"A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow"
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Young’s line reads like a corrective aimed at the sacred myth of the “pure” novelist, the writer who supposedly floats above politics, history, class, and consequence. She’s not claiming every essay or vignette needs a sermon. She’s drawing a line between the miniature and the cathedral. “A big book” isn’t just long; it’s capacious. It has to contain a society, not merely a storyline.
The key word is “undertow,” a sly, physical metaphor that refuses the tidy language of “theme” or “message.” An undertow is what pulls beneath the surface even when the water looks calm. Young’s subtext: if your novel only moves on the obvious current - plot, romance, adventure, voice - it may entertain, but it won’t last. The books we keep returning to are the ones where private lives are dragged, sometimes against their will, by public forces: money, power, race, labor, faith, scandal, war. Social consciousness isn’t an add-on; it’s the pressure system that makes the weather.
Her phrasing also implies a moral standard without sounding like a scold. “Cannot avoid” suggests inevitability, not virtue-signaling. The real ambition of serious fiction is to be porous: to let the world leak in until the text becomes an argument with its own era. Coming from a 20th-century American novelist who worked on sprawling forms, the remark doubles as aesthetic advice and cultural diagnosis: a major book earns its size by carrying multiple hidden pulls at once, the kind that make readers feel, belatedly, what was moving them all along.
The key word is “undertow,” a sly, physical metaphor that refuses the tidy language of “theme” or “message.” An undertow is what pulls beneath the surface even when the water looks calm. Young’s subtext: if your novel only moves on the obvious current - plot, romance, adventure, voice - it may entertain, but it won’t last. The books we keep returning to are the ones where private lives are dragged, sometimes against their will, by public forces: money, power, race, labor, faith, scandal, war. Social consciousness isn’t an add-on; it’s the pressure system that makes the weather.
Her phrasing also implies a moral standard without sounding like a scold. “Cannot avoid” suggests inevitability, not virtue-signaling. The real ambition of serious fiction is to be porous: to let the world leak in until the text becomes an argument with its own era. Coming from a 20th-century American novelist who worked on sprawling forms, the remark doubles as aesthetic advice and cultural diagnosis: a major book earns its size by carrying multiple hidden pulls at once, the kind that make readers feel, belatedly, what was moving them all along.
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| Topic | Writing |
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