The Patterson Affair: Tribalism Run Amok Once Again

Charlie Sykes passed along an account of l’affaire Patterson on Monday in his Morning Shots newsletter (Identity Politics Comes for a Best-Selling Novelist). Richard North Patterson writes legal thrillers. Of his twenty-two published novels, sixteen made the New York Times bestseller list. In January his agents began submitting his new novel, the first in nine years, to publishers. Patterson writes that his agents agreed that Trial stood with his strongest work but warned that he would be "running into trouble" as a white author writing about black characters. The warning proved prescient.

Despite being forewarned Patterson was agitated when, in his description, the novel "was repeatedly rejected by major publishers because as a white author I chose to write about some of our most vexing racial problems—voter suppression, unequal law-enforcement—through the prism of three major characters, two of them Black." He responded with an essay for The Wall Street Journal (Why My New Novel About Racial Conflict Ran Into Trouble) and an email to The Bulwark, to which he has been a contributor.

I have not read Patterson due to my implicit bias against blockbuster novels. For all I know he is a fine writer; or maybe a hack who, as Harlan Ellison used to put it, could not write his way out of a pay toilet. According to promotional hyperbole at Barnes & Noble, Trial "explores America’s most incendiary flashpoints of race" in "a propulsive narrative that culminates in a nationally televised murder case." This and the synopsis that follows do not draw me in, but that is not the point.

I read Patterson’s account as capsulized by Sykes with interest but wariness. It is plausible. It is also possible that Patterson misjudged the quality of his new novel and was wrong to infer that the racial aspect was the reason for rejection. The alternative though is that "roughly 20 major imprints of New York publishers" rejected a manuscript by an author with Patterson’s record of commercial success because of a deficiency in literary merit or because he somehow lost his touch with the legal thriller genre. This seems more than a tad unlikely.

As it turns out, we learn from the Wall Street Journal essay that Patterson did not need to infer anything. He provides examples of publishers who made quite clear their reasons for not taking the book. One editor advised that he would be "rightly criticized" for writing it, another that she only cared to hear from '"marginalized voices," and that he was, quelle horreur, "too liberal for white people and too white for Black people." The coup de grace, perhaps, was the call from the head of a “major publishing conglomerate" to tell his agent that she adored the book but needed to "consult the young people who worked for her. That ended that."

Not once did anyone suggest that any aspect of the manuscript was racially insensitive or obtuse. Rather, the seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters.

An observation by Zadie Smith cited by Patterson cuts to the heart of it: "The old—and never especially helpful—adage 'write what you know' has morphed into something more like a threat: 'Stay in your lane.'"

Patterson writes that he has no wish to be an aggrieved white "decrying so-called reverse discrimination."

The core question applies to anyone who dares to write fiction: Should empathy and imagination be allowed to cross the lines of racial identity? This goes to the heart of what kind of literature we want, and what kind of society we aspire to be.

People are free to dislike any book on whatever basis they choose. But to repress books based principally on authorial identity is illiberal, intolerant, ignorant of the ways of creativity and inimical to the spirit of a pluralist democracy.

The Journal essay is thoughtful and well argued. Worth reading in its entirety.

Patterson found an independent publisher, Post Hill Press, for Trial, due to be available in June. Installments of the book will be released twice a week over the next seven weeks at Patterson’s Substack platform, Richard’s Substack, where he discusses the book at some length in A Q+A with Richard North Patterson. Readers may find a 2019 article at The Atlantic of interest: I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant.

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Germany. She appeared on my radar via her essay Longing for Reconciliation in the April 6 issue of The New York Review. Her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019) addresses the legacy of American racism through the lens of Germany’s confrontation with its past. An earlier book, Evil in Modern Thought (2002), published in the shadow of 9/11 and which I have just begun, asks if a history of thought about evil can provide a framework for thinking about the present. She proceeds on the assumption that "examining the history of philosophy can be a way of engaging in philosophy itself." Her goal is "to use different responses to the problem of evil as a means of understanding who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment." Names appearing in chapter titles give a glimpse of ground she covers: Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegl and Marx, Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, Freud.

Neiman’s new book is Left Is Not Woke (2023). In her essay The true Left is not Woke at UnHerd, she takes up issues that happen to be relevant to the Patterson affair. Neiman prefers the word "tribalism" when discussing what is commonly referred to as identity politics: "Tribalism is a description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else." This is, she reminds us, an idea as old as the Hebrew Bible.

As for woke:

The woke discourse today is confusing because it appeals to emotions traditional to the Left: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs can be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions — usually expressed as self-evident truths — that ultimately undermine them.

She critiques notions of universalism "now under fire on the Left because…[they are] conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests."

It is now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was designed to disguise Eurocentric views which supported colonialism. These claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn the Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism—on the basis of universalist ideas. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they are echoing a tradition that goes back to 18th-century thinkers, who risked their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, to defend those ideas.

A thinker worth reading, ideas worth pondering. Tomorrow’s mission is to hit Powell’s downtown and purchase Left Is Not Woke to take up when I finish Evil in Modern Thought.