 Sponsored by University of California Press “Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire,” writes Aaron Matz, quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, in a review of Dan Sperrin’s State of Ridicule from our March 26, 2026 issue. Unfortunately, literary political satire has been in a long period of decline—and not just because it has been supplanted by faster and more attention-grabbing forms of media in our screen-addled age. Sperrin argues that satire—at least the grand tradition of English political satire, the focus of his book—hasn’t been the same since the late eighteenth century, when state affairs became too complex to effectively mock, and English society, struggling to maintain its cohesion, became less tolerant of withering critique. Matz finds that a more significant factor was the development of mass culture. “There was now simply too much to puncture, the zone of power had far exceeded machinations in government, and a satire on politics could no longer leave out the vast arena of society,” he writes. “The boundary between the two had become too porous.”  Aaron Matz Matz, a professor at Scripps College who specializes in the English and French novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has often written about literature’s attempts to grapple with a baffling, decaying world. He is the author of two books, Satire in an Age of Realism (2010), about the collapse of Victorian realism into satire, and The Novel and the Problem of New Life (2021), about the novel’s long history of skepticism toward procreation. For the Review, he has written about Émile Zola and the anxiety, evinced by Amitav Ghosh and other critics, that literature has failed to meet the challenge of accounting for climate change. I emailed Matz this week to discuss Veep, Flaubert, and a future of all-consuming irony.  Advertisement Willa Glickman: In your recent essay you argue that now the most effective satire tends to take place on TV or the Internet, in part because “people in government today obviously don’t care about literature, so the effort to ridicule them in literature can seem pointless or (worse) harmless.” Is there any contemporary literary satire that’s caught your eye, nonetheless? Or any great satire in these newer forms? Aaron Matz: There is plenty of great literary satire; it just tends not to be explicitly political, in the sense of lampooning politicians. But it is almost certain to be political in more indirect ways. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout comes to mind. I’m a fan of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which came out in 2022 and was translated into English last year. It’s a satire in the supplest sense of the term: it looks at the world with a kind of detached pity, and it’s funny. Clearly TV over the last decade or so has been a natural place for some very good satire. A lot of it has been unambiguously political, as in the work of Armando Ianucci: Veep and his 2017 film The Death of Stalin. As for broader social satire, the characteristic mode in contemporary film and television is the skewering of rich people. Not all of it is great, but the first season of The White Lotus, especially in its last couple of episodes, has a magnificent control of satiric tone. The Captain’s Dinner scene in the 2022 film Triangle of Sadness, with its opera of vomit, is satire in a long-standing tradition, going back to the retching sequence on the boat in Céline’s Mort à crédit, and before that to Rabelais. I suppose it’s political satire in a roundabout kind of way. There’s a debate over the ship’s loudspeakers about capitalism and communism the whole time those rich guests are flooding the dining room and hallways with puke. Your book The Novel and the Problem of New Life traces the novel’s ambivalence or even hostility to procreation, but also toward artistic reproduction. What do you see as the source of those concerns about the novel form itself? The book is mostly about novels that depict characters who are ambivalent about having children. This takes me through Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing and into contemporary fiction. The dilemma, in the hands of these novelists, is not only an abstraction but a central element of the plot and structure of their books. But what you say about the novel form itself is true. There has been an element of austerity, even astringency, in one major strain of the novel since the nineteenth century. It took root as the novel began to coalesce as a serious form. It mostly begins (as so much does!) with Flaubert, who nurtured an immense suspicion toward the efflorescence of his literary gift, and who routinely expressed this feeling as a distrust of artistic reproduction and circulation more generally. We can see similar traces in some later nineteenth-century writers, like Huysmans. The great twentieth-century exemplar of this attitude is Beckett, with his realization that he could only inherit the mantle of Joyce by reversing the inheritance: he had to be a subtractive writer rather than an additive one, abstinent rather than luxuriant. We know well the novels and plays that followed from this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are some of the same writers who expressed, in both their private writing and their published work, such fierce hostility to actual procreation. In Flaubert and Beckett, for example, we encounter a regular antipathy toward proliferation or excess in the abstract—but also toward the prospect of bringing life into the world in particular. Even a lot of contemporary fiction, where the scenario of characters agonizing over whether to have children has become quite common, defaults to a laconic style (very short paragraphs separated by empty space, for example) that channels the familiar wariness about lushness. Procreative skepticism and stylistic restraint often go hand in hand. Your question—what is the source?—is a difficult one. Are Flaubert and Beckett writers who felt terror about having children, and then sublimated this frugality into the discipline of their literary work? Or were they, from a young age, naturally averse to fecundity in literary form and style, and then eventually determined that they couldn’t tolerate the biological kind either? It’s probably a little of both.  Advertisement In your essay on Amitav Ghosh and other literary critics who think about climate change, you write that for many of them, “The question is not just ‘Can literature be redeemed?’ but also ‘What exactly has literature been doing, given the circumstances?’” Are you drawn to either of these two questions, or is there a third question that could be asked? I think the second question is the better one, but the first presumably follows from it. To ask what literature has been doing all this time, as atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising to ever more alarming levels, is to ask about the basic task facing writers—what they’re spending their time doing when they’re sitting at their desk. It assumes that novelists have been capable of writing about the climate emergency in some satisfactory way. It also assumes that novelists have understood what has been going on in the first place. Obviously both assumptions are correct now. The more difficult question is when they became so. This gets us into the matter of when the essential problem of greenhouse gases began to be known to a general public and therefore to writers. If one premise of realist fiction is that it takes into account present circumstances, however bluntly or obliquely, then a literature that is unresponsive to this biggest circumstance of all will probably seem defective. This worry about defectiveness can lead to a panicked call for literature’s redemption. The response has taken different forms. One is climate fiction, or cli-fi. Another is the excesses of some literary criticism, the kind I addressed in that piece, which can be anachronistic or unfair in judging the literary record. To be clear, I don’t think literature needs to be redeemed. There is a risk of arrogance in suggesting so about the literature of the past. Nor do I think that when we appraise the literature of the present for its way of addressing the crisis we are taking part in an effort of redemption to begin with. If the great masterwork about climate does come along, it won’t be because it’s making up for a past deficit. You ask if there’s a third question we can pose. Here’s one: Is it possible any longer to write novels that are not already suffused with the situation? That is, can a serious contemporary literature not already be absorbed by the crisis, and therefore proceed inherently from it, even if it’s not manifestly about it? This isn’t a new question. Already in 2019 David Wallace-Wells was expecting that climate would become no longer a story but a kind of basis: “We will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.” Surely that moment has arrived. Your next book will be about how the reality of climate change forces us into a stance of irony toward recent art and literature. Is it a hostile stance, or a rueful one? The irony I’m writing about is more rueful than hostile. It begins with a recognition of the fundamentally ironic nature of our predicament in the climate emergency. I’m interested in the development of the idea of irony over the past two hundred years, during which time a term having mostly to do with rhetoric expanded into a word for describing a situation. In 1833 the scholar who basically introduced this more capacious understanding into English defined irony in a way that we can recognize easily today: all our wishes shall be granted, but only to verify our worst fears. By the twentieth century the OED was offering this definition: “a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise or fitness of things.” For a long time we have known exactly what we’re doing, but the underlying history bears this ironic trace. The burning of fossil fuels has created the very civilization that it is now in the process of unmaking. Given this predicament, it is often difficult to look back at the art and literature of recent decades, as parts per million of carbon dioxide were rising, without finding them altered or even warped in various ways. The book or artwork may contain some latent element that only our recognition of the climate reality can now allow us to see. There is an incongruity that may be best understood as an irony. But if that irony is rueful, disenchanted, that does not mean it must be a stance of defeat. Irony doesn’t have to be nihilistic or despairing. On the contrary, it can be a great source of clarity, fortitude, and action.  Advertisement More by Aaron Matz at nybooks.com All of Us YahoosA new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice.  Flaubert’s PlanetDo novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?  Inheriting HungerÉmile Zola’s monumental twenty-novel cycle encompasses nearly every sphere of French society, but returns repeatedly to people with a bottomless compulsion to dominate others.  New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.  You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 4 de abril de 2026
Novels of the Future
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