Adam Bellow’s cover-story in National Review (paywalled) urges conservatives to re-engage with popular culture, especially by embracing the novel as a medium to fight the culture war and bring right-wing ideas into the mainstream. Dreher cheers:
[A]rt and culture should not be approached from an instrumental point of view. This is why, for example, so much contemporary Christian filmmaking is so bad: it’s designed to culminate in an altar call. It’s about sending a message, not telling a story. I’m personally aware of a conservative donor and investor who poured millions into an independent film because he thought it was wholesome, and would improve the character of its viewers. I watched the movie in a private screening, and it was terrible. A total waste of money. My sense was that the investor had no idea what he was paying for, and in fact he wouldn’t have paid for a film that was anything other than moralistic propaganda. That model is not what conservative artists and writers want or need.
Alyssa offers some advice to writers who want to heed Bellow’s call. “Popular fiction,” she notes, “has a long tradition of packaging conservative ideas about everything from sexual mores to foreign policy in page-turning plots,” but pop novelists like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Tom Wolfe haven’t always done a great job with it:
Neither Clancy nor Grisham are particularly adept at character development or psychological writing. Instead, they hook us with plot, which is the primary vehicle for their ideas. This is an approach that works well if the stakes for a story are external, whether Jack Ryan is foiling a terrorist plotor Mitch McDeere is bringing down a mob-controlled law firm. Something different is required when a novel is trying to get at more internal issues of morals and ethics.
In 2004, when Tom Wolfe published “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” his novel about an elite university and the contemporary students who fail to live up to its reputation, he obviously intended to pen a scathing look at what would come to be known as hookup culture. But the book is marred by Wolfe’s failure to create a fully compelling internal life for his titular fallen freshwoman. Charlotte reads like a 73-year-old’s fantasy of how an 18-year-old woman thinks, which is, of course, precisely what she is. “I Am Charlotte Simmons” should be a strong reminder of the value of empathy and nuance when writing characters who do not share your life experiences–particularly when you want to criticize their morals.
But Waldman is skeptical of Bellow’s vision, questioning whether the contemporary American right is even all that interested in influencing mainstream culture:
The problem is that conservatives love their politicized media bubble. It’s so nurturing and warm and supportive. Unfortunately, it also produces all kinds of pathological beliefs and behaviors, from the Benghazi obsession, to the insistence that climate change is a giant hoax, to the “unskewed” polls proving that Mitt Romney would trounce Barack Obama in 2012.
If Bellow can find a conservative writer who’s also the next great American novelist, more power to him. But he’ll start at a disadvantage, because artists are just more likely to be liberal. As a group, liberals tend to be more open to new experience and tolerant of ambiguity—traits that might lead one to be more creative—while conservatives tend to be more conscientious, but also more rigid. That’s why artists of all types have always been more likely to be liberals—challenging tradition, exploring new ways of seeing—and always will be. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, and maybe Bellow can help create a community of writers that produces work that would make both William Faulkner and Milton Friedman weep with gratitude. But it sure won’t be easy.
The Dish 