot of the work for him, instead of needing reasoned explanations to lay out all the things that were and are wrong about US colonial expansion. But there, too, I just pointed to a problem with any artistic genre: to get anyone other than the choir to hear what you’re saying, how honest or accurate can you be; how much schlock do you have to include to soften the blow enough for minds to even think about changing? The Sorrow and the Pity, for example, let French collaborators in World War II condemn themselves without any watered-down script—but that was a documentary, not a movie.

I’m not saying The Antidote is schlocky; it’s not. It may instead be evidence of just how bad (white) US Americans are at approaching a troubled national past and present. After all, most of what we’ve been treated to since my middle-aged self can remember is the desperate hope that the mere performance of the right gestures—embarrassingly earnest land acknowledgments or the taking of a knee in kente cloth—will heal all ills with no further action needed, and we’ll be able to move on with a clean slate.² In the book, Russell has a character lay out to the townspeople exactly what their livelihoods have been built upon, a history it seems their descendants purposefully deposited with the witches so that they could go forward in good conscience. And to Russell’s credit, there’s no clear resolution in the wake of the old knowledge being newly revealed.

Again, until a miracle occurs and we actually do something about past and present crimes, we’ll keep needing reminders about them, and needing new ways of presenting those reminders, if anything approaching resolution is to be found. Can literature do that, though, and still be really great literature—or does the aim of greatness pale in comparison to the possibility of a book’s hoped-for social effect? The choice isn’t limited to that binary, of course, and my wondering about the relationship between art and history/politics/social patterns and events is hardly new. But I’m sure I’ll be racking my brains for at least the next week, trying to come up with a real classic that points you in a clear and convincing moral direction.³

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