It's a little insane to write about these two books, but they're both near-masterpieces published in the mid-80s and have even more to say to us today than they ever did in their own time. One defines the spirit of our time and one is the zeitgeist's literal opposite. If you say anything uncomfortable about The Handmaid's Tale, you're in trouble. If you say anything nice about late Bellow, you're in trouble. So let's get to it (sticks up middle finger).
Nobody needs to champion The Handmaid's Tale. It's one of my lifetime's most beloved works of literary fiction (if 'beloved' is something you can call it). I still haven't seen the series, but the novel is one of fiction's most claustrophobic visions. As you probably know, it's about women whose options are completely restricted to reproduction or illegal whoredom. The only escape is a still worse place - a place of internment which seems uncannily like the death camps.
The Handmaid's Tale is not just a political pamphlet against fundamentalist Christianity, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. It's a vision of the world that is at once distant and very, very familiar. In the Trump era, it speaks to our fears of what fundamentalist Christianity may become, and we fear it because of so many times already when Christians were like this. But the more difficult truth of The Handmaid's Tale is we fear it because we see it today, and the place we see it is Islamic countries, where being a woman is a dystopia so far beyond anything seen by recent American eyes. The fact remains, there are people whom we're trained to view with sympathy who are the least sympathetic people on earth. If you want to know what life is like in those countries: read The Handmaid's Tale.
The problem of The Handmaid's Tale, if its a problem, is the condemnation it omits. Not the male characters, though the men of this book are viewed with weird sympathy. The missing condemnation is fellow travelers around the world who excuse these fundamentalists because their own goals align with fundamentalist Christianity. In the real world, they're the same Western conservatives who view Putin with sympathy. They're Middle Eastern Muslims, they're even Chinese communists. What they all hate is Western liberalism, Western secularism, Western permissiveness, and however fundamentalist this fictional Christian regime, there are a billion people at least who'd say 'their heart is in the right place.'
How do we know? Because their opposite numbers say the same about Western colonialism, and have justified any amount of totalitarian rule in the name of ending modern imperialism. It's even in my lifetime that Soviet backed dictators killed their countrymen with a speed only the Belgians could match. To be sure, there were individual American-backed dictators just as bad as any Soviet, but statistics don't lie: the Soviets were worse.
This is half the point of The Dean's December - the half which takes place in Bucharest. We think we have it bad, but 'they' have it worse. The plot is pretty simple: a man goes with his wife to her country of origin to visit her dying mother who did everything to get her girl to America. The bureaucrats prevent the daughter from seeing her, the mother dies, hundreds come to her funeral and treat her as a hero because she did similarly heroic things for them. Her funeral becomes a silent protest against the Caucescu regime: the only protest which can't be censored.
Was Caucescu's Romania as terrible as Gilead? Of course not. Romania wasn't even as terrible as America-backed dictatorships like Congo and Indonesia, but Romania is a real place and Gilead is not. Communist Romania was a tyranny of fear that your own relatives could put you in prison; your own friends, your own spouses and children. Betrayal in Eastern Europe was a fact of life, and everyone lived in terror of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong intimate, all of whom might ruin their lives. And if you knew who your informant was, you simply had to welcome them and treat them as though particularly beloved, else as revenge they could even lie to the government about what you said or did.
But there are people in America who have it just as bad. This is The Dean's December's other half. It's not 'us,' the privileged readers of literary fiction, it's the murdered, many of whose last moments are full of horror and pain we can neither endure nor imagine. The murdered in America are a whole class of people: over a half-million in the last 50 years. These don't count soldiers or police. This is just the stark fact of American life, perhaps the starkest. We respond with horror to mass shootings and police killings, yet to every other type of murder we're conspicuously silent. To solve murder we like to say that soft power is the key, social work is the key, education is the key, better housing is the key; but the truth is, we don't know that. All we know is that gun death kills 30,000 people every year, and there are only two solutions everybody knows kinda work.
One is the force nobody wants to countenance: hard power. Police work. Police presence. Police enforcement. Police force. We can insist on higher standards of policing and still understand that police work is one of the cornerstones of any functioning society. If you want better policing, treat police officers more respectfully, not less. Pay them more. Be nice to them. Stop treating them like the enemy and stop making their change of tactics a higher priority than stopping murder itself. The alternative, we already see, is more murder, more injustice, more danger. Any policeman smart enough to get other options is leaving the job, knowing that their lives are that much more endangered for lack of tactics available to them and no new tactics put in their place. Replacing them will be exactly the corrupt lowlives we want off the beat.
The other solution is that 'thing' nobody thinks is important but defines everything: culture. Everybody says that culture isn't important when the other side makes the argument, then uses it without apology when it's their side who makes the argument. Culture matters. Everybody agrees so long as it's their culture.
But culture only works when included is a culture of agreement and compromise. A culture where people have the same motives is a culture where people get protected. The three sides of American life all have to concede enormous things. The right has to value education, the left has to value policing, and the center has to fund them both. It's all well and good for Republicans to look back to the mid-20th century when we had the world's entire economy and taxes for the highest earners at 94% (marginal), but they willfully misunderstand the circumstances which enabled it. it's nice to dream of the socialist paradises of Scandinavia without realizing that they're only possible with a racially homogenous population of a few million people and some defense money from the US so they can spend everything on social programs. The minute a few Muslims come over, northern Europeans start sounding like Nazis. The minute they need their defense needs taken care of, all that European contempt for us melts into American flags again.
Bellow is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and in his home country he languishes forgotten - more remembered in Europe than he's been here for twenty years. What Bellow represented was the mid-20th century liberal consensus, and because that's what he represents, his books are uniquely unsuitable for our time because of the unpleasant truths that come with him. He was an American liberal bordering on socialist who almost met with Trotsky in Mexico (the day of Trotsky's assassination), and then turned neoconservative in the wake of late-century urban decay.
Like so many of us, his great strengths were his weaknesses. And Bellow's great insight is that culture is what saves us, and that by letting go of the aspirations to middle class American white picket fences with good public schools, we succumbed to a nihilism from which we still haven't freed ourselves. With that insight came a disrespect for people who did not share his concept of culture; and his worst book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, has an unforgivable scene of breathtaking racism.
But the solution, as always, comes from meeting in the center, and its to the center that we have to look. But which center? A liberal center or a libertarian center? One cares enough to fund schools and police, the other doesn't care. So if you want better, the center has to be liberal, not libertarian, not conservative nor moderate. By managing this compromise, centrists cannot compromise on their own behavior. The 'well-meaning' center can't just sit back and stay affluent, they have to raise taxes through the roof and pay for education, social programs, defense, and policing to the quantity of hundreds of billions each. Either you share the wealth, or you consign a society to dystopia.
I don't know how to end this one.
