In 2018, a young nurse living in England, Lucy Letby, was charged with seven counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder. Many of these acts were alleged to have taken place over a period of time running from 2015 to 2016, a period during which Letby did not operate without detection. The yearlong police investigation that resulted in her eventual arrest revealed that there had been suspicions of a possible connection between Letby and an unusual increase in deaths on the wards where she worked, at least once resulting in a hospital inquiry that went nowhere. Letby was eventually moved to an admin position, but after a hospital investigation turned up tenuous evidence, the reporting doctor was forced to apologize to Letby, who was put back on duty in the intensive care ward, where she went on to allegedly attack more patients.
I listened to a podcast about the Letby case hosted by two journalists who walked their audience through the legal proceedings. The prosecution laid out their evidence. We heard testimony from former colleagues of Letby and also heard transcripts of Letby’s text message conversations with her fellow nurses as read out by actors. This was paired with court reporting on the mood and tenor of the room as the trial unfolded. Next, detail by brutal detail, we heard about the crimes themselves. How Letby was alleged to have injected air into the veins and feeding tubes of her patients. How she created air emboli in their stomachs or gave them insulin which sent them into hypoglycemic shock. We heard about the horrible rashes running across their backs and abdomens. We heard about and from the families too, all of whom were fundamentally transformed by the events described in the case and likely by the case itself. Because how could they not be?
When Letby was found guilty—I actually have some doubts as to the strength of the evidence itself and the case put on by the prosecution—I kept turning over in my mind the question that most people probably come to when they hear about something this awful: What would make a person do this?
Until this point, I have not told you about the specific nature of Lucy Letby’s crime, which I believe push her actions beyond the realm of mere crime and into the realm of evil. True, murder is usually evil. A person who serially attacked thirteen people, resulting in seven deaths and six incapacitations, is likely evil. But there is something about this set of crimes that qualifies it as a special variety of evil. Lucy Letby’s victims were all neonates. The smallest, weakest, frailest of new humans. The most innocent of creatures on earth.
I realized that in my trying to figure out a reason for her actions, by trying to follow the act back through her history and psychology to its exact origin, I was thinking like a novelist. But I kept coming up against the fact that I could not actually imagine why a person would do something like that. I can imagine reasons for a great many things. I can begin to understand how certain factors in a person’s life might make them prone to fall into a set of actions that end in something horrible. That is not difficult. But that moral configuration posits that every person is fundamentally a victim of the universe and that when we do evil acts, we have merely strayed from an innocence that is the default position of every person. This is a naïve and limited worldview, but one that is utterly indispensable in writing the kind of fiction that we write today. Because a belief in the fundamental innocence of our fellow man is what allows us to imagine ourselves into their position enough to tell a kind of individualist story about them. Otherwise, they would make a pretty poor protagonist.
But how is one to enter into the mind of someone whose acts, by any definition, are evil? How are they to portray people and events beyond what they can possibly imagine themselves sympathizing with? I suppose I would ask a different question. When did we become limited solely to the domain of what suits our natural sympathies? What we need is a different order of value.
The term worldbuilding is often used to describe the elements of a story that create the backdrop and setting against and in which the events of the narrative unfold. It is perhaps most familiar to us in the context of fantasy and science fiction or speculative fiction. But it also pertains to the realist novel tradition. Consider this early passage from Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country:
Mrs. Heeny had had such “cases” before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. . . . It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.
This passage tells us not only about the circumstances of the Spragg clan and Mrs. Heeny’s sharp read of their situation but also provides the context in which the novel will unfold. We know that New York then is a place ruled by families and that these families are arrayed into groups and tiers of interrelated clans. And that these transplants, the Spraggs, are having difficulty negotiating the city’s seemingly arcane structures. The plot begins precisely because the Spraggs have moved from one place to another for a particular set of reasons, and the new social climate of that place has complicated those plans. This is worldbuilding at its finest.
There is a different, often neglected manner of worldbuilding, too—what I have started calling moral worldbuilding. It seems to me that a great deal of contemporary novels, usually realist, take place in a society that is aridly secular by default. This arid secularity, I believe, is a breeding ground for a banal variety of moral relativism. This moral relativism, at least in America and at least among our artist class, is vaguely post-Christian humanist, and by that I mean a set of ideas built around a belief in the potential goodness in man and in the commonness of man’s needs, desires, and condition. Post-Christian because the post-Christian humanist does not pursue this aim of the commonality of man and man’s interior weather for some Christian reason or due to a belief in God’s having made man in His own image. The post-Christian humanist believes that the commonality connecting all of mankind flows from the rational fact that mankind is complete in itself, and that this life is all that there is, and that all that awaits or befalls man concerns only this plane of existence and its laws. A great deal of emphasis is placed upon the value and beauty of the individual. And because we live in the twenty-first century, the primary vexation many of our characters face is alienation or isolation.
I do understand why moral relativism flourishes in a post-Christian-Humanist-Globalist anglophone world, particularly as societies in the West have become atomized and fractionalized, and the old coherent myths of Country, God, and State have been replaced by many individual spheres of influence—not all working toward one common goal or in accord, but seemingly for themselves and their own self-fulfillment.
D.H. Lawrence described the novel as “the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered.” The work of the novel then is to draw out and reflect the “infinity of pure relations, big and little, like the stars of the sky: that makes our eternity, for each one of us, me and the timber I am sawing, the lines of force I follow; me and the dough I knead for bread, me and the very motion with which I write, me and the bit of gold I have got. This, if we knew it, is our life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumambient universe,” and it is the work of a moral fiction in particular to capture, “that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness.”
This idea of morality speaks most deeply to the writers I revere, whose own works affirm this primary virtue of beautiful art. That is to say, the artists who have been most instructive in my education and the writers who were most instructive in their own education are all working within this same general tradition of moral art, particularly literature. A great literary tradition whose core belief is that our art should speak of and toward and about the truth of human relation. That isn’t to say only the good. Indeed, never does it say only the good. But all of it. My friend Garth Greenwell often says something like, If I am to say that you are neck-deep in the shit, I must also be willing to say and acknowledge that I am also neck-deep in the shit. That’s a bad paraphrase of his brilliant idea.
This is not without its appeal to me. I was raised with a brutal and all-seeing God. One who was jealous for my love and devotion. Hungry for my passion. As a child, I knelt on my floor each night and prayed to be spared and, if I could not be spared, then at least let me rest in His arms forever. That sort of God is dangerous. Because His will is easily co-opted by those with power over you to extract from you behaviors they find convenient. Why else would my mother slap me for putting a towel on my head and pretending to have long hair, telling me that it was a sin to do so. Why was I made to fear God, who would punish me constantly, and not to fear the men my parents let stay in our house, the ones who came into my room at night. We did not call that Evil. But that I might put a towel on my head and pretend to be the beautiful Nia Long or Gabrielle Union? That was Evil.
Having endured the brutalities of a strict Evangelical religious education, I can understand how a person can long for what passes for moral relativism in our contemporary life. A freedom from all the God stuff. A freedom to choose to live according to one’s own values and priorities. I have heard many people say of museums and beautiful architecture and libraries and gorgeous paintings and vivid novels, that this is their church. And true, reading that scene in Anna Karenina when Levin drinks from the cup in the field, I too feel affirmed in a way that I never did in the pews of the tiny white church I attended as a child:
And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long string of mowers and at what was happening around in the forest and the country.
Or when Lily Bart, at the end of The House of Mirth, tells Selden that she has tried very hard, she does everything she knows how to do, and still life is so hard, so hard, I am overcome with tremendous feeling, and I think, this is what it is to be human, to be alive:
I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me. We went to the Rothko show. I was still thinking about those trees. When we arrived at a series of late gray-and-black paintings, I felt that Rothko had captured something true in my experience of the world. Amid the swirling gray field in the lower half of one of the paintings, I saw the shifting faces of those in the beyond—indistinct, but present. I do not mean that there were figurative aspects to the painting or even that the painting gestured toward the figurative at all. I also do not mean to say that there was anything in the painting that suggested I should have found some personal resonance in it. Yet, in that negative space, the painting felt extremely personal to me. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is not looking as such. But that in my looking at the subtly shifting bands of light and shadow in the abstract gray field of the Rothko paintings, I remembered very strongly how I felt when I watched my father’s cigarette smoke turn and billow or how I watched fire and smoke stream out of the burning barrels we used to dispose of trash or the shapes the wind made as it kicked up dust from the fields in late summer. What I felt then was perhaps a recognition for a prior state of looking, which belonged to a part of my life that has nothing to do with the way I live now or the person I am. The Rothko with its many shifting shades brought it all back, tumbling over me. In a moment like that, the strange and sudden overlaying of the past and the present brought on by just one painting, you can’t help but to think, Yeah, art can be an ethic. Art can be a moral universe.
When an author has succeeded in their moral worldbuilding, you get a novel like Teju Cole’s Tremor. Because it is Teju Cole, the novel is hard to explain and summarize even though its facts are rather prosaic. The novel opens with a character named Tunde trying to photograph a hedge at night. He is interrupted by a security person. He moves on. The novel takes its shape from Tunde’s wandering thoughts and meditations on things like colonialism, art, the history of genocide, art markets, academia, the strangeness of immigration, class, and on and on. Truly, it is a cosmopolitan vibe novel in its truest form, for better or worse.
But what I find most remarkable about Tremor is its moral worldbuilding. Tunde gives a lecture at a museum that speaks to the nature of plunder and art and collecting. The talk ties a depiction of a slave ship to Nazis and from Nazis to the dangers of leaving institutions like museums unexamined and the embedded elitism of Western art discourses. The lecture, reproduced in its entirety in the novel, begins with a rather meta element; Tunde acknowledges that there is a recording of the lecture. This meta-aspect is revisited later in the lecture when Tunde stops to recognize a sudden loss in his vision. The moment seems to disorient him, and the reader is disoriented by the swirling and unbearable facts Cole has been pressing upon us. It feels somehow that Tunde’s loss of vision coincides with a dark spot that has existed within our moral field of view all along. Symbol and object become one in this section. Tunde’s lecture goes on.
Later in the novel, there is a section in the form of a chorus of Nigerian voices delivering vignettes of their experiences, each a person who Tunde has encountered in some oblique or major way earlier in the book during his trip to Lagos. In this array of voices, the whole range of human behavior and endeavor is described: business owners, shop girls, slutty young men, mothers, sons, fathers, daughters—many daughters—all of them scheming and scamming and being scammed, trying to make a living, trying to have a good time, trying to do right, trying to avoid getting caught. We get the sense as we end the section that Lagos is a place where anything might happen. You might get a job or you might go to a party or you might get robbed or you might get assaulted or you might get judged playfully or you might be invited to a practice funeral or you might hear some of the most beautiful music you have ever heard—all perhaps on the same day. All of it runs continuously together. You never doubt that around every corner, there is the potential for either a true miracle or a true calamity, and so we hold our breaths sentence by sentence, waiting to see what Cole will conjure next.
But to me the greatest act of moral worldbuilding in Tremor is when Tunde’s class watches a brief documentary about the most prolific serial killer in American history, Samuel Little. Tunde is overwhelmed by the depth of Little’s crimes. He confessed to raping and killing ninety-three women, and he has been confirmed by the FBI to have been involved in sixty of those cases. Cole describes Tunde looking at Little’s face:
Little is black and elderly and has a sweet manner. The most prolific American serial killer is black? The man is not wild-eyed like Charles Manson. And though he is evidently intelligent he does not seem to have the hostile insinuating charm of a Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter. Tunde is aware of the affective pressure of the word “elderly,” a word he can hardly separate from tender and even protective feelings. Little’s face and his mien, his small twinkling eyes, his merry raconteurish manner, all of it is familiar to Tunde from numerous experiences of hearing elders talk about long-ago events.
The placid old-manness of it. The normalness of his appearance. The way his eyes light up as he tells the story of one murder he particularly enjoyed. The loving way he describes the women, with terrifying recall. And the way Tunde links portraiture to Little’s loving confessions. That Cole permitted these events into his novel without extended dips into Little’s biography, or without searching for a reason, is remarkable to me. He makes the drama of the moment about Tunde’s own self-examination of why he needed to find such a reason for Little’s actions, and his realization that ultimately, Little acted simply because he could.
I listened to the novel while I was on my way to meet Adam at the Rothko exhibit. I had Little’s crimes on my mind as I walked by those pine trees. I looked up Little. In appearance, he reminded me of one of my uncles. I think Tunde says something similar, how the victims look like people he knew or could have known. And the novel meditates for a bit on the danger of this identification as well as its power.
I find it instructive and illustrative to examine how evil finds its way into the work of writers like Cole and others. It operates by way of an icy distance, a pseudo-objectivity that does not dare to dip fully into the minds of the depraved. It is in some ways opposite to a novel like Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine, which follows a young man, Jacques Lantier, who is a train driver between Paris and Le Havre. The other main characters are a man named Roubaud, who manages the trains, and his wife, Séverine. On balance, I would say that Zola had more interest in evil than the average writer, or at least, he had a stronger stomach for it. La Bête humaine is a novel that is particularly suffused with evil. I do not mean merely evil acts. I mean evil people, which does seem like an old-fashioned idea.
The plot of La Bête humaine is pretty straightforward. Roubaud is fiercely jealous, and when he discovers that his wife’s former guardian, a wealthy administrator, sexually abused her, he flies into a rage. The injustice he feels is chiefly sexual humiliation. Feeling cucked by the old man, he concocts a scheme to murder him. Séverine and Roubaud do in fact murder the man and toss him from the speeding train. The body is discovered, precipitating other events. Meanwhile, Jacques, the driver, has a monomania for killing. He is obsessed with stabbing women. At the novel’s outset, he hopes that he’s been cured of the affliction, but after playing around with an attractive female cousin, a distant relation, he sees her bare neck and is seized with a desire to stab her with a pair of scissors. Fleeing is the only thing that keeps him from succumbing:
Then, Jacques, with weary feet fell down beside the line; and, groveling on the ground, his face buried in the long grass, he burst into convulsive sobs. Great God! So this abominable complaint of which he fancied himself cured, had returned! He had wanted to murder that girl. Kill a woman, kill a woman! This had been ringing in his ears from his earliest youth. He could not deny that he had taken the scissors to stab her. And it was not because she had resisted his embrace. No; it was for the pleasure of the thing, because he had a desire to do so, such a strong desire, that if he had not clutched the grass, he would have returned there, as fast as he could, to butcher her. Her, great God! That Flore whom he had seen grow up, that wild child by whom he had just felt himself so fondly loved! His twisted fingers tore the ground, his sobs rent his throat in a horrifying rattle of despair.
Nevertheless, he did his utmost to become calm. He wanted to understand it all. When he compared himself with others, how did he differ from them? Down there at Plassans, in his youth, he had frequently asked himself the same question.
The novel is laced with Jacques’s lust for murder. At every turn, Zola describes how it seizes him like a thirst, like an appetite, like a physical ache that must be satisfied. In the end, when Jacques and Séverine become lovers, Roubaud is once more driven to a frenzy, and is murdered by Jacques, who then kills Séverine in an act of lovemaking. And then Jacques ends up fighting with his co-conductor on a train, and the pair topple over the side, plummeting to their deaths.
The novel also contains a poisoning, bribery, a suicide by train, a horrible derailment in which dozens die, and a woman who dies as a result of being sexually assaulted and whose murder is pinned on her closest male friend, who is then tried for a terrible crime and arrested.
Disasters pile up in La Bête humaine, but Zola does something that many novelists do not do, and indeed are afraid to do, which is to write the interiority of a killer. To depict their actual thoughts. Not in the trite, banal way that contemporary life would have us insist upon but rather the truly flagrant, wild leaps of imagination that someone undergoing a moral transformation into a killer might experience. There is no restraint in Zola, that is true. Some might call it melodrama—I would agree that it is kind of melodramatic. Even so, the novel achieves something that I find increasingly rare: a willingness to engage evil.
The novel opens with a scene of domestic tranquility. Roubaud is sitting around at home, waiting for Séverine to return from shopping. He is hungry, dinner is late, and he is getting cranky. When she finally returns, they begin to quarrel, as they often do, and eventually Roubaud asks her why she has refused an invitation to join her former guardian, Grandmorin, at his estate in Doinville for a couple of days. We have the sense that Roubaud needs this man’s assistance with a matter of his job security. Séverine is coy about her reasons, which enrages Roubaud, and he seizes upon her and assaults her, and it’s then that she tearfully confirms his accusations that yes, she has slept with this former guardian, but certainly not because she wanted to. This scene unfolds in Roubaud’s mind for the most part. We are with him as he gears up to do his violent act. We are privy to the pulse of his motivations. When he gets the information he is after, that Séverine slept with this man, he then turns cajoling and tender. He almost seduces her to write to Grandmorin, to convince him that they might kill the man. Together.
We know from the very beginning that this is a world highly potentiated in violence and appetite. We cannot even call it irrationality. Because Roubaud arrives at the plan so logically that you can’t really disagree that he must murder Grandmorin in order to stay alive because he is so absolutely riven with jealousy. We understand totally how this is the only remedy for his existential condition. He must kill! And all of that occurs in the first chapter. The first chapter and they’re already plotting murders.
This tells us that murder is not an impossibility. That it exists in this world. That there are places in the world of this story where people are killed and dying, sometimes violently. For all of its overheated theatrics, La Bête humaine was bracing to read because it required a sustained encounter with things I would much rather not acknowledge. It refused to look away or to create a comfortable distance from evil. The novel is not anxious about redemption. The novel has no interest in redemption. This is in part to do with the determinism at the bottom of Naturalism, which holds that the actions and circumstances of man may be understood as products of biology and social environment, and also partly to do with Zola’s broad disinterest in religion. It’s interesting that to the modern reader, a character who does something evil without redemption is sometimes perceived as a plot hole rather than an element of the moral worldbuilding of a story.
When evil arrives in contemporary fiction, we often tell ourselves that it must be a cipher and that it must speak in whispers, always from the margins, downplayed. That it must not overwhelm the delicate balance of realism at play. And that if one is going to take on evil directly, it must be in a satiric or ironic mode. That contemporary realism-cum-realism requires a delicate morality, which is to say, moral ambiguity, which is to say, moral relativism. In the end, the effect is inadequate moral worldbuilding.
Take, for example, Lynn Steger Strong’s recent novel Flight, in which a blended family returns to the family house during the holidays. There is an issue over money and class. The novel follows several members of this family throughout the course of this holiday visit, and we get to see the different ways that class, anxiety, and past hurts inform their marriages and relationships to each other. An outsider in the family gets involved in the lives of a mother struggling with addiction and her young daughter, who goes missing at one point. When this happens, I had no doubt that she would be found and that she would be fine, ultimately. I had no doubt that the mother’s precarious sobriety and money situation would more or less remain the same, but that we’d get to see how hard she worked to maintain that balance. I had absolutely no fear for any of those characters. Because they did not live in a world where bad things could happen. And I mean bad things in the sense of a child getting killed by a drone or an apartment building collapsing and killing two hundred people. I simply did not have a sense that the novel’s moral texture could accommodate the presence of evil within its narrative universe. The girl goes missing in the snow and the cold, she walks in the dark, lost and alone, and then, eventually, she is found.
Another recent novel, Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan, follows a woman who works as a nanny for a well-to-do couple who have moved to a college town. The couple is struggling with fertility and a general sense of purposelessness. The nanny is a student and has her own anxieties about class and money. (She even briefly tries to improve the lives of the cafeteria workers she knows.) When reading this novel—which I enjoyed for its entertainment—I again did not get the sense that anything truly awful would happen to these people. No one was going to get a horrible infection. No one was going to get knifed on a sidewalk for no reason. Or discover that their money had all been stolen. Instead, we’re treated to descriptions of liberal cringe and the inadequacy of good white people and how solipsistic they can be when faced with the fallout from their good-intentioned meddling. The novel meditates most deeply on the discomfort of the questions and paradoxes of the idea of “privilege,” while the less privileged characters never turn into actual humans. The novel does have moral worldbuilding, but the moral worldbuilding seems to come almost entirely out of an anxiety over the limitations of whiteness and economic privilege as it relates to building real, sustaining human connections. The novel’s big question seems to be Are my good intentions enough? What if my privilege is a flaw? Is that totalizing? The novel is emblematic of the moral quandaries of many contemporary novelists: that the true battleground of everyday life and the questions of meaning that haunt us have everything to do with whether or not we are recycling or whether or not we are cruel to the people who watch and bathe our children or whether or not we are sufficiently active in our community and seeking to bring about change. Those are not unworthy subjects. I only mean to point out that these questions lose their urgency if they are not unfolding in a more sophisticated moral context. The characters in such fiction are all rather good if banal, but these novels derive some narrative tension from whether or not the characters are capital-G Good—the kind of goodness that is debated online by internet leftists and in philosophy classrooms around the world.
It seems that what now passes for moral ambiguity is a slightly older brunette woman pondering if she should or should not discreetly ask her slightly younger brunette nanny to take her fertility shots for her instead of telling her husband she doesn’t want a child. It’s not that there is an absence of moral ambiguity in such a case, but we already know that the older woman will not ask and we already know that the younger woman will not do it because the story is unfolding in a world where the most extreme evil that exists is kind of getting ghosted by a guy after sex.
Yes, The End of the Affair is about an affair. Yes, we might say to ourselves that the infidelity novel has lost some of its juice since divorce became an accepted fact of life and since infidelity lost some of its power to signal the depravity of the human soul. After all, there is no God and therefore the only sins are the interpersonal ones, are gripes and grievances. One might imagine that returning to a novel like The End of the Affair or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary at a time like the contemporary moment would rob those novels of their power. After all, cheating and divorce are as much a part of public life as going to restaurants and posting reviews on Yelp. Does the contemporary reader understand why Emma Bovary is driven to cheat on her husband? Or why Anna doesn’t just get rid of Karenin and marry Vronsky? Can we understand why Sarah Miles feels it necessary to follow through on her promise to a God she isn’t entirely sure she believes in to give up her lover?
The answer is that we can and do recognize the power of these novels precisely because of the moral worldbuilding undertaken by the author. So total is the realization of Tolstoy’s Russia, Flaubert’s France, and Graham Green’s London that we are placed within the very moral fabric of these societies. And even though we now inhabit a moment that is secular and whose moral relativism makes it impossible to point to any kind of moral absolute with certainty, we can still, if we are attentive enough, feel the tension and the stakes of that the characters themselves feel. It is, however, the absence of moral worldbuilding that renders the aridly secular so tiring to read. It often feels as though I’m stepping into a world with no wind.
I have some ideas about the origin of this issue. That it stems from what the supervillain Peter Thiel calls an “excess of interiority,” and a fear of excess in art broadly. Let me explain.
Part of the fear or anxiety around the depiction of evil in this context is simply one manifestation of a broader dynamic in American literature, which is a fear of the didactic. I do not mean to rehash old conspiracy theories about individualism espoused as an ethic in American culture by the CIA via the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and abstract post-expressionism. I mean only to point out that this fear of the didactic often coincides with an emphasis on personal freedom, personal agency, and the primacy of the individual within society. Indeed, much of the Cold War appeared, on the American side at least, to be the final confrontation between individualist liberty and the oppressive dictates of communism, with its individual-eradicating tendencies.
This conflict of course is not new—it is readily visible in the conflict between the Romantics and the Realists and later the Romantics and the Naturalists. Between the Modernists and the Edwardians, the Edwardians and the Victorians, and on and on. There has always been some degree of conflict over just how exalted the role of the individual ought to be in our art, and whether we should place the primary emphasis of our fiction upon the social or the personal dimension.
There has always been some degree of argument over how instructive our fiction ought to be. For much of the novel’s early life, it was held up as a form for moral instruction. This, I believe, had to do with the novel’s other primary function of entertainment, which needed to be justified in some way. But as the novel progressed and the cultures into which it was embedded changed, this emphasis on explicit moral instruction receded—but did not disappear entirely. As a result, the novel has always had an anxiously contradictory character.
I believe somewhere in here lies the origin of our anxiety about the didactic. That in passages that seem to express some moral idea or set of moral permutations, we instinctively tense up and recoil. We do not want to be told how to feel or what to think about certain situations. We turn away from what we consider flat characters and flat moral situations. In this, we espouse another modern virtue: complexity. Consider how often you have heard in workshop phrases like: one-note, one-dimensional, flat character, round character, needs more nuance, a moment of complexity, a beat where they’re nice so we can see the contrast. We are told that for a novel or a story to be of quality, it must provide a credible humanness to even its most unlikable characters. They can’t be just a villain.
The idea that every person is the hero of their own story and has some secret, unilluminated interior realm that might, just might, provide some beautiful, complex reasoning as to their actions is not an unsympathetic notion. I understand why, when faced with an incomprehensible act like a mass shooting at a church or an elementary school or a movie theater, carried out by someone who seems perfectly ordinary, we might reach for some greater reason. We assume always that there must be a reason. Not a cause but a reason, which implies deep, considered thought, and that the person has arrived at this incomprehensible act only after a great deal of consideration.
When, for example, we hear about child abuse or sexual violence, we assume that there is some darker reason behind the act. And when we cannot discern a reason, we ascribe the act to irrationality, to madness. It sometimes feels as if we live in a world where it is unfashionable to simply say that there are evil people. Instead, we focus on the act. There are no evil people, just evil acts. No one is all bad. Surely, they have a mother who loves them, a kind neighbor who sees the best in them. We fixate on this as though it were some sort of unresolvable tension. We salivate like starving dogs for the beautifully mundane backstories of monstrous people, and we gesture to the kindergarten photos of killers and war criminals with a manic excitement, in ecstasy over how normal they seem.
This delusion, this weird fixation on the banality of evil, always trying to decompress the intensity and scope of the act as if literature could not contain a full accounting of man’s capacity for horrible acts. We encourage ourselves and our students to write coolly about the things that burn them up. We tell them, back off here, let it just be complex and messy, let it get weird. We inspire in them a fear of the melodramatic. A fear of being considered over-the-top.
I used to think that this was simply good artistic practice. I have now come to view it as a moral failing, and as I look around at myself and my contemporaries, I feel a great despair that ours is a literature incapable of being able to speak the name of evil. We have now a literature of victimhood and complaint, in which no one is truly to blame because there is always some mysterious force lurking just out of sight and reach to account for what we’ve done and said and what has been done and said to us.
In one view, Lucy Letby makes for an ideal protagonist in this kind of fiction. She is a seemingly normal blond woman and a perpetrator of morally indefensible acts. Her text message exchanges reveal her to be a lonely, vaguely desperate sort of person. She had a stressful job. She had some friends but only saw them semi-regularly. You can almost imagine the fragmentary little novel—about two-hundred-twenty pages’ worth of her text messages and emails—in which her crimes appear in the margins, very subtly. Or you can imagine the tightly paced suburban thriller she might helm. Regardless of the style or tone of the novel, I believe that in both iterations, Letby’s interiority would remain a mystery because no author wants to commit to the page a mind working actively toward an evil act. No one wants to write about the exact thoughts of this blond woman at the precise moment she texts an attending doctor something flirty after having just injected insulin into a dying infant.
To do that would require an ironic or satirical tone. To take it head-on as realism would defy the imagination. The reader, in contact with such a text, would almost immediately demand to know what she was really thinking. Which is to say a reader would expect the author to prosecute the character for their acts, resulting in a fragmented or distorted interiority. Letby’s frantic days and nights on the neonatal ward rendered in the shimmering haze of To the Lighthouse or in the tight, terse details one finds in The Department of Speculation. One can almost imagine the banal fever-dream, the little anecdotes swimming in white space detailing trips to the restroom, to the corner market, to the park, all to offer something, anything, that explains how an ordinary person might be brought to such an act.
Readers want to feel empathy for their protagonists. We must be able to identify with them in some way—not in the sense of “relatability” but in the sense that a character’s life on the page must speak to certain unspoken, underlying structural rules about how we know life to be. A flash of the remarkable, but nothing more.
I am reminded of a chapter from Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, titled “Innocent Amusements.” The essay scrutinizes abolitionist John Rankin’s account of witnessing a slave auction. In writing to his brother, Rankin describes how imagining that his wife and children were the people being whipped and treated like property allowed him to imagine just how brutal the conditions of slavery were. This feels like a novelist at work, no? By placing himself in the position of other people, and mapping his own experience onto this imagined experience, Rankin can begin to understand the toll of such a vicious institution upon the lives of a subjugated people. And in telling his brother while using language that closes the remove and then allows the brother to imagine himself through Rankin and his family—as also standing on that auction block being appraised and sold—Rankin creates a chain of empathy that hopefully will cause the story of these people to echo down the line and out into broader society.
I have heard this described and have described it myself as the craft and reason for storytelling. But Hartman’s analysis reveals why this is, at best, a tricky prospect.
Hartman writes:
So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other’s pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution, the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for abasement.
The effort to counteract the habitual indifference to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration. Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin’s pages, this recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making the slave’s suffering legible.
This rendering of readerly empathy outlined here seems to describe how fiction is received today. If something horrible acts upon a character, the reader can sometimes feel as though the author is punishing some innocent little doll baby with whom the reader has overidentified. The character has become a de facto stand-in for the reader, so the character carries this burden of readerly expectation. Thus, for a character to feel real, we shave down the contours of their lives and their interiority until they match what readers know of their own flow of thoughts and life events. I believe that this accounts for what feels to me like a decline in character in contemporary fiction.
When I first began to go to readings and reading interviews in the late 2010s, many of the writers I most admired started saying the same thing over and over: I’m interested in capturing consciousness on the page. Laura van den Berg. Garth Greenwell. Ben Lerner. Rachel Cusk. Eimear McBride, Teju Cole. Sheila Heti. They all said this, or some version of it. I didn’t know then that these writers were merely copying Sebald and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. This was different, naturally, from the last generation of writers to try to capture Joyce, which resulted in works of intense formal variation. This new set of writers, starting from about 2015 or so, until the recent-ish present, stopped trying to capture the form of consciousness and seemed to fixate upon capturing the feel of consciousness—the ways a mind drifts and turns its focus upon different, seemingly mundane things. The subjects of their novels were not new. They were writing about people being enmeshed in the moral matrix of contemporary life and its sundry alienations and isolations. They were writing about sex and art and people who think a lot. Their books had very little physical presence in them but felt deeply, strangely alive because of the whirring of their narrative intelligence. When you stepped into one of those novels, it seemed as though you were holding your hand over a set of electric coils and feeling the heat coming off. But what set them apart was the interest in the interior world. Their stage of conflict, reconciliation, and synthesis was not occurring in the exterior world or even between characters themselves. The drama of the novels of which I speak pertained exclusively to the evolution of thought itself. The characters were in conflict with themselves, with their lives, with their memories, with time and place, but always the resolution of the conflictions took them into deeper accord with themselves rather than with an outside world or set of systems. The relation was not between the character and, in Lawrence’s phrase, the characters’ circumambient universe, but between one aspect of the character and some other aspect of the character. I have said this before, but something happened in the 2000s, and the outside world lost its coherence. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe it was the cratering of the economy. Maybe it was the looming climate crisis and the perpetual threat of the end of the world. But it truly did seem that there was, in that period, a renewed interest in the power of subjectivity to shape reality. The consensus was dead.
It is for this reason that character died. How can there be such a thing as character in a novel if our narrators have no belief in the idea of a coherent world? In the novel of consciousness that has defined our time, there are no characters. It’s all vapor, a consciousness gently misting through rooms. No one wants to believe in a narrator strong enough to say how a person is. Because no one believes they know how a person is. We can’t imagine such a thing as a character being stable from morning to the afternoon. We can’t imagine a personality being described, defined, articulated in words. Consequently, our novels only speak of what they have direct authority over, which is the drama of the self.
To be clear, I do not mean to lay this at the feet of a relatively small cohort of novelists working in English language literature for only a span of a few years. I am aware that this tradition stretches back as far as the invention of the novel itself. But it is true that the dominant subject of the contemporary novel is the self. Either becoming a self. Or losing a self. Or describing a self. Novels that dare to shine their light exteriorly are called commercial or cheesy or bourgeois. Novels that look inward and have a little dash of formal variation, novels that exist outside of the direct mimetic capturing of ordinary life—those are called great novels and are exclusively published by Fitzcarraldo.
But to me, all I can feel is fear. A fear of doing too much. Being too bold. Being too direct. Being too on the nose. A fear of the melodramatic. Of the plainspoken. A fear of saying how people and things are, and can be. We fear it for a great many reasons—reasons of taste, reasons of commercial success, reasons of political persecution, reasons of privacy—but we do fear it just the same.
This is never more evident to me than in matters pertaining to evil, but we must go beyond that. We must go beyond secular defaults, the received moral schemas that we put into our fiction without thinking. We must set these aside and begin to make real choices about the values that underpin the worlds of our creation. What our characters believe and value and feel. They need not be theists. They need not worship a god. Or a single God. But a moral universe with no evil is not a living world. It is dead. A ghost star that casts a false light.