Turn to fiction to appreciate #MeToo

It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism

In The Friend, Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, the narrator, a writing teacher, grumbles about her students’ personal essays on sexual violence. Always the same nouns, she complains to us (scar, bruise, blood), always the same verbs (choke, starve, scream). The dull, depressing sameness of these stories. Their horrifying number.

She has no way of knowing that she stars in a book that is part of a wave of its own: “#MeToo novels”, they’re called, these disparate stories of sex and power suddenly regarded as timely, and read through the lens of an unfolding movement — with happy results, I’m about to argue (irritating Nunez’s teacher, I imagine, and rather surprising myself).

It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism, nor will you find the numbing sameness Nunez’s narrator deplores — in fact, these books deliver us from numbing sameness. They are remarkably various, and they trouble debates that traffic in certainties. They come laden with confusion, doubt, subtlety — is it excessively earnest to call it truth?

The original “Me too movement” was created by the civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, out of her work with young women of colour who had experienced sexual abuse. Since the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke in 2017, the term has been adopted as a rallying cry for survivors of all kinds of gendered violence. The “#MeToo novel” shares this range; it has been applied to everything from Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, with its gentle May-December romance, to Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel History of Violence, which recounts a rape and attempted murder.

There is Anna Burns’s Milkman, set during The Troubles and awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize (“I hope this novel will help people think about #MeToo,” the judges’ chairman said). See also Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (called “an Iliad for the age of #MeToo” in a review in this newspaper), Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (a “Mennonite #MeToo novel”) and Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew (“the definitive #MeToo novel,” according to Entertainment Weekly). Reissues, like The Street, a 1946 novel by Ann Petry, are included in the category, as well as a rare #MeToo novel by a man, James Lasdun’s Afternoon of a Faun.

Recent feminist dystopias imagine the further erosion of reproductive rights (Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps, Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks). Several books feature charismatic, predatory teachers, including Nunez’s The Friend, Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Kate Walbert’s His Favorites. There are revenge fantasies (Naomi Alderman’s The Power), romance and young adult novels that grapple with consent — even a #MeToo western.

The best of these books are heretical where narratives of sexual violence are concerned. A History of Violence, His Favorites, Asymmetry, Trust Exercise, Those Who Knew, The Silence of the Girls, The Friend, Women Talking: Their titles run together in my mind, like fragments of a rumour I’ve heard too many times before, but the books topple conventional stories of heroes and victims. They exist as reminders of the kind of touchy ethical explorations the novel makes possible.

These novels occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition. In Trust Exercise, a woman called Karen (not her real name, she tells us) confronts her youthful relationship with a much older man and finds she cannot arrive at any comforting conclusions. She feels victimised but also entirely responsible. Her feelings for young women in similar situations are “violently mixed”; “these young women who made a bad judgement and now want to blame someone else”. She wants them to shut up but hates them for their silence; she wants them to move on but cannot forgive them if they refuse to take revenge. Where does this leave her? What should she do with her pain? (I advise against following her example. Mostly.)

#MeToo is a moment full of reappraisals — of beloved artists, public figures, ourselves. How do we respond to this feeling of unmooring? By tightening our grasp on what we have always known? By jettisoning one set of scripts for another? In Women Talking, based on a true story, the women and girls living in a fictitious Mennonite colony in South America called Molotschna discover that men from their community have been drugging and raping them for years. They gather in a hayloft, and decide what to do: Stay, leave, fight. Over the course of the novel, much of it written in dialogue of the plainest possible language, they ask what separates justice from punishment. They re-examine every one of their premises: “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?” one character says.

It’s a habit of mind this woman is talking about — a habit of scepticism toward the self, the ability and willingness to change your mind. These novels offer a kind of training in this way of being.

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