Good if not great literary fiction is all about presenting societies and individuals as they really are and not as they should be.
Realistic literature or "naturalism" began with great authors like Gustave Flaubert, Stendahl, Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Jane Austen, and the Brontë Sisters. Charles Dickens accelerated the concept with his unvarnished and unsentimental depictions of brutish British society in Victorian times.
Imagine how ridiculous
David Copperfield and
Oliver Twist would read if Charles Dickens altered entire scenes so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the Establishment and those who wanted to pretend that debtor prisons, child labor and exploitation, and domestic violence did not exist along with overwhelming urban poverty and crime-ridden slums.
Imagine what sentimental whitewashed hogwash Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird would read like if she did not mention the segregated and ultra-racist Deep South of her childhood and its grotesque criminal justice system that often turned into lynch mobs.
I should be applauded for my truthful portrayal in
Sohlberg and the Gift of the highly dysfunctional Norwegian society that led to the massacre of 77 innocents by anti-immigration murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Instead my proverbial cast pearl landed in a couple of muddied minds of the unthinking knee-jerk Politically Correct.
I'm writing this article because my publisher has received a coordinated campaign of repetitive "blank form" complaints from "readers" who forget that I only report what I see and hear in Norway on the backlash against immigrants and multiculturalism and how these two "social institutions" are now widely recognized across Europe as failed experiments. They attack me the messenger because they are in denial that Norway is not one happy racially-integrated socialist utopia.
The maligning complainants ignore the FACT that Oslo has a crime rate hundreds of times greater than New York City and that most crime comes from immigrants. They ignore Europe's and Norway's well-documented honor killings and genital mutilation of Muslim women by their own radicalized and backward men.
Should I please sentimental and Politically Correct readers who are angry that the messenger reports the truth? Should my books lie and paint Norway as a happy racially integrated family? Did William Faulkner and Harper Lee and Mark Twain paint the Deep South as some idyllic plantation for all whites and all blacks?
Should Cormac McCarthy in the
Border Trilogy (
All the Pretty Horses, etc.) paint Mexico as a happy and sleepy good-natured Fiesta-land of three amigos? Should his
Blood Meridian or
The Road masterpieces read like
Little House on the Prairie or
Wizard of Oz?
Good if not great literary fiction must reflect the times we live in. For example, that's why I recently finished reading (and loved)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. He perfectly describes the inner turmoil of a Western-educated and Americanized Pakistani immigrant after 9/11. His mild character seethes inside with rage at his adopted USA for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Should Mr. Hamid not write a truthful account of what Americanized Pakistani Muslims feel against the USA or would that destroy the "hands across the world" fantasy of the Politically Correct crowd?
It's a sad reflection on modern Western society that any author's honest and unvarnished portrayal of any society is instantly mob attacked by lemming-like slogan-repeating robots because reality does not fit the one-size-must-fit-all Fantasy Island society of the Very Politically Correct.
