She has no way of knowing that she stars in a book that is part of a wave of its own: “#MeToo novels,” they’re called, these disparate stories of sex and power suddenly regarded as timely, and read through the lens of an unfolding movement — with happy results, I’m about to argue (irritating Nunez’s teacher, I imagine, and rather surprising myself).
It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism, nor will you find the numbing sameness Nunez’s narrator deplores — in fact, these books deliver us from numbing sameness. They are remarkably various, and they trouble debates that traffic in certainties. They come laden with confusion, doubt, subtlety — is it excessively earnest to call it truth?
The original “Me Too movement” was created by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, out of her work with young women of color who had experienced sexual abuse. Since the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke in 2017, the term has been adopted as a rallying cry for survivors of all kinds of gendered violence. The “#MeToo novel” shares this range; it has been applied to everything from Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” with its gentle May-December romance, to Édouard Louis’ autobiographical novel “History of Violence,” which recounts a rape and attempted murder.
There is Anna Burns’ “Milkman,” set during The Troubles and awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize (“I hope this novel will help people think about #MeToo,” the judges’ chairman said). See also Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls” (called “an ‘Iliad’ for the age of #MeToo” in a review in The New York Times), Miriam Toews’ “Women Talking” (a “Mennonite #MeToo novel”) and Idra Novey’s “Those Who Knew” (“the definitive #MeToo novel,” according to Entertainment Weekly). Reissues, like “The Street,” a 1946 novel by Ann Petry, are included in the category, as well as a rare #MeToo novel by a man, James Lasdun’s “Afternoon of a Faun.”
Recent feminist dystopias imagine the further erosion of reproductive rights (Bina Shah’s “Before She Sleeps,” Maggie Shen King’s “An Excess Male,” Sophie Mackintosh’s “The Water Cure,” Leni Zumas’ “Red Clocks”). Several books feature charismatic, predatory teachers, including Nunez’s “The Friend,” Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” and Kate Walbert’s “His Favorites.” There are revenge fantasies (Naomi Alderman’s “The Power”), romance and young adult novels that grapple with consent — even a #MeToo western.
The best of these books are heretical where narratives of sexual violence are concerned. “A History of Violence,” “His Favorites,” “Asymmetry,” “Trust Exercise,” “Those Who Knew,” “The Silence of the Girls,” “The Friend,” “Women Talking”: Their titles run together in my mind, like the fragments of a rumor I’ve heard too many times before, but the books topple conventional stories of heroes and victims. They exist as reminders of the kind of touchyethical explorations the novel makes possible.
Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s style — that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm — revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years — the op-eds and testimonies — I’d occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I’d think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps — women must constantly perform credibility.
“The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences,” Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception — straining to appease, convince, console — conscious of being overheard, in Rich’s phrase, but this time by women as well as men.
Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition.
In “Trust Exercise,” a woman called Karen (not her real name, she tells us) confronts her youthful relationship with a much older man and finds she cannot arrive at any comforting conclusions. She feels victimized but also entirely responsible. Her feelings for young women in similar situations are “violently mixed”; “these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.” She wants them to shut up but hates them for their silence; she wants them to move on but cannot forgive them if they refuse to take revenge. Where does this leave her? What should she do with her pain? (I advise against following her example. Mostly.)
“We all make our own choices,” a character in a play in “Trust Exercise” says. “Do we?” responds another. “Milkman,” a stream-of-consciousness novel dictated by a young, isolated woman stalked by a shadowy paramilitary figure, asks what sexual consent might mean to people who have never had any experience of control: “I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.”
#MeToo is a moment full of reappraisals — of beloved artists, public figures, ourselves. How do we respond to this feeling of unmooring? By tightening our grasp on what we have always known? By jettisoning one set of scripts for another? In “Women Talking,” based on a true story, the women and girls living in a fictitious Mennonite colony in South America called Molotschna discover that men from their community have been drugging and raping them for years. They gather in a hayloft, and decide what to do: Stay, leave, fight. Over the course of the novel, much of it written in dialogue of the plainest possible language, they ask what separates justice from punishment. They re-examine every one of their premises: “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?” one character says.
It’s a habit of mind this woman is talking about — a habit of skepticism toward the self, the ability and willingness to change your mind. These novels offer a kind of training in this way of being. They are full of narrative tripwires that force us to pay attention, reassess our reflexive responses, revise what we think the story is about. “His Favorites” has a circular structure, with vertigo-inducing shifts in time. “Trust Exercise” has odd, double-jointed sentences that flip between points of view; Karen refers to herself variously as “I,” “she” and “we” — experiencing herself as both subject and object. In “Milkman” there are no names at all — characters are “Somebody McSomebody” and “longest friend” — and only a few proper nouns.
In several of these books, there is a fundamental confusion about what we are reading in the first place — is it a novel within a novel? Who is narrating? Do they have a right to the story? A striking number of these books — “The Friend,” “Asymmetry,” Trust Exercise,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Those Who Knew” — all involve a parallel plot, in which the story of a relationship, either lopsided or abusive, is juxtaposed with the story of a character who draws upon the experience of another in their own writing, often a tell-all.
As an acting exercise, the drama teacher in “Trust Exercise” would turn off the lights in his classroom and have the students find their way around by touch. He’d watch them, talk to them: “Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”
The answer, of course, is always. “We’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other,” Choi writes. “You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled.” We’re all here together, in the dark.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.