http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2459
(((Contemporary novels and contemporary politics...
These literateurs are all pretty good commenters, in their chaste, gimme-a-Nobel kinda way, but this Norman Rush guy is especially good. I feel the same way, Norman!
It's all about ink-on-paper while the smoke is rising.)))
Link: reflections - bookforum.com / in print.
(...)
"Today, we live in Late Capitalism, a world system characterized by parliamentary styles of governance, accompanied by the undeclared hegemony of the limited-liability corporation and by the evaporation of any significant advocacy for an alternative system based on collective ownership—which was the core of the radicalism prevailing among political novelists until just about the other day. Protest against the existing economic order goes on in the form of fragmented populism, of ethical campaigning against assorted injustices. Maybe this sort of resistance will turn out to be a good thing—who knows? The great impediment to the absolute consolidation of Late Capitalism is the development of militant, chiliastic, antimodernist Islamic movements. Might Islam and Late Capitalism reach some grand accommodation? It’s under way in the realm of international banking, for instance, and tepid forms of Guided Democracy (as in Indonesia under Sukarno) are getting tryouts in some of the more forward-looking Muslim autocracies.
"The above might be a rich scene for a political novelist to anatomize and dramatize, no doubt, but there is a problem. And the problem is . . . doomsday. The environmental crisis, a mosaic of threats to human flourishing that grows more complex by the day (global warming, acidification of the seas, water shortages . . . ), has a tendency to throw a dark shadow over the human arena. This crisis, it seems, is a summary outcome of humankind’s most innocent endeavors, to get and spend and to tame the planet. And the doomsday shadow tends to make the social struggles traditionally addressed by political novels seem parochial, in a way. It’s tough, these days, for what Lawrence called the one bright book of life...."
