n the age of rampant MFA programmes in fiction on American campuses and in the wider literary landscape (in sync with the dumbing down of the American mind in myriad other ways), as the gatekeepers insist on clarity and uncluttered syntax, it was stimulating to have stumbled upon Christine Schutt’s prose. Her flow and style, its inventiveness—at times poetic, often lyrical–and its tiptoeing across interiority and the world around the main character, Isabel, are heartening.

The argument in favour of clarity (sometimes known as “write what you know”) is that it saves the writer and stops them from entering a territory that a piece of fiction cannot grapple with; it makes it easier on the eye of the editor, the ear of the agent and the heart and mind of the wider (mostly white) American audience. The argument against it, of course, posits that writers should venture into the unknown, risk failure, embrace imperfection and muddy the master narrative.

For example, most fiction writers will not have worked on any of the over 700 US military bases spread across the world, and by that logic, they must not write about the US as an imperialist, neo-colonialist entity. Or, to give another example, if an author has never worked for an arms manufacturing business, the IMF or the CIA, they are advised not to make it the topic of their fictional probe or critique. This modus operandikeeps most authors in line, and with practice, they get better at self-censorship.

Our system has figured out ways to reward such writers. There’s a reason why many South Asian American fiction writers are encouraged, perhaps subconsciously, to continue writing about the world they left behind long ago – the land for which the industry has appointed them as native informants – rather than the land where they actually live, shaping its present and future and rearing their children.

The divide between political and non-political writers is artificial, if not entirely non-existent. Anything an author writes – I’m strictly concerned here with fiction – is political, whether through inclusion or omission; even a fluffy romance. Now, strictly speaking in the American context, there is a peculiar type of writer who feels the pressure or need to showcase their liberal credentials by highlighting elements of bigotry, racism, injustice or ignorance.

When injecting liberal credentials, mastering the separation of the authorial voice from that of the character(s) becomes essential. The author takes liberties, entering and exiting a character’s “thinking jar” while dispensing with quotation marks. It is in this regard that Christine Schutt’sProsperous Friends becomes a bit more complex for the critic – and the reader, if you will.

The story revolves around a couple with literary and artistic goals. While Ned is bitter that, despite having an editor, he’s not getting the break he should have by now. Isabel, his wife whom he met at Columbia University and married soon thereafter, is more or less wasting away, unable to produce anything meaningful. With bourgeois tendencies, they are drawn to travel, parties and certain types of people – people with more money, artsy or otherwise.

Schutt makes it clear that Isabel’s marriage has been hitting road bumps, but her prose style allows layers of ambiguity as to whether Isabel, Ned, or both would be willing to do something about fixing their relationship. The plot thickens as Isabel accepts an offer from Clive, an artist acquaintance, to be his model while taking up residence at his manse nearby. Clive is a certified womaniser. His forever-loyal wife Dinah, who left her first husband for him, has known and tolerates his infidelity and is even kind to her husband’s sexual prey or object of fleeting desire.

One could say Dinah is the most interesting, even the most mature, character in the novel, though Schutt could have used her in a more complex way deserving of her high intellect and compassion. Ned, on the other hand, is in touch with and still attracted to his ex, who is married to Clive’s nephew, most likely for his money. Subplots are unnecessary but make the novel colourful nevertheless, if not interesting.

On the surface, either intentionally or otherwise, Schutt has offered her readers four apolitical, somewhat gullible characters who are unconcerned with the sorrows and hardships of the disadvantaged and downtrodden – the Global South of the world, the Third World, the world crushed under occupation, the weight of IMF or World Bank loans, Western interventions and the economies of countries such as Cuba or Iran, destabilisedthrough sanctions or coups. It is vaguely plausible that the author is arguing that she is merely exposing the current state of American affairs – a time and place where the educated, artistic minds have gone rotten, become self-absorbed, even pathetically unconcerned with the suffering of others, whose suffering is somehow connected to the privileged lives people in the West can afford to enjoy.

But if that is the case, it has been done carelessly, because to brush an entire spectrum with one wide brushstroke exposes a lesser writer – one who is smart enough to hit the right notes in the right places to be lauded by the gatekeepers of important book reviews, nominations, and awards, yet devoid of the needed depth.

So, what are we to make of a couple of hand-waving political awakenings? In one scene, Schutt superimposes her authorial thought onto Isabel as she reads about the “greater sorrows of others” and Rwanda and genocide, making the reader wonder how Isabel could move from “Rwanda to mulled wine and apples, but she was doing just that when Ned emerged . . .” What’s the point of letting the reader peer inside Isabel’s feeble mind when there is never an actual conversation about Rwanda or genocide between Isabel and Ned, or anyone else? To allow the reader the agency to decide which character is thoughtful and who is thoughtless?

A similar scene of fleeting compassion – whether concerning the author or the characters, no one can tell – occurs towards the end after Clive’s wife, Dinah, and Clive’s daughter, who is liked more by her stepmother than by her father, pay Isabel a visit at the place where the ex-muse has been overstaying Clive’s generosity. Sally, the daughter, and Isabel head out to an outdoor concert of “African and African American choral music,” where a huge crowd has gathered. It seems to Isabel that everyone is there, only for her to question a paragraph later, “where were the Black faces, the migrants who picked in the blueberry barrens?” Sally explains, “Haitians pick apples, and Mexicans pick blueberries . . . [t]he Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers.”

Any conversation on the topic evaporates from the consciousness of every character. The reader, thus, is forced to surmise that those weren’t really Isabel’s political thoughts or preoccupations. Fair enough. Let’s say the author felt an uncontrollable itch to flaunt, in politically difficult and divisive times, her left-leaning feelings, accentuating her liberal posture. But things get murky if we stick to this line of thought.

What are we to make of her brief encounter with a cab driver, who responds to Clive’s whistle like a dog, for example:

“The cab driver was on the phone speaking in a furious language, and Isabel was to get out of the cab, away from the close, coarse–too mortal–smells, his and her own. The cloudy partition, his impossible name. Only the turban helped. A Sikh.”

One wonders, one wonders. Help with what? To essentialise a Third World country person religiously? Mind you, those are not words coming out of Isabel’s mouth; Schutt implies that that’s what’s going on in Isabel’s mind – that she finds the sound of the language very unpleasant. It is not clear if the cab driver is furious or angry at the person on the phone, or whether the intrinsic nature of the language is unpleasant to the ear. What matters is that Schutt succeeds in painting a picture of an uncouth person, an immigrant, who was likely, but not certainly, speaking Punjabi – my mother tongue.

Being someone with aspirations to becoming a serious writer, one would hope to be more attentive, not dismissive, and certainly not unappreciative of the sounds of other languages, which enrich the canvas of American music. A better writer would take a scene like the one mentioned above and do something writer-ly with it. It is a missed opportunity. And the allusion to his impossible name? Give me a break, MsSchutt.

That paragraph above seems to share its DNA directly with Conrad’s unexamined racism, as pointed out by Chinua Achebe in An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The only gift – or call it a weapon – that an author has is language. To withhold it, or demean the sound coming out of the mouths of those who don’t look like you or speak a language you don’t understand, is cowardly and unimaginative.

Schutt’s biggest blunder is perhaps something quite common among White liberal American writers: normalising Israel. Very early on, Isabel tells Ned that she wants to go back home and… “then they were going home, the real one! Ned had his book, working title still a working title, Lime House Stories, and she had a guest book, a record of their guests at the real Lime House, the rental near Hampstead Heath. Its owners were in Israel.”

“Someday I want to go to Israel,” she said to Ned, then went back to the guest book.

From 1948 to 1966, Israeli Arabs lived inIsrael under military law. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 through pre-emptive strikes, it transferred that military law to the occupied territories. When Israel dismantled its unlawful settlements in Gaza, it enforced an illegal siege, which people have called an open-air concentration camp or the biggest jail in the world, thus maintaining the occupation. Israel has continued to rule the West Bank through military law since then. Not to mention how many times and how often Israel has broken international law; in 2021, Human Rights Watch, in its report titled A Threshold Crossed, found “that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity, of apartheid and persecution.”

Soon after, in 2022, Amnesty International, in a report titled Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, condemned Israel for practicing apartheid. But before both reports, a leading Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, had already labelled Israel an apartheid regime. Of course, what precedes all those reports is the book by our own President Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). The list of institutions and scholars who have pointed out that Israel is practicing apartheidis now quite long, not to mention other Nazi-esque, racially motivated colonialist practices, such as testing the latest weapons on the besieged population in Gaza.

Reading Schutt’sProsperous Friends, a reader is forced to ponder what kind of person, whether a writer or a character, would so casually utter the word “Israel” in such a sanitised manner, without an iota of awareness or conscience. Indeed, it is, again, a lost opportunity. A better, more nuanced writer would do something meaningful with it. Don’t just show a gun in the opening scene of a movie;do something with it as the story progresses. Here, the culprit is not Isabel but Schutt herself, who takes it upon herself to be a foot soldier in perpetuating a normalised, apolitical image of Israel as a regular place with regular people – by erasing apartheid, occupation, unlawful imprisonment, land dispossession and whitewashing its image as a settler colonial experiment, and so on.

Tragically, the unfolding of the genocide in Gaza is connected to how Western writers, filmmakers, artists and their acolytes, mostly white, have signalled, loud and clear, that they have Israel’s back regardless of its behaviour and blatant disregard for international law, pissing on the Geneva Convention. One reason among many why Israel, today, can get away with genocide is because a majority of white American writers refuse(d) to see Israel as a racially motivated oppressor. I had pointed out this tendency in earlier works as well, such as Shawn Rubenfeld’sThe Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone and Molly Antopol’sThe UnAmericans: Stories, to name a few.

Now, it would have been a daring and imaginative stroke if she had explored why the owner of the house Isabel rented had gone to Israel. Is he a settler? Does he join the IDF and humiliate Palestinians at checkpoints or terrorise and/or murder Palestinians in the occupied territories? Is he related to someone who bulldozes Palestinian homes?

Most American reviewers are ill-equipped to notice or engage with such issues as pointed out by this writer in otherwise serious or celebrated fiction. That’s why the burden of calling to task writers hell-bent on flexing the liberal posture muscle must fall on critics and writers of colour. Those who write from the margins, are anti-racist and anti-Zionist.

Now that many thousands of writers from the Western world have written a letter condemning Israel’s genocidal behaviour – a little too late – it proves the point. Had American fiction writers and artists of note, through their collective conscience, been loud and clear in seeing Israel through the lens of its victims, instead of regurgitating falsehoods given to them by the Zionist lobby, State Department, NYT, Fox or CNN, Israel would not have been able to get away with genocide.

For a writer of conscience, it is not a light thing to live with the insinuation that they might have been complicit in what’s been unfolding in Gaza now. The reasons why the genocide is occurring are not that much different from why we may, through our apathy and spineless liberal posture, end up with Trump – or Kamala, the abettors of genocide.

As a writer, you and I have to keep repeating: the struggle continues.

The writer is a librarian and lecturer in San Francisco. His last book was A Footbridge to Hell Called Love. His novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is due soon