There is no contemporary fiction

New Statesman​

22-05-2025

I write contemporary fiction. Sometimes it's more contemporary than some people find entirely decent: I published a lockdown novel during lockdown and was bemused to find that for some critics and readers it was 'too soon', as if the major global event that had dominated everyone's lives for two years needed to be put away to mature like wine or cheese before we were allowed to make art with it. Who would ring the bell, I wondered, when it was time? Where are the gatekeepers of contemporaneity?
I have just published a novel with a subplot about European Jewish intergenerational trauma. The narrator is an Englishwoman living in the west of Ireland; I was interested in the literature of guilt and complicity, a major strand of post-colonial and postwar fiction but not much developed within these islands. My move from England to Ireland five years ago had made me more conscious of my Englishness than I had ever been, even though I was born in Scotland and grew up in a household divided between Russian-Jewish-American and Yorkshire allegiances. I wrote my PhD on British voyages of exploration in the 18th century, and so knowledge of imperialist art and colonial land-grabbing has been part of my thinking for decades. But I had not felt so personally implicated until arriving in Ireland.
My immediate love for particular places and landscapes – often geologically familiar from my Scottish and northern-English childhood – had complications, because English people's admiration of Irish land has, historically, not gone well. I wanted, of course, to do the right thing, to think the right thoughts, to school my desires and pleasures in moral ways, but it wasn't clear that goodness and Englishness could be compatible in Ireland. Even the self-laceration and abnegation that come easily to me didn't meet the case, because the self-loathing oppressor is if anything more malignant than one with healthy self-esteem. I'd read and written about plenty of English people playing out their masochistic dramas on other people's territory and that wasn't good either. These cultural legacies were not about me and still there I was, here I am, living with them.
Uncomfortable, intriguing: let's write a novel about it.
I made my central character half-Jewish partly because I am and the half-ness is interesting, partly because her ambivalent status opened my theme of belonging. In the weirdly binary popular history of oppressed and oppressors, goodies and baddies, for most of my life the Jewish identity – at least in western Europe – felt like one of victimhood. I spent my teenage summers on exchange in West Germany, where grandparents at the neighbourhood pool sometimes tried to apologise to me for the Holocaust. My Old Testament name and stereotypical appearance were enough to trigger guilt, and – especially in my half-ness – I felt an imposter.
Broadly mainstream feelings about Judaism in Europe changed while I was writing the book, as Israeli violence in Gaza escalated. I want to add 'unimaginably' to that last clause, but there's nothing unimaginable about a well-armed state's elimination of a weaker neighbour, and the horrible familiarity of that event is part of the point of my novel, Ripeness. Down the generations, descendants of survivors and of perpetrators, we all live with the consequences. Violence breeds violence. No such thing as an innocent bystander. Is there an innocent passport? Trauma passes down the family, and what about guilt? What if most of us carry complications?
I set Ripeness at more or less the same time I started writing what became the final draft, in the spring of 2023, six months before the events of 7 October, though far enough into the war in Ukraine that I could include the presence of Ukrainian exiles in Ireland. As I wrote, of course, events continued to unfold, as they do, and so sometimes I could nod over the page to the reader's and my shared knowledge of what would happen later.
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A different set of characters in different circumstances would have had more concern for Middle Eastern politics in spring 2023, but Ripeness is interested in the decline of my parents' and teachers' generation, in the last years of the European postwar sensibility and in its bequests, in its visions and blind spots, of which one might argue that Palestine was often one. Even a politically engaged woman in her early seventies living in County Clare might not have been preoccupied with Palestine in those months. From the beginning, I imagined the novel as an elegy for the flawed, Eurocentric and fundamentally optimistic ideas of the world that shaped the (flawed, Eurocentric) postwar liberal consensus.
That idea of the world order was always – but coyly – rooted in violence and repression. We all always knew that our gadgets ran on rare minerals produced by the forced labour of children far away, that our food and clothes were produced by underpaid workers at the cost of poorer nations' land and water. We knew that there were wars and famines and droughts about which our governments, liberal and conservative, were not concerned, and indeed from which they and we benefitted. We guarded our social security and healthcare systems against undeserving outsiders. We have known for decades that our abuse of our planet is accelerating towards our own obliteration, killing poorer people before richer people, and we know how to slow down, but it's too much hassle, someone else's problem. There's no point in listing large-scale and ongoing examples of human inhumanity in which almost everyone not personally involved is uninterested, because you already know about them. With the destruction of Gaza and the election of Trump, the fictitiousness of the postwar 'rules-based order' is patent. But those rules always applied to some and not others.
The old world order has come to an end. I set my novel in its final months, at the latest possible point where a reasonable person could have believed that the liberal European world-view would prevail.
There will be novels about what has happened in the Middle East in the last two years, as there will be novels about Trump's re-election and whatever happens next in Ukraine. They will be written by people who have, through experience or research, an understanding of the intimate, material detail of individual lives in those times and places, because fiction runs on intimate, material detail. Other people living other lives, including me, will continue to write about other matters, all of which continue to be related to each other.
But to an extent there is no such thing as 'contemporary fiction', because however fast a book might now or in the future travel from writer to reader, the process of writing – in which I include much of the work of literary publishing – does and should take time, sometimes a lot of time, and also, crucially, because a fundamental promise of fiction is that there will be an ending. It is in the writer's invitation to the reader, the handshake on which the reader's suspension of disbelief is based. Comic, tragic, neither or both: I will make meaning for you. I will offer you a pattern. And this means that the writer must make an ending, not merely an end, which means that the events of the novel are concluded. Endings are the hardest part of realist fiction because they are where reality diverges most from realism: in reality there are ends, not endings. Reality is a mess, realism makes meaning.
I cannot write well or honestly about real-life events ongoing at the time of publication because I write at the time of writing. All narrative is retrospective, because of the ending. I am startled that I feel the need to say that the durations of art are not those of the internet.
There is an interesting question about a novelist's responsibility to portray 'current events', whether that currency relates to the time of writing or the time described. It's a compelling idea that it's outrageous to write about anything but war while war is ongoing, but one might also reasonably write about the way people living out of sight of war do, mostly, continue to go about their business, to attend meetings and send emails and weed their gardens and recycle packaging and celebrate birthdays and indeed read novels exactly as if thousands of people were not being murdered over the horizon, or even down the road. Very few of us not personally affected down tools and stop everything until the killing ends, and in my experience those individuals who do are often not especially kind or pleasant in personal life. Our inclination to keep calm and carry on is at least as worthy of attention as the rarer and perhaps better tendency to stop and howl.
Art is not activism. If your sole desire is to stop genocide, writing a novel – or making music or dance or painting – does not rank highly among ways of achieving that aim, and only partly because by the time it is published the war may well be over. I do not mean to exonerate artists from politics, much less morality. Shelley's claim that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' has always been true, but only in the loftiest sense. As totalitarian regimes continue to demonstrate, in the short term at least, the police, or ICE or the IDF, have a far stronger case.
There may be case for war reporting as an art form, but the difficulties are plain and the obverse – that art is war reporting – is plainly untrue. Even if we consider such readily located examples as Picasso's Guernica or Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, what makes them important and enduring is precisely their truth beyond a particular time and place. Guernica speaks to massacre and civil war, not just a particular town in Basque country in May 1937. Badenheim 1939 is about the human capacity to ignore, to uphold routine, to deny accumulating evidence of both ascendant evil and imminent personal danger.
That is why they are still interesting nearly a century later, when we might also note that massacre, civil war and the ability to deny accumulating evidence of ascendant evil remain current. It is a delusory narrative of 'progress' that insists on the power and obligation of art to make people better. Art is as old as people – the making of art is a plausible definition of humanity – and we are not better.
There are many ways of making contemporary fiction contemporary. So I may, I think, write about the intergenerational effects of genocide and forced migration without betraying an obligation to write about the particular genocide taking place just after the novel is set. I may let the shadow of contemporaneity hang over a story that becomes historical as fast as I write. I hereby make unacknowledged legislation. I ring the bell.
Sarah Moss's 'Ripeness' is published by Picador
[See also: The dark reality behind Trump's embrace of white South Africans]
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