Life During Wartime:
Political Fiction in the 21st Century

Other bookblogs have generated much conversational heat lately talking about the state of the political novel; I've mostly steered clear because it's not a field in which I have much insight. But I'm happy to point out other people's thoughts on a subject. Ray Conlogue of The Globe and Mail reports from a Montreal writer's festival where a panel of writers discussed the topic; one comment that struck me came from Maggie Helwig:

"So I don't agree that literature doesn't have any effect on history. It does make things happen. Unfortunately, the things that it makes happen are evil."

She speaks particularly about racist literature in Serbia and Yugoslavia, as it pertains to her novel, Between Mountains, which features an American-born Serbian war criminal, but then of course I immediately thought of The Turner Diaries, which by that standard might well be the most influential American political novel in ages. Ultimately, I don't suppose it's any surprise that the panelists seemed to settle upon a fiction that holds a mirror up to modern injustices without grand speeches about who is to blame or what is to be done.