An American Writer In France Leaves Me With Food For Thought

 It is early in the morning, I woke before the alarm. My eyes are watering because I stewed a pork loin overnight in the slow cooker. This is how I came to read Gabino Iglesias's Does America Still Care About Authors? from Esquire.

As the beautiful green of the French countryside rolls by my train window, I talk with Marie-Laure Pascaud, the public relations person from Sonatine who’s taking care of me and making sure I’m where I need to be while in France. As Marie-Laure and I talk about books in a mix of broken English and French, she tells me my book is one of her favorites and the darkest thing she’s read since Gregory McDonald’s The Brave, a novel about a desperate man who agrees to star in a snuff film for a lot of money. My ego soars, of course, but then we slide into a deep conversation about how crime fiction is a mirror that some of us hold up to society and how the French love that. In The Devil Takes You Home, the novel that brought me to France this time, I write about poverty, injustice, and racism while critiquing our broken healthcare system. Back home, those things get me hate mail, angry comments on social media, and many one-star reviews. In France, those things make me an intellectual and get me invited to important events. I begin to understand that in France, writers are indeed treated differently.

Kh and I talk a lot about how Americans do not read. Maybe they never did, but then, maybe they did -

Once upon a time, authors were treated like celebrities in the United States. Authors like Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, and Mark Twain were known by everyone, even nonreaders. That’s no longer the case. Sure, a lot of people recognize notable authors like Roxane Gay and James Ellroy, but how many living writers could appear on the cover of Time and be immediately recognized by everyone?

The French see the crime novel as showing the real America. I have thought that for a very long time.

We are about to re-elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. A man who refuses to read, a man with no discernable intellectual talents. We have a population enamored with the fantasies of pro wrestling and reality TV. Christian nationalism and other varieties of racism are on the rise, showing a lack of imagination and empathy in the face of their neuroses and fears.

Listen, I would love to be on the cover of Time for a plethora of reasons. Seeing some of my favorite writers on magazine covers would make me very happy, but a lack of mainstream recognition is not the issue here. The problem is that the role of the public intellectual in America has declined so much it has almost disappeared. We are living in the time of rampant, celebrated, unabashed anti-intellectualism. It's bizarre to think that most people expect authors to write entertaining narratives and not comment on timely topics. After all, authors are storytellers, and the role of storytellers has been the same since the beginning of time: we try to make sense of our experiences on the page, and then we do our best to communicate our process and share what we learned. Authors are keen observers, which makes them the perfect chroniclers for our collective history. In France, that's celebrated. In the United States, it's mostly shunned or ignored.

We could be better, we should be better. Theodore Dreiser came out of Terre Haute, Indiana, and shone a light on the seediness of American culture. That was over a hundred years ago. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Chester Himes showed us white people the irrationality and hypocrisy of racism. Our political leaders, the Fox News crew, get rewarded by attacking unnamed elites. That makes those who are fearful of books and ideas drooling like Pavlov's dogs. Those fearful, even hateful, about critiques of their own lives in this country are those who know they have not the talent or the ambition to rise above their own sloth. Like pigs in the mud, they roll around and want nothing more than to enjoy their mud. That is not a great problem for pigs, they are not trying to bring a whole nation down into the muck. All I can think of as a solution is to encourage the functionally illiterate to liberate themselves - to read, to think, to overthrow the chains they have placed on themselves. Maybe be more French? Take a risk, challendge yoursleves - read.

"The French consume more books,” said Joy. “You look at the statistics and the French are always in the top ten well-read countries in the world. They’re typically somewhere around number seven. The U.S., on the other hand, we’re lucky to make the top 30. People just don’t read here. In this country, one third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives."

People just don't read here. Now that I’ve had my own experience in France, those words haunt me. What is the role of the author as a public intellectual in a country where so many people don't read? The truth is, I have no clue… but I'm sure the answer is somewhere out there, and probably the only way to find it is to read a lot.

sch 7/11