One could argue that all three books are political fiction about the difficulty of writing political fiction in a culture where empathy looks like a fraught and uncertain proposition. Those books are about many things, but at heart they are comedies of anxiety, inhabited by characters who struggle with their own lack of trust in their ability to truly know or help other people.
Bender’s The New Order (2018) come right to mind. Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Johannes Lichtman’s Such Good Work (2019), and Karen E. Is empathy a source of moral action, or a form of sentimental self-delusion? A product of strength, or weakness? Should it play a role in how we formulate government policy? Or is that inclination just a symptom of political decadence, a sign of American decline? Writers have responded to this debate by turning empathy into a subject matter for fiction, something to be circled and examined rather than simply invoked. politics has become tangled up with a larger cultural argument about the nature and value of empathy.
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