When Donald Trump won the presidency the first (and, one hopes, the last) time, I started work on a writing project immediately. You will remember the mantra that came from Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” In the Trump era, I was interested in lies. Even before Trump took oath, I was recording daily in my notebook one salient falsehood that the victorious candidate had placed in the public sphere. And soon I discovered that I was working on a novel which later became A Time Outside This Time (2021). This novel allowed me to process what was happening during the Trump rule; it also allowed me to fashion what felt like a protest against the bad fiction called fake news.
But what if Trump wins again in 2024? I can’t obviously start writing another novel. Or can I?
On April 27, 2020, Trump tweeted: “Fake news, the enemy of the people!” It appears in A Time Outside This Time. My narrator is writing a novel “about fake news and journalistic excavation of truth”— the narrator’s title of choice is, naturally enough, Enemies of the People. When the pandemic arrives, the World Health Organisation warns that what is also being unleashed is an “infodemic”. Satya, the narrator, in each successive chapter enters a new struggle to parse the truth. A riot during Satya’s childhood in Patna; an encounter with an alleged terrorist after 9/11; an interview with an informant in Bengal; a police shooting of a Black college student in the Hudson Valley; a lynching outside Delhi… the idea is to find a language and a form adequate to the task of representing what is taking place in the real world. Satya doesn’t always, or even ever, succeed; his wife, Vaani, a behavioural psychologist, has quite a few theories to explain why people do what they do. Those theories interest Satya but they don’t seem to capture the complexity of human life. Nevertheless, the events around him exert a pressure that results in Satya coming up with a story.
That particular need, the urgency — the desire to provide “a shimmering assault on the zeitgeist,” (which is how the New Yorker described my novel) — will not have diminished if Trump returns. However, this time around, I cannot imagine doing what I had started doing in the dying days of 2016. There seemed to be a narrative wholeness to the beginning and the ending falsehoods that marked the Trump presidency. On the author’s note at the end of A Time Outside This Time, I had referred to this: “The writing of this novel spanned a four-year period which coincided with an era of chaos that a report on Donald Trump in The New York Times characterised thus, ‘A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace,’ And ended on a lie in the words of Trump himself: ‘I won this election, by a lot!’ (Twitter, November 7, 2020, 10:36 am).” I find it exhausting to think that one could possibly be forced to open and close such circles once again.
When the pandemic was upon us, my friend Sloane Crosley got to the material first by writing an op-ed in The New York Times that seemed to say, on the surface, that we shouldn’t yet be writing about this new era that we had all now entered. We could make notes, though. I remember reading the Crosley op-ed when it came out — and continuing to work on my novel, not least because I distrust quick takes in op-eds. If there is a second Trump presidency, I hope interesting novels are written about it, even while our days and nights are still radioactive with a horrid orange glow. I appreciate fiction because, unlike an op-ed, fiction has greater scope for entertaining ambiguity and contradictions. It can be expansive and open possibilities (In comparison to novels, op-eds strike me as reductive and often bad-faith posturing). I imagine there will be fiction where some of the frisson of the real will sneak in through the invocation of a name or a current event; then, there will be others that even without invoking anything current will nevertheless carry the dread and the charge of what is still happening.
I have suddenly remembered how, during the lockdown, after several days of not writing fiction, a very short story had come to me out of nowhere. I was on my way to the grocery store when the outline of this brief fiction took shape in my mind. In the parking lot, still sitting in my car, I wrote a piece I titled “Essential Services”, about a young man and woman, masked and gloved, converging in a queue outside a liquor store. Only 12 people were allowed at a time inside. The young man is looking at the blond streaks of the woman in front. “You weren’t answering the phone last night,” the young woman said to him, turning. “Do you think it is easy for me to step out like this?” Her companion hadn’t stopped smiling under his mask ever since she arrived. He now said, “I’ve heard that the wait is longer in the line outside the CVS on South Hill Road. Your father must need his medicine. Let’s meet there tomorrow.”
I remembered the story, or the story about writing this story, because I think that is how it will be for me, as an artist, if Trump wins: I’ll feel that I’m in a lockdown, that a plague has spread across the country and maybe the world, that I must focus on survival, and, crucially, that a part of that survival is the ability to write about it — and that, as in the little story above, I must be able to imagine pleasure, perhaps even love, in the midst of the raging plague.
Kumar is the author, most recently, of the novel My Beloved Life. He teaches at Vassar College, New York.
