A Cancellation Trilogy
Jews take the lead in a new literary art form: The cancel-culture novel
Nothing stifles great art like censorship, whether through overt acts by government censors or through acts of pillow-smothering by conformist claques eager to display their virtue. As far as the pillow-smotherers are concerned, it’s no secret that the mainstream publishing houses only look to publish work that conforms to a few preset narratives while robustly censoring anything that tweaks their puritanical orthodoxy. Starting in 2020, when thought-policing in creative fields peaked, publishing houses were often the first to “do the work” of acquiescing to cancellation mobs and dumping writers who didn’t immediately kowtow to the party line of the day, or simply didn’t check off the right identity boxes. This is not a surprise for an industry that is overwhelmingly made up of affluent liberal arts college-educated tote bag-carriers living in coastal metropolises.
Any writer worth their salt opposes any movement that seeks to curb free artistic expression, and this includes what we now call cancel culture—a term that is now said to be “of the right” but which describes something entirely real. The old cliché offered to new writers is “write what you know,” and any writer minted in this new milieu surely knows about cancel culture. Thus, it’s not a surprise that a new wave of writers has begun to write, often in metafictional tones, about authors stifled by the specter of cancellation. And while some are indeed right wing (which didn’t seem to hurt the fiction of Saul Bellow and Mario Vargas Llosa), others are leftists and old-school liberals of a bygone time and place where free speech was held to be central to progressive intellectual life.