The Snow Forest saga on Goodreads has an uncomfortable lesson.
Fresh off a bad breakup this time last year, I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love on the principle that if you’re going to get dumped, do it properly. I then spent the summer banging on about the book, how unfairly relegated it was to the self-help shelves, doling out high school–level analysis about how if Eat, Pray, Love had been written by a man then we’d be calling it a keystone work of narrative nonfiction, yada yada yada. Being annoying, basically.
Advertisement
My belated affection for the book, and Gilbert, has provided a curious lens for the latest literary controversy that’s unfolded this week. Let’s say a couple years ago, allowing for normal publishing timelines, Gilbert wrote a novel set in mid-20th-century Russia. The Snow Forest was due to be released in February next year, a book seemingly based on the true story of the Lykov family, who spent decades isolated in the Siberian wilderness amid the former Soviet Union’s drive toward industrialization. But now Gilbert, or her publishers, or both, has decided not to go ahead with publication after all. When the book went up on Goodreads, it was flooded with one-star reviews from people who could not have read it yet. “While Ukrainians are dying from russian terrorists, famous authors are writing books about them and romanticizing these bastards,” one commenter wrote. There are 532 such reviews as of this writing.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
“I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced, and who are all continuing to experience, grievous and extreme harm,” Gilbert subsequently said in a video posted across her social media channels, announcing that the book’s publication was on pause.
Related from Slate Laura Miller 50 Years Ago, the Woman Who Would Usher in the True-Crime Boom Befriended Her Co-Worker. His Name Was Ted Bundy. Read More
The backlash to the subject matter of The Snow Forest seems to comes from two primary and separate places: Firstly, an understandably impassioned and perhaps inevitably scattershot response from a people under attack toward anything that reflects the culture of their invaders. The other motivating factor seems to be an odd thing that is happening with literature generally. It’s not a great travesty that this book has been postponed, but it is reflective of some quite ill-judged thinking about what a novel should be, what purpose it might serve. A novel shouldn’t be written with the primary aim of being morally instructive—and in any case, simply being Russian is not morally wrong, which feels like a ridiculous thing to need to say, but here we are. (The controversy has now sparked a counterbacklash, with PEN America and others speaking out against the decision, calling it “regrettable” and “wrongheaded.”)
Advertisement
Advertisement
It certainly is those things. But I find all this interesting specifically in relation to Elizabeth Gilbert. While I was reading Eat, Pray, Love, between sulking about my own romantic disasters, I found it striking that the tone of the book felt dated, though it was only written in 2006. Some of it jars a little: Endless little ribs about the horrors of getting fat have thankfully fallen out of popular usage these days. But mostly the datedness felt like a good thing: It came from a time before self-admonishing memoir writing, before caveats in every chapter of “I know how privileged I am” or “Of course this doesn’t apply to everybody,” etc. It was refreshingly un-po-faced.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Some critical response at the time did point out that Gilbert’s story of redemption is a little difficult to swallow if you are minded to find the application of large amounts of money to a personal problem annoying. “The book could easily have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White,” as one review in Bitch Media put it. But the text itself isn’t burdened down with obvious anxiety about what readers might think of Gilbert for writing it.
It’s something of a fool’s game to play “What if this book had come out now?” Inevitably if Gilbert had written it today, she would proceed differently just by virtue of cultural osmosis. But to play the game a little: If it had come out now, many more of its reviews would surely protest that it doesn’t reflect well on the character of the writer that she wrote about her nice time traveling in less white, less wealthy countries, and so on. It’s not that Elizabeth Gilbert has become personally more toothless in postponing this recent book, but the distance between that act and writing something like Eat, Pray, Love in terms of what she thinks her audience requires of her is demonstrative of an uncomfortable shift that has taken place in literary culture: a babying of readers that they themselves are participating in. One day, The Snow Forest will come out, to far fewer headlines than it did this week, and without the introspection from readers that its delay should spark. Gilbert’s decision may be rash and pretty ridiculous, but anyone who has ever logged onto Goodreads knows how she got there.
Source: Slate
