Satire in a Skittish Time

The satirist’s troubles begin with a bad review. Anna, the writer who narrates The Book of Ayn, has published a comic novel about the opioid crisis that a New York Times critic condemns as “classist.” The novel skewers Big Pharma execs and drug dealers as well as addicts, for which the Times accuses Anna of treating her subject with “excessive moral nuance.”

Ha! Excessive nuance. That’s just what the PC police would say. And yet—perhaps there really could be such a thing as too much nuance, if nuance means deriding both victims and perpetrators in equal measure. What kind of novelist would write a both-sides satire about middle-aged factory workers and party-going teens addicted to drugs fraudulently promoted by Big Pharma and wantonly prescribed by cash-raking pill mills?

“I had honestly believed I was writing a book so good it metabolized its own badness,” Anna explains in the opening pages of Lexi Freiman’s satire about a canceled satirist. Idealizing the victims would have denied them their full humanity, Anna thought, so she allowed them to make bad choices and also gave them “bad haircuts and misspelled tattoos.” Such details struck readers as mean jokes about rural white culture—written by a prep school graduate, no less (herself also white).

Her publisher drops her, social invitations dry up, she can’t get hired as a high school English teacher, and someone on Twitter encourages her to jump off the roof of the luxury midtown skyscraper where she’s been living rent-free in a family friend’s pied-à-terre.

Freiman completed The Book of Ayn before the October 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. Having unsettled the American liberal and left political landscapes, Israel/Palestine now seems to punctuate the last ten to fifteen years of domestic political ferment focused on the rights, recognition, equality, and safety of marginalized groups. It was a period when, in some circles, there was acute pressure on individuals and institutions to articulate the right views using the right language. You may remember it.

But while some of that nervous jockeying seems ripe for satirical treatment, any send-up is complicated by the immense amount of public attention—frivolous and serious, on social media and in legacy publications, from the political right and center and even from within the left—already paid to the problems of political correctness and cancellation. This vast volume of criticism has very nearly exhausted cancellation as a subject of interest while also making it more challenging to account for cancellation’s actual effects on public expression. How is it that an “orthodoxy” can have so many garrulous and powerful detractors and still act, in some corners, as an inhibiting force?

For her part, Anna wilts in shame: “There was a strong possibility that I was not brilliant or even very good.” She seems ready to accept her cancelers’ logic that she’s not simply a bad writer but also quite possibly a bad—prejudiced, complacent, ignorant—person. Though she describes herself as a lifelong contrarian, she is apparently the kind of contrarian who wants to be liked.

Shame drives her into the arms of Ayn Rand. Yes, Rand—the novelist and propagandist for laissez-faire capitalism who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. It happens when Anna, coming off a bruising encounter with a censorious former friend, spots a cluster of late-middle-aged people gathered on the sidewalk: “The six bundled figures were looking up at a telephone pole where a hawk was tearing into the body of a bloody pigeon.”

“Ayn would have approved,” a woman says. The others chuckle and nod. Anna notices that one of the men wears a lanyard labeled “Official Ayn Rand Tour Guide.” They are a quiet, unflashy group with a perceptible camaraderie. Anna follows them into a Starbucks, where one of them remarks that “Ayn would’ve hated cancel culture.” Now Anna finds herself opening up: “The New York Times tried to cancel me for writing a satire about the working class,” she tells them. The guide consoles her by pointing out that Rand’s books were panned by The New York Times too. Another man warns her not to let herself be owned by her enemy. They offer her a seat and pass a plate of cinnamon rolls. Later that afternoon Anna goes back to the pied-à-terre, googles Rand, and orders some books. When they arrive she curls up in the Saarinen wing chair by the window facing the Empire State Building and reads for six hours straight.

Elitist, anti-communitarian, contemptuous of the common run of humanity, Rand is—by intention—all the things that Anna’s been accused of. Though Anna rejects any sort of biographical determinism, she is moved to find that she and Rand “had a lot in common.” In 1919 the twelve-year-old Rand watched Bolshevik fighters take over her father’s Petrograd pharmacy as he stood by helplessly. Anna sees a strong analogy to her own father, a “hard-working orthodontist” frequently humiliated by his two teenage daughters, Anna’s half-sisters, “for being bourgeois and accidentally misgendering their friends.” But there’s an even deeper connection: both Anna and Rand are attracted to younger men. Rand had romantic relationships with her younger male admirers, most enduringly with her acolyte Nathaniel Branden, twenty-five years her junior. Anna can relate—at thirty-nine, she, too, has been finding men her own age unappealing.

Anna phones her friend Vivian, one of the few who has stuck by her, to talk about the books. “Isn’t Ayn Rand something rich psychopaths use to justify their greed?” Vivian asks. She may have in mind such avowed Rand fans as the PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and the Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick. Or perhaps Donald Trump, or his former secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo. Or maybe she’s thinking of Rand’s most famous follower, the former Federal Reserve chair and free market champion Alan Greenspan.

Anna, stymied, looks out her window:

As usual, there were people marching below in the streets. I couldn’t read the placards from up here but I could tell they were essentially protesting the social and material conditions of life.

I knew the young people wanted to ban Virginia Woolf for elitism, Shakespeare for racist slurs, Picasso for sex crimes, and Freud for all three. These clever young girls with their angry pink hair and huge, tenty T-shirts and stunningly muscular bottoms. I missed the waif. I missed my bland, pacific girlhood touting heroin chic and The (gentle) End of History. It was frightening to see it now: History returned. Young and pink and marching down Fifth Avenue in cheeky shorts.

“Ayn Rand isn’t as bad as you think,” she tells Vivian, and goes out into the world to test the wisdom of her new tutor. She comes upon another street protest and invites a cute young Marxist-anarchist—she refers to him as Antifa—for a drink at a nearby bar. He agrees warily.

Over beers Antifa blanches at the revelation that she lives in a high-end midtown apartment—though he also asks to come up and see the view. He hate-watches the city lights through her floor-to-ceiling windows, hate-lounges on the midcentury modern furniture, and even pressures her to let him hate-sleep on her couch for the night as a break from his Occupy-style encampment. But Anna is only interested in one thing, though she senses that sex is a long shot.

Apropos of the view, Antifa asks her if she knows how many workers died in the construction of the Empire State Building. Expecting an atrocity on the order of the White Sea–Baltic Canal, Anna inadvertently laughs when she hears the actual number. The anarchist glares: “Five lives isn’t enough?” Anna parries with a Randian idea: “It’s like the building is more of a symbol, you know? That transcends human life.” The anarchist recoils. “It was time to give up,” Anna thinks. “He didn’t like me and it had become impossible to imagine how sex might materialize between us.” On his way out, he catches sight of a shelf holding her recently purchased books. “What the actual fuck” and “Randian psycho” are his parting words as he heads for the elevator.

What to make of our narrator, the cosseted pariah? Freiman’s premise presents a number of tantalizing possibilities. Anna might be a comically misguided person in need of a moral education. Or she could be a wise fool who, having been cast out, has something shrewd to tell us about the shortcomings of current progressive discourse. Or the joke could go both ways: a facile contrarian meets an insecure, freshly politicized cultural elite who tear into her to prove their own leftist mettle. And there is another possibility: Anna’s satire is an artistic failure, not a moral one. She meant well, but she was not able to land her jokes successfully, to make her actual moral orientation perceptible to her readership.

Freiman doesn’t so much choose from among these possibilities as toss them together. Sometimes Anna is amusingly ludicrous. Looking down from her castle tower, she hopelessly misunderstands the people’s protest, victim-bonds with Rand’s biography, preaches Rand in an already Randian world of deregulated markets and low marginal tax rates, and always seems more interested in Rand’s personal life than in her politics or philosophy. She loses the train of every political thought she starts to have in distracted fascination with hot young protesters. This Anna is clearly in need of correction.

But Anna is not content to remain a flat, satirical character—she keeps popping into sympathetic three-dimensionality. Elaborating her distaste for men her own age, she says:

They were always exhausted and eager to share their failures with me—something I doubted they did with younger women. Maybe they wanted to know me; they definitely wanted to be known. But I felt like a vessel for their broken dreams and disappointments. Like something their therapists had told them to try.

This Anna seems like someone capable of discernment. You begin to suspect that some sort of redemption, rather than mere correction, is in store for her. But Freiman limits smart Anna’s observations to family life, sex, and the repulsiveness of marriage and motherhood; she’s not allowed to apply the full force of her intelligence to the politics of her own cancellation. When it’s time for political commentary, Freiman brings out foolish Anna to say something so vague or preposterous that it doesn’t seem truly provocative. (The Empire State Building “transcends human life”?) Then smart Anna comes back out to observe the embarrassing interpersonal fallout from what foolish Anna has just said. When you’re with one, it’s a bit hard to believe in the other. Smart Anna doesn’t seem like someone who would go all in for Rand, while foolish Anna doesn’t seem like she would doubt herself or cede ground to her critics. As Anna capers from one madcap scene to another, the novel itself seems to be running away from any consistent perspective on what she gets right and wrong about her world.

At a Manhattan “dissident soiree” full of moderates and centrists, Anna meets a sympathetic venture capitalist who offers to put her in touch with his son, a talent manager in LA. The next day she gets a call: “Jamie had big plans for me. His wager was that cancellation was about to become cool.” Jamie persuades her to turn her Rand fandom into a TV show—a half-hour comedy paying “funny homage” to Rand’s life. He’ll set up meetings with producers; she has three weeks to write the script.

Anna borrows $2,000 from her father and rents a corner of a living room in Beachwood Canyon, where everyone under forty seems to be enraptured by a new video-sharing app that lets users post footage of themselves disguised as an animal of their choice. Her roommate, Raffi, gives beauty advice as a marmoset and has a million followers. In the elevator of her building Anna runs into a large, handsome young man in his twenties, whom she refers to as Big Boy. He, too, is a micro-content creator—disguised as a Labrador retriever, he does “a barely verbal impersonation of a hot football jock in a state of semi-concussion.” His videos are wildly popular with young women.

Big Boy, a good fifteen years younger than Anna, is just her type. She starts hanging out with him, hoping he’ll eventually want to move on from Nintendo to sex. One day, while she’s explaining Rand’s horror of altruism and self-sacrifice, Big Boy takes out his phone and films her. He puts a sheep filter over her face and pronounces her Ayn Ram. The video goes viral. Anna is exhilarated: she is not alone in her Rand admiration.

But even in Hollywood they’re not quite ready for revanchism. “I mean I’m not a communist,” says an actress whom Anna tries to woo for her television show. “But like I don’t think capitalism actually cares about people.” A young woman listening to Anna’s defense of billionaires at a party tells her that she prefers it with the sheep filter, sending Anna into a tailspin of self-doubt. Had her online fans been enjoying Ayn Ram ironically?

Thus begins her swift West Coast downfall. That night a friend invites her to Shinefield, a remake of Seinfeld. In each episode of this modern version, one of the characters does “something selfish and then, for most of the thirty-minute episode, various plot points pushed them toward an examination of their behavior and its psychological causes.” Alienated by the show’s violation of the original’s amoral spirit, Anna sulks at the after-party, drinking heavily in a corner while reading Rand’s The Virtues of Selfishness. “Is that meant to be funny?” Shinefield’s star comedian asks her, and in an alcohol-induced fog Anna defends Rand and somehow free-associates her way into calling the comedian and her costars “slaves.” She means it in a Nietzschean sense, but it comes out wrong, and she is too drunk to discourse on Judeo-Christian morality anyway. The next day Jamie the producer calls her; rumors are already going around that she called the racially diverse cast of Shinefield slaves. He won’t be able to produce her show; it’s canceled.

This feels more or less like an ending, but the book takes another, wearying turn. Anna follows a friend’s advice and goes on a meditation retreat in Greece—if she can’t take refuge in Rand or redeem her cancellation with a hit show, the only thing left to do is kill her ego.

At the retreat, Anna works hard to quell her impulse to make fun of everything. But it’s not exactly clear what we’re supposed to be doing. Anna calls the participants “sanctimonious” yet seems to experience sincere personal growth (her joking has been a defense against pain!) yet also jokes that her life is like “Eat Pray Love narrated by Humbert Humbert.” By this time it’s clear that Freiman is committed to nothing but coyness itself. Anna will neither admit to having been wrong nor make a lucid case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

Freiman has said, in a New York magazine profile, that she has long admired the writing of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq: “His books are shocking and grotesque, and I find that exciting.” Houellebecq’s narrators issue a smoothly blended stream of insight and fatuity (we can disagree about the ratio) while the author steps back, making no moves to ironize his narrators, to cue us to their wrongness. (Houellebecq has in fact indicated that he does not think of their sexist or Islamophobic views as wrong, though they are not simply mouthpieces for his own opinions.)

Freiman, on the other hand, seems to be hovering over Anna, trying to manage her potential toxicity with a confusing jumble of contradictory signposts to the reader. As a result, there is not much that’s actually outrageous or offensive in The Book of Ayn, and also not much movement toward sorting out the novel’s important questions: Was the New York Times criticism legitimate? Was Anna’s satire noxious or misunderstood? Are her cancelers spineless sheep or people doing their part for positive social change? How can one live with shame, responsibly absorb criticism, know when to stand up for oneself and when to acknowledge mistakes? What place is there for a temperamentally irreverent person in a time of moral seriousness?

For a comic writer, the ultimate prize is not simply to avoid cancellation but to prove herself beyond cancellation. Ayn Rand may seem, to the humiliated contemporary writer, a distant, shimmering example of uncancelability. Houellebecq might seem another such example, a novelist who can simply tell an interviewer that “a feminist is not likely to love this book.” But Rand is dead and Houellebecq is French; a writer working in the US today is differently implicated in its sociopolitical mores. You can’t escape the sense that Freiman actually cares to avoid offending her readers. This is by no means a bad thing—as long as the novelist can face her condition.

The Book of Ayn is Freiman’s second novel. Her first, Inappropriation, is about a socially awkward prep school student who, along with two equally unpopular friends, falls down a series of online rabbit holes where being a victim is a badge of honor. She tries on several different gender identities before pronouncing herself a transhuman cyborg and falling—unwittingly—into the embrace of an incel-ish alt-right group. Freiman’s gentle takedown of online taxonomies and identity-based bonding did not get her canceled. Inappropriation was praised in The New York Times Book Review (and elsewhere). But in the Times the fiction writer Ilana Masad included a small caveat at the end of her piece:

Who is the book’s intended audience, really? Those of us who understand our own complexities and nuances, and can laugh at the book’s exaggerations of them? Or those who think that all identity politics is nonsense? Surely both groups will enjoy it, but for very different, and in the latter case perhaps troubling, reasons.

Be careful, Masad suggests, the other side might be listening. They could use this against us. It’s not, strictly speaking, a literary-critical point, but some version of this thought seems to guide American comic writing on social and cultural politics across multiple forms and genres—at least comic writing intended for a wide audience. The most successful satirical bits having to do with political correctness and claims of harm proceed with obvious caution. For those who care, there seems no alternative at the moment to being careful.

It isn’t that audiences aren’t ready to break the tension of a decade-plus of earnest activism and advocacy with some laughter. They are in fact extremely eager to do so, I concluded this past winter after seeing Kate Berlant’s show Kate, in which Berlant parodies the trauma-confessional monologue. Her self-named character is an actress who wants to be working in Hollywood but has a problem: her overly expressive face looks unnatural on-screen. She can’t cry for the camera; she can only “cry” to the back of the house, producing a rictus of anguish that, when filmed in close-up, makes her look like a constipated hand puppet. In order to address this problem, Kate will have to confront a painful formative moment from her teens. The trauma turns out—of course—not to be truly grave, involving as it does the diagnosis of a minor medical condition easily treated with over-the-counter iron supplements. But Berlant delivers it like she’s finally breaking the silence, and the audience roars.

The film American Fiction (2023), directed by Cord Jefferson and based on the novel Erasure (2001) by Percival Everett, opens on a literature professor in a college classroom. “Who wants to start?” he asks, calling on a student who raises her hand. “I don’t have a thought on the reading,” she says, “I just think that that word on the board is wrong.” Cut to the classroom whiteboard, where the professor has written the title of the story the class will be discussing, “The Artificial Nigger,” and under it the name of its author, Flannery O’Connor. The professor deflects with a joke (“I think it still has two g’s in it”), and the class laughs gently. But the student isn’t having it. “It’s not funny. We shouldn’t have to stare at the N-word all day.” The professor is kind but firm:

This is a class on the literature of the American South. We’re going to encounter some archaic thoughts, coarse language. But we’re all adults here, and I think we can understand it within the context in which it’s written.

The student is unsatisfied. “I just find that word really offensive.” The professor is losing some of his patience; for the first time, he makes implicit reference to their respective racial identities. He is Black; she is white. “With all due respect, Brittany, I got over it, and I’m pretty sure you can too.”

The joke lands: professor and student have drifted into a zone of absurdity. But can Brittany get over it? Is she allowed to? Is her professor’s permission enough? He can’t speak for other Black people, after all. In its paranoid—or rigorously logical—form, white antiracism can’t stand down: no one has the authority to call off its campaign of resistance to the N-word.

Of course, she can’t speak on behalf of Black people, which is why she must lodge her objection in personal terms. She walks out of the room and reports to the administration that the incident made her uncomfortable. The professor is asked to take a leave of absence.

If Kate points to the limits of the self-serious confessional mode, the scene in American Fiction indicates another pitfall within progressive discourse: the fixed position. The confrontation between a white student and a Black professor allows for a laugh at student dogma that can accommodate a range of audience perspectives; you can laugh because you think progressive strictures on language usage are self-defeating and stupid, or you can laugh because it figures that, the world being what it is, white people’s good intentions would end up causing more trouble for Black people. Either way, you will not have to consider the thornier hypothetical version involving a Black student and a white professor. We don’t have the common ground to satirize that scenario, but in the meantime, we can at least agree on what some fraudulent claims of trauma and offense look like. They are made by seemingly comfortable white people—significantly, white women—who seem oblivious to the self-indulgent aspects of their complaints. Taking up this kind of troubling white woman as her narrator, Freiman seems unsure whether to school her or unleash her, and settles on a spiritual-therapeutic intervention.

The American Fiction scene does not appear in Everett’s novel. Added by Jefferson, the classroom scene places us in the instantly recognizable quandaries of our present. Jefferson folds the cancel culture moment into the larger story of the professor, Thelonious Ellison, who is also a novelist. His cerebral books don’t find many takers among editors and readers expecting conventional treatments of “the African American experience” from a writer who is Black. But when in a fit of spite he writes a pseudonymous potboiler about a young Black man’s life of crime and family dysfunction, those same editors and readers go wild for it and make him rich. Political correctness, the film suggests, is only one part of a sprawling system of rewards, deterrents, inducements, and constraints that shape what gets said about race, by whom, and how. Political correctness is relatively weak—we are aware of it, we see where it begins and ends—while racism, like misogyny, is a force that runs deep and baffles our attempts to rout it.

Even where these forces could optimistically be said to be in retreat, they have left land mines. One of these land mines is that casual racism and sexism are exactly that—casual; the people who fall in with the status quo don’t work up a sweat, while those trying in good faith to “unlearn” something get tied up in knots and look like idiots. They become fodder for reactionaries as well as for writers of comedy, some of whom are working hard not to be mistaken for the former.