He we have a dramatic example of literary suicide by writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who, after being demonized on social media, withdrew from future publication her latest novel, The Snow Forest. Why? Solely because it was set in Russia—1930s Siberia, to be exact. Apparently writing about Russia when Putin’s Russia is attacking Ukraine—a century after the novel was set—simply cannot be done. Besides the pushback, which may have come from an organized campaign, Gilbert claims that she withdrew the book because its topic elicited an outpouring of anger and pain from Ukrainian readers, and she didn’t want to add “any harm to a group of readers who experienced and continue to experience extreme harm.” Note that none of those who objected had read the book, for it wasn’t due out until next February. All they knew was its topic. But of course that hasn’t stopped literary Pecksniffs before.
And that’s apparently the only reason for the self-cancellation, as recounted in the following Free Press piece by novelist Kat Rosenfield (click screenshot to read):
I don’t know much about Gilbert except what everyone else does: she wrote the wildly successful autobiographical novel Eat Pray Love, aimed at giving hope to all women whose love life wasn’t successful. I neither read the book nor saw the movie, but I did pick up the book in a bookstore and paged through it. What I saw was the worst writing of any novel I’ve seen since The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, which was a good movie but an absolutely dreadful book—perhaps the most abysmal modern novel I’ve read. (Note: I haven’t read any other of Gilbert’s half dozen books.)
Gilbert’s withdrawal was accompanied by the usual act of public contrition, so look at that first: click on the confession below to hear it on Instagram, and be sure to turn the sound on:
Now everyone knows I’m firmly on the side of Ukraine in this conflict, but this novel had nothing to do with the current conflict; the only “problematic” thing about it was that it was set in Russia. Not only that, but it depicted the lives of a group of anti-Soviet people, people who, says Gilbert, “removed themselves from society. . . resisted the Soviet government and defended nature against industrialization.” What on earth does that have to do with the current conflict?
Yes, I’m with the Ukrainians in the war, but I’m not with them on this one, for they’re exhibiting the kind of cancellation-without-reading madness that we’ve become familiar with. Here’s what Rosenfield says about the episode:
Until this week, Elizabeth Gilbert was best known as the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir about finding her bliss (and her appetite) in a post-divorce odyssey through Italy, India, and Bali. Now, she’s the unwitting harbinger of what appears to be a seismic change within the literary community, and perhaps in the culture at large.
Gilbert’s upcoming novel, The Snow Forest, was set in 1930s Siberia—which, as we all know, is part of Russia, which, as we all know, is the headquarters of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing and execrable war against Ukraine. As is so often the case when it comes to publishing controversies, this fourth-degree connection between American author and Russian imperialist wasn’t a big deal until, suddenly, it was: over the weekend, The Snow Forest was trashed on the book review site Goodreads in an organized campaign by people who took exception to Gilbert’s choice of setting.
As of this writing, the book has 174 reviews and 533 ratings, every single one of them one star, and most employing eerily similar language that suggests the existence of a form letter lurking behind the scenes. (Chief among the claims on the page, which has now been removed, is that Gilbert’s book, which was not slated for release until February 2024 and absolutely none of its critics have read, is guilty of “romanticizing” Russia.)
This from a New York Times piece on the cancelation:
[Gilbert] continued: “It is not the time for this book to be published. And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”
The publication of the book, “The Snow Forest,” was announced last week and had been scheduled for Feb. 13, 2024, shortly before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The novel follows a Russian family that has removed themselves from society in the 1930s to try to resist the Soviet government.
. . .Since the start of the war in Ukraine, arts institutions have sought to distance themselves from Russian artists and writers — in some cases, even from dissidents. In May, during PEN America’s World Voices Festival, participating Ukrainian writers objected to a panel featuring Russian writers, leading to a disagreement about how to proceed and the cancellation of the panel. (Both of the Russian writers on the canceled panel, the journalist Ilia Veniavkin and the novelist Anna Nemzer, had left Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine.)
Last year, the Metropolitan Opera in New York cut ties with the superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who had previously expressed support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, who denounced the invasion, had his concert tour in Canada canceled last year. The Bolshoi Ballet lost touring engagements in Madrid and London.
It’s one thing to impose sanctions on the Russian government that, incidentally, may cause harm to regular Russians. But it’s a different thing entirely to cancel all things Russian because Russia invaded Ukraine. Many Russian people don’t agree with their government, but are afraid to oppose it publicly. Just as I don’t favor academic boycotts of “demonized” countries like Israel, I don’t favor cultural boycotts of countries like Russia, which seem to me to have no positive impact at all. It’s a form of enraged virtue signaling.
Rosenfield makes two more points. First, this cancelation is nothing new, as you’ll know if you read this site. Sometimes the publisher does it (not in this case, though), and sometimes the author does it. But the cancelations are invariably accompanied by cringeworthy statements of contrition by the author, like Gilbert’s above. As Rosenfield notes:
Within the past five years, authors withdrawing their books over allegations of nebulous harm have become a familiar spectacle.
In 2019, fantasy author Amélie Wen Zhao cancelled her novel Blood Heir over allegations the book was racist. That same year, Kosoko Jackson withdrew his debut novel from publication after critics complained that its Kosovo-set gay love story “centered” Americans and trivialized genocide. In 2020, Ember Days author Alexandra Duncan withdrew her book from publication after another author, who had not read it, took exception to its cover tagline (yes, really).
More interesting to me is that, for the first time, the literary world is showing a backlash to the backlash: authors, literary organizations, and free speech groups are upset and worried about the ability of the public to control literature in this way, and are not that supportive of Gilbert’s decision:
[Because previous acts of contrition had been applauded], there was no reason to think that Gilbert’s announcement would not be similarly celebrated. Yet, right away, this one just hit differently. Commentators immediately compared it to the histrionic moment in 2003 when the Congressional cafeteria renamed French fries “freedom fries” after France declined to support the American invasion of Iraq. PEN America’s Suzanne Nossel released a statement calling Gilbert’s decision “regrettable,” saying, “literature and creativity must not become a casualty of war.” And fellow writers were no less dismayed: as acts of moral grandstanding go, this one had disturbing repercussions. Elizabeth Gilbert, whose net worth is estimated upward of $20 million, might not have thought much about the financial hit she would take by cancelling her book, but for most writers, this sets a precedent that is not just economically ruinous but completely untenable in the glacially paced world of publishing. As author Rebecca Makkai tweeted, “So apparently: Wherever you set your novel, you’d better hope to hell that by publication date (usually about a year after you turned it in) that place isn’t up to bad things, or you are personally complicit in them.”
Perhaps most tellingly, this was a bridge too far even for some of the most diligent defenders of similar, previous incidents. “The Russian people are human beings,” wrote Osita Nwanevu on Twitter. “Stories can and should be told about them. They are not reducible to the actions of their present government. This stuff over the last year has been pretty unsettling, honestly.”
. . . That someone, someday, would take the anti-Russian cultural crusade too far was probably inevitable; the only question was where the line would be drawn. As it turns out, declaring Russia off-limits even as a fictional setting—a place you dare not go even in your own imagination—was too much, even for the scolds among us.
Even the staid but woke New York Times couldn’t help point out the difference from previous cancelation campaigns:
By the early afternoon on Monday, a backlash to the backlash had escalated on social media, with many slamming Gilbert’s critics, and others chiding Gilbert herself for succumbing to pressure.
The episode also sparked renewed criticism of Goodreads, which allows users to leave reviews of books long before their publication date, without having read the book, and has sometimes served as a springboard for online campaigns against authors.
Some literary and free speech organizations saw the controversy over the novel — the latest example of how a social media pile-on can derail a book’s publication — as a cautionary tale.
Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, said the organization supports Gilbert’s right to make decisions about her book’s publication date, but also expressed alarm about how authors increasingly feel vulnerable to online pressure campaigns.
“We don’t think authors should ever be pressured not to publish their books,” said Rasenberger. “The more complicated issue of the era is that authors are being told they can’t write about certain subjects.”
Other organizations warned that the criticism of the novel, and Gilbert’s response, set an unnerving precedent, and urged her to release her novel as originally planned.
“The publication of a novel set in Russia should not be cast as an act exacerbating oppression,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The choice of whether to read Gilbert’s book lies with readers themselves, and those who are troubled by it must be free to voice their views.”
When PEN America, which hasn’t had a particularly strong backbone about these issues (besides its canceling its Russian literary panel in May, in 2015 many of its members criticized an award given to Charlie Hebdo for literary courage), then you know that the literary establishment isn’t with you. The Ukrainians who complained about this novel being set in Russia are understandably peeved at that country, but that’s overwhelmed their judgment to the extent that an author who simply writes about Russia is piled on (I suspect many of those one-star ratings came from Ukrainians or their sympathizers). Are we to have no more literature about Russia until the war is over? Will they start pulling Tolstoy and Dostoevsky off the shelves? Not this time: the literary world is fed up with cancelations, at least for a while. Gilbert is not a hero, and her actions aren’t admirable: she is a sniveling, whining, coward who refuses to recognize the obvious: her book has nothing to do with the current war, and thus causes no harm to Ukrainians.
Does this mean Mr. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is on the chopping block, too?
Along with every book ever written about slavery or the Holocaust (both of which, I’d suggest, were far more traumatizing than the current conflict). This is a completely ludicrous overfocus on the present or, as someone once put it, “people nowadays are painfully aware of the last 24 hours, and frightfully ignorant of the last 24 hundred years.”
To Elizabeth Gilbert (in case you happen to be reading this): Here’s an eight-minute video you might want to watch.
It’s about the importance of resisting those who would enforce their ideas on us, rather than kowtowing to them. I would think that for someone like you, who ostensibly helps people to improve their lives, this would be an extraordinarily important idea to keep in mind.
After reading this column by Gilbert: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/confessions-of-a-seduction-addict.html , I came to the conclusion that she’s a sociopath and, as such, not particularly burdened by a conscience or a desire to tell the truth. I would take any stated reasons for withdrawing the book with a spoonful of salt.
Thanks for that link; I found it to be a fascinating article. In it, Gilbert wrote:
“For the first time, I forced myself to admit that I had a problem — indeed, that I was a problem. Tinkering with other people’s most vulnerable emotions didn’t make me a romantic; it just made me a swindler. Lying and cheating didn’t make me brazen; it just made me a needy coward. Stealing other women’s boyfriends didn’t make me a revolutionary feminist; it just made me a menace.”
With all due respect, that doesn’t strike me as a person “not particularly burdened by a conscience.” She realized she was screwed up and sought to be better. I think she deserves credit for that.
If it takes someone years to figure out that wrecking other people’s marriages for shits and giggles is not cool, there’s something very wrong with that person. And any credit she gets for admitting the problem, she loses for bragging about it in NYT, in my book.
I haven’t read those authors but I have difficulty imagining any writing worse than the dreck by Dan Brown.
Waller is WAY worse. He can’t even write a coherent sentence! Have a look–if you can still find that book.
Preposterous.
The book will eventually come out, in the wake of a tsunami of free publicity, with the author simultaneously cast as a literary witch hunt victim and a virtue-signaling woke hero.
I hope her agent gets a big raise for this one . . .
‘Aut prodesse aut delectare. . . .’
Once the culture thought it healthy to be instructed & delighted by literature.
Literature helped us learn & know.
Almost no chance of that now.
Because literature matters for the understanding–and living well in–human culture:
William T. Vollmann’s ‘Europe Central’–Stalin, Hitler, Shostakovich during WWII; National Book Award winner; moving, affective beyond my ability to capture in words.
I must admit I don’t know much about how the publishing industry works behind the curtain, but I can’t help feeling this is more of a PR strategy than anything. There must be a lot of money wrapped up in this novel, and I imagine it comes down to someone scheming how they can make more or a profit this way…
Full disclosure: Before commenting on this post, I read it from start to finish. (I have never read anything by Elizabeth Gilbert. And never will.)
My rating of Jerry’s post (on a scale from 0 to 5 stars): 5 stars
I could not agree more with this judgment of Jerry:
For evil to triumph, what it needs is people like Gilbert: not an ounce of courage, and, seemingly, also pretty stupid.
This is why wokeness has become so influential: there are so so many people who are cowards and have no integrity.
People like Christopher Eisgruber,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_L._Eisgruber
president of Princeton University, who claimed in 2020 that Princeton University is a systematically racist institution and then protested when the Trump administration reacted with: Then return the public subsidies Princeton has been receiving on the premise that it does not discriminate against anybody:
Conor Friedersdorf: How Princeton Opened Itself to the Ultimate Troll. The Atlantic, Sept. 25, 2020
Why the left and the right are exaggerating the racism of the Ivy League institution.
https://archive.is/VlLDf
If Eisgruber would have been a German under Hitler he would have probably acted similar to Martin Heidegger, a highly educated man who also supported Hitler and participated in the persecution of Jews (including his Jewish colleagues at Freiburg University).
The truly odious Eisgruber (matched in subservience to “wokeness”, amongst administrators of the Ivies, only by Yale’s Salovey) recently gave a truly execrable “commencement sermon”, which might have issued forth from any DEI apparatchik in today’s (absurdly remunerated) academic nomenklatura.
What surprises me about such authors — so weak-minded, so eager to capitulate, so blandly virtuous and desperate to be known as blandly virtuous — is that they mustered the confidence to write anything in the first place. Even the worst writing, after all, is a kind of subversion, because it is always the assertion of a unique personality. It is an act of confrontation. But these authors’ souls seem more fit for office work in some gargantuan bureaucracy.
Reading Jerry’s website and the news every day, about half the time it feels like sticking my head into a sewer. How do I keep my sanity?
1. Re-watching the tv comedy series 30 Rock (2006-2013) – it’s my happy place, like Rose Byrne’s* is Seinfeld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Rock
* See here: https://youtu.be/Vu3WgixqLok?t=134
2. Re-reading Bertrand Russell’s essay An outline of intellectual rubbish: A hilarious catalogue of organized and individual stupidity (1943)
https://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/outIntellectRubbish.htm
From its first paragraph (emphases added):
3. Do some physical exercise. The mental health benefits are beyond dispute.
When the bigger picture is lost to ones clammy self interested life you are showing more or less, a human.
Gilbert won’t stop the war or elevate it by doing a virtue flaunting exercise.
Propaganda to a Russian is to wokeness bashing by a holier than thou to the great unwashed. It’s a creep, deliberate lying to lying to oneself. Ignorance though is not a fault, but
truth suffers once again. Conduring a lie from nothing is Gilbert’s offence.
What a way to publicize a book that is probably unreadable! Brilliant!
Let’s ban Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy and Dostoevsksy too! Don’t stop at books, ban the documentary Navalny as well.
Of course Gilbert can afford such expensive virtue signalling. Perhaps she should attach some peacock feathers to make her worth even more obvious.
It would have taken so little effort to say the book is not making any profit for Putin, but serves to illustrate (if it does: no one has read it yet!) the misery of the ordinary Russian under successive criminal regimes. She could afford to say she would donate profits to the Red Cross in Ukraine. So many better ways to deal with idiots online who get excited over all the wrong things.
I’m puzzled that many of the complaints about the novel appear to be coming from Ukrainians. One would think that people in the midst of an actual war wouldn’t think much of the “harm” coming from people reading a fictional story set in a remote area of the 1930’s Soviet Union with a theme about environmental spirituality.
Russian trolls do have a history of creating controversies on social media designed to damage and confuse. I’m wondering then if they’re trying to stir up resentment against the Ukrainians by making it look like they’re the reason we can’t have nice things.
2 cents. I read the book (EPL) when it came out and thought it had value. Watched the movie, w/Julia Roberts – okay. My father (1920-2016) went to see the movie and called me. He said “Eat, Pray, and a bowel movement.” Alright.
Times change.
Yeah. Publishing, writers, readers, artists, and so on are going through “climate change”.
Back to an earlier post – I can’t psychoanalyze Gilbert. Don’t know her. However, the publishing industry is going through “climate change”. For better or worse?