Twitter mobs ruin young-adult fiction again

Jennifer Senior used to be a book-review editor for the New York Times, but now she’s an op-ed editor. Her history at the paper has served her well in her new op-ed about the social media mobs who now police young-adult fiction (YAF) for ideological purity. (Click on screenshot).

What happened is that Kosoko Jackson, the author of a new book called A Place for Wolves, was forced by a Twitter mob to pull his accepted and already-printed book from the shelves.  The irony, as Senior points out, is that Jackson was not only black and gay, but had himself been one of those “sensitivity editors” who professionally vet this kind of fiction for purity.

You would have thought Jackson would learn to avoid putting himself into the shoes of characters of different ethnic or racial background, for that is the Number One Sin that gets YAF books damned by both sensitivity readers and the Outrage Police who descend en masse on works they don’t like. But when Jackson came to write his own book—a book that Senior thinks is flawed—he discovered the joys of imagination: he put himself in the shoes of people from Kosovo during the wars of the late 1990s. In particular, he made the two main characters Americans, though both are gay and one is black. The other characters are Albanians and Serbs, and one of them, an Albanian Muslim, is an evil character.

Despite the gayness and blackness, this just won’t do, because the Albanian Muslim was—horrors—not exemplary in every way. Muslims must be honored. And so the social media thugs descended. As Senior notes.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had — a reader who’d written an intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture — self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure. Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way: What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse, ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

How did Jackson get into this mess? Because he used his imagination, which is what fiction writers are supposed to do. And here Senior gets the dilemma of ideological purity tests exactly right:

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to create and dream — rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations — his natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience. Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities, guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing stuff for a living.

As I said, Senior, who read the book, didn’t like it: she found it clumsy and poorly paced. But its flaws could have been better vetted by the market than by a bunch of censorious, virtue-flaunting literary thugs. Senior ends her description and critique with these powerful words:

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways. Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it — or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first.

This kind of social-media demonization is only getting worse over time, and I don’t know how to combat it. I do know where it comes from: from the entitlement, fragility, and purity culture infecting American college campuses, which now, as college students enter the job market, is seeping into both politics and art. And its effects are not salubrious. It’s time for all of us to stand up against it, even if it means you get called a bigot or an “alt-righter”. Kudos to Senior for having the guts to call out the call-out culture.

h/t: Greg