Did neoliberal capitalism kill morality in the novel? Absent God and a traditional sense of what’s wrong and right, the market stepped in some fifty years ago1, or, more accurately, some very wealthy people let the market’s rapacious logic take over the world. What’s the protagonist of a novel to do in a systems world, where any individual action is dwarfed by vast impenetrable levers of power? On the lower end of the class spectrum, how can the precarious worker do anything besides work from paycheck to paycheck and do their damndest to survive? So we have novels of postmodern consciousness at best giving us necessarily muted victories within the various echelons of power, as in some of the post-Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon novels, or, more popularly, bootstrap-porn boy-come-good narratives as one is lifted out of poverty and its attendant miseries. There’s also a vein of redressive fiction that rights the wrongs of the present by exposing the ills of the past, a la Miriam Toews’ Women Talking or Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise or a whole host of other post #MeToo novels. But none of these types of story seem to have the moral weight of your Dostoevskys, Melvilles, Eliots, or Morrisons, where the fate of humankind seems tied up with the fate of the novel’s characters. Where are the grand novels on weighty themes with decisive moral actions? They just don’t make ‘em like they used to anymore – factory got shut down, venture capital moved in, whole thing got shipped overseas…
Perhaps, then, the only way to sneak morality back into the novel is through the inverse: the downsized, quotidian novella of a simple and truly good act. Claire Keegan’s 2021 book Small Things Like These isn’t the only book that could make a claim for a new kind of moral novel, but in its precise measuredness, its rigorous simplicity, and in the muted palate against which goodness emerges, it plots out a new course for the novel in the 21st century, a course which at once recognizes the limits of individual action while also reveling in the pyrrhic act of goodness. Good, evil, the future of the world: it’s still at stake, just spread across more disparate, and more minute, battlefields.
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