I have an idea that our political meltdown will be good for art.
It imposes a new set of constraints, and for me constraints are liberating.
I was finished withMr.
Wanaporn Yangsiri
What was I supposed to say about this?
Parts of the novel feature a buffoonish American autocrat making outrageous promises and demands.
The whole thing is about a disastrous climate-change scenario.
All of it looked different in light of what had happened.
And yet I started writing it in the pre-Trump era, not long after I finished Mr. Eternity.
I thought we would look back and remember how strange it was that Donald Trump had run for president.
Wanaporn Yangsiri
Should it be about what had happened in some more particular way?
I decided to shift it forward, mostly because it was too sad to think of what wed lost.
That meant lots of changes.
After the election, for instance, I started calling legislators every day and checking the news obsessively.
They had to go from being disaffected young adults to angry informed citizens.
When General Flynn imploded, however, I started to think about another aspect of the problem.
The World is a Narrow Bridge wont be published until the spring of 2018.
He is unstable; there is a possibility that he is guilty of real crimes.
Nothing seems outside the range of possibility.
The novel had to avoid speaking to any specific policy issues.
But this was only the first page.
Many other pages follow, and there are many other problems of the same kind.
The characters occasionally see Trump on television, for instance.
After the election, I replaced them with things that Trump the president had said.
I recently heard him refer to the journalists in the White House press pool as very honorable people.
And what about all the time these characters spend in rural America?
How should they relate to the womans rustic North Carolina cousins, who would certainly have voted for Trump?
There are writers who will say that politics doesnt belong in literary art.
In the old days, I might have said so myself.
And yet, and yet, everything could change.
The whole world could change!
Trump reminds us that being human is an uncertain enterprise.
We are always at the mercy of something or other.
I also think its a better book nowsharper and more focused.
It imposes a new set of constraints, and for me constraints are liberating.
They force me to reexamine my assumptions and find new ways of saying what I want to say.
Anything that mixes up the Scrabble tiles is good.
Ive heard people joke that Trump really is making America great again because he has reawakened the America left.
By the same token, maybe he can make American literature great again too.
