The president’s summer reading list has come out and, in a predictable Pavlovian response, rightwing pundits are jumping all over it. The most outrageous reaction was from a National Review Online writer, who blasted him for reading fiction.
The books that Obama bought at a Martha’s Vineyard bookstore are Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, David Grosman’s To the End of the Land, Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante, and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone. The NRO writer opined,
Assuming that Brave New World and Frost are for his daughters, this leaves six books that are presumably for presidential consumption, and they may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed, for a number of reasons. First, five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.
Out of touch with reality?! This is a response to literature that Victorian poet Matthew Arnold would describe as “Philistine”—which is to say, ignorant of art’s deep wisdom. We should be celebrating the fact that Obama is reading fiction. We want our presidents to be balanced and grounded, and good fiction helps one remember what is really important in life.
It is only too easy for a president to get lost of all the “stuff” that’s going on—stuff like unemployment and credit downgrade and rising deficits and Libya-Egypt-Palestine-Syria-Israel-Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and European financial meltdown and terrorist threats to the U.S. and climate change and challenges to the EPA and immigration and . . . The question is, how can he hold on to his center in the midst of all this? Literature helps one keep one’s head when all around are losing theirs (to quote Kipling). So thank goodness Obama is reading fiction.
For instance, I’m glad that Obama is reading Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, which is the one novel on the list that I know (other than Brave New World). It is about doctors and nurses servicing the poor in an Ethiopian hospital during a time of upheaval. I can see why Obama would be drawn to such a book since his mother was driven by such a desire to serve and so is he. The book acknowledges the difficulty of engaging in such service and the flaws in even exemplary characters. If Obama is looking for ways to revitalize his commitment to his ideals and find strength to get him through, Cutting for Stone could be just the book he needs.
But this is just to say why Obama might like the novel. I’m not going to analyze what the book says about him until after he reads it. It’s hard enough to use reading lists to gain insight when people single them out as favorites, and while I’ve done so several times (with Obama, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Jared Lee Loughner, Anders Breivik, and American presidents in general), I’m always careful to acknowledge that it’s a speculative process. Until one knows (1) more about that person and (2) exactly which characters and passages he/she is responding to and how, one doesn’t have much to go on.
A reading experience can indeed tell us a lot about a person. Sometimes my students have major breakthroughs once they and I figure out the personal reasons that draw them to a certain work. But it can require sustained conversations to get to this understanding.
If the National Review writer were alone in his narrow view of novels, I wouldn’t even bother to address him. Unfortunately, there are far too many people in our society who see literature as little more than an extra. Thus my need to write today’s post.
Two Addenda
I had forgotten, when I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom last month (see my post here), that it was last summer’s reading for Obama. I wonder if the book’s attack on mountain type removal (one of the most horrific instances of environmental devastation that I know) is related to the recent decision of the EPA to ban the practice. Perhaps not since the ban should be a no-brainer given that MTR pollutes all the surrounding ground water and produces sludge that can’t be disposed of. Nevertheless, it went through my mind that there might be a connection.
I certainly hope that the novel helped boost the president’s awareness of habitat destruction. More negatively for leftist activists, the novel also caricatures two anti-population explosion lefties in ways that might support Obama’s suspicion of ideologues on the left. Obama is more interested in practical problem solving than Quixotic stances. On the other hand, maybe he secretly enjoyed the scene where the father decides that he is done with playing nice with the enemy to further his own cause and commits career suicide by going on a rant. The character gets fired, but a video of his harangue goes viral and he develops a following and a new career.
On another subject, I’d be interested in hearing from high school teachers why dystopian novels like Brave New World are so often taught in high school. I remember being assigned Huxley’s work and also Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Furthermore, while not set in the future, the always popular Lord of the Flies also plays with alternate realities. Is it because high school students are beginning to question the world they inhabit—a world that used to be defined by their parents—so exercises in shaking up the familiar take advantage of their questioning? Just wondering.
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5 Comments
My students are developing their own world view when I teach them junior year. Many of them recognize for the first time that they are disconnected not only from their parents, but also from the world they see around them. They suddenly see our errors and can label them! The dystopian books make it concrete, give them a way to categorize what they don’t like and will do better. I am dragged down by the weight of their YA dystopian novels as well, but they can’t seem to get enough. Just as they distance themselves from their parents, they seems to need to step away from the world all adults have made too. Though I do not teach college, I have always hoped that the next stage happens then: they begin to imagine their world as it could be.
This is very useful, Leslie. I can relate to this dragged down feeling–I remember the feeling of being weighted down by those novels when I was in high school, a time when pessimism seems fashionable. You’ve given me great insight into why I felt that way.
I can’t speak for all college teachers but I can say that, in my classes, I’m all about students taking responsibility for the issues in their lives. I get impatient when they play the victim card or melodramatically lament the force of circumstance. I see literature providing clarity that can be a spur to self actualization, even in the face of formidable odds. Thus, to give the first example that comes to mind, I encourage them to see King Lear as someone who, even after having wasted his entire life and destroyed himself and those around him, learns to rise above selfishness and find love. They like the idea that Lear’s few authentic hours outweigh all the years that came before and come to see the play as a call to reexamine their own lives and behaviors and reorder their priorities.
Or to mention another example, I point out that Beowulf doesn’t stay stuck at the bottom of the mere where Grendel’s mother lives or in the dragon’s cave. He figures out what resources he needs to extricate himself and takes action–action which sometimes (when he’s fighting the dragon) means letting go of the desire to be self-sufficient and accepting help from others.
But this may be more me than all college teachers. One finds a range of approaches to life in college, just as one does in high school.
I like Leslie’s comment too. I’m not convinced that Brave New World is for Sasha, though — it’s hardly the most elegantly written piece of literature, but it’s a great satire of the kind of state that certain demagogues claim that a hyperpowerful government would like to create. Maybe Obama is reminding himself of what these people seem to think he’s all about (as ludicrous as those claims seem to be, with respect to his own moderate stances, IMO).
Thanks for the post/thesis, Robin. I wish more politicians would really read, instead of selecting a booklist of things comprised only of what they want their acolytes to see them reading.
I have also wondered why so many dystopian novels make the high school reading lists. In Slovenian, 1984 and Brave New World are also on the list.
Leslie, you’ve made these selections make perfect sense! Thanks.
Robin, I posted this on my Facebook page. Imagine complaining because the President is a well-rounded reader. What a world.
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[...] novels of prominent people in order to see what insights we can gain. (See previous posts on Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and a range of presidents.) I was therefore [...]