Politics & Power Quote by Rick Moody

Moody’s line performs a neat double action: it boasts and it winces at the boasting. “Conquered” is chest-thumping, almost comic in its militarism, but he undercuts it by pairing the verb with “writer ghetto,” a phrase that turns literary category into a kind of forced containment. The joke is that no one literally fights their way out of “regional” status; the fight is with the industry’s shelving habits, with the way American fiction is still marketed through place-branding (Southern writer, New England writer, Rust Belt writer) as if geography were destiny.

The pivot to “nationalist writer ghetto” sharpens the target. He’s not just irritated at being labeled local; he’s wary of being cast as an American spokesman, a domestic export. “Nationalist” suggests a narrower box than “national,” hinting at the cultural moment when literary identity gets tangled with flag-waving, prestige circuits, and the expectation that a novelist should “represent” the nation’s psyche. Moody signals an ambition to be read as unbordered, but the phrasing admits the trap: even escaping one enclosure just lands you in the next, only larger and more ideological.

The final clause, “moving out into the world more,” is deliberately plain, almost sheepish. It’s the human desire beneath the meta-literary complaint: to travel, to be translated, to be made strange to oneself. The sentence is a manifesto disguised as a gripe, powered by the suspicion that the real enemy isn’t obscurity but legibility on other people’s terms.