Empathy Exams: On Fictionalizing Extremists

To read the news is to immerse oneself in the lives and deeds of extremists. Whether that extremism takes the form of violent religious fanaticism or neo-Nazis agitating in the streets, it’s an alarming sight for anyone who strives for a peaceful and civil society. But those aren’t the only manifestations extremism can take: a recent article in New York noted that a new generation of readers has been inspired by the writings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, perhaps best known for killing several people via mail bombs and having written a lengthy manifesto advocating lethal action in opposition to modern technology. Radicalization can take many forms, all of them chilling.

It’s easy to see why so many writers have been drawn to the lives of extremists—whether to explore, in fiction, what might draw someone to this way of life or to create a novel exploring the aftereffects of extremism, especially for those who don’t share that ethos. And it’s resulted in some memorable works of fiction in the last few decades: the protagonist of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral grapples with his estranged daughter’s radicalism, while in Paul Auster’s Leviathan, a disillusioned writer embarks on a campaign of destroying replicas of the Statue of Liberty, ultimately resulting in his death.

This isn’t to say that every high-profile literary endeavor to explore the extremist mind is remembered successfully: John Updike’s 2006 novel Terrorist earned a plethora of mixed reviews, for instance. In the Los Angeles Times, Matthew Price wrote that “Terrorist feels flat-out rigged. Updike, leaving middle-aged suburbia for the American inner city, has written something like a teen coming-of-age story, but he wants his 24 moment too and indulges in some gratuitous button-pushing along the way.” Therein can be found some of the dangers of writing about extremists and extremism: going too far in one direction can result in a cliched thriller; going too far in the other risks sapping any tension from the narrative.

Some authors have dedicated a substantial portion of their bibliography to exploring extremist mentalities. Nearly all of John Wray’s novels have done so, for instance: The Right Hand of Sleep and The Lost Time Accidents both examine the rise of fascism and its effects on mid-20th-century Europe, while Canaan’s Tongue is set in the Southern United States around the time of the Civil War. His latest, Godsend, is loosely inspired by the life of John Walker Lindh, an American who was captured fighting for the Taliban.

Wray eschews a sense of history with a couple of names changed, and also adds another wrinkle into the plot—namely, that protagonist Aden disguises herself as a young man when she travels to Pakistan to study Islam. What Wray meticulously demonstrates is the ease in which those with the best intentions—in this case, Aden, and her boyfriend Decker—can quickly find themselves in circumstances where there may be little choice but to become complicit with sinister acts. It’s a kind of horror narrative, one where there’s a sense of inevitability to her progress—a confusion of action with devotion.

Therein can be found some of the dangers of writing about extremists and extremism: going too far in one direction.

As is the case with Wray, several recent novels by Nuruddin Farah also explore different facets of extremism—although Farah’s work frequently delves into the periphery of extremist violence. His 2014 novel Hiding in Plain Sight was centered around a woman whose brother died in a terrorist attack. Farah’s latest novel North of Dawn is also set in the aftermath of extremist violence. Unlike that novel’s protagonist, however, the aging couple at the center of this one are Gacalo and Mugdi, the parents of the man responsible for a horrific act: a frustrated young man who left Norway to rediscover his roots in Somalia and became radicalized there, ultimately dying in a terrorist act at an airport.

That’s not the only radical act of violence to be found here, though. That the novel is set in Norway is no coincidence; instead, Farah also incorporates the white-supremacist murders committed by Anders Breivik into this novel. Overall, Farah’s thesis is that these two radical groups, each relatively tiny—neo-Nazis and jihadis—feed one another, creating a horrific landscape through which nearly all people must maneuver cautiously. “These two are at war and the rest are victims,” Farah writes. It’s a succinct and moving statement that encapsulates much of the world’s horrors.

That perspective is evident in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, in which the author shows how an Islamist murder of a soldier emboldens white supremacists to make the case for their own ideology—and which causes several of the novel’s older characters to see echoes of the National Front’s racist campaigns and violence in Northern Ireland in decades past. In a 2018 interview, Gunaratne spoke about the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby as having sparked the idea for the book. He noted that in a video of the killings, one of the killers “was talking the way I did, and was dressed the same way kids from my school were dressed. Even his mannerisms and the way he carried himself looked familiar. It was terrorism, just way too close to home.”

This in turn led Gunaratne to write a novel where, as he put it, “each character confronts their own version of extremism.” Which, in a very different context, could describe Richard Powers’s The Overstory as well. The novel meticulously chronicles the disparate personalities that come together to oppose the destruction of forests on the Pacific coast of the United States, amidst substantial corporate and political opposition. That the novel is largely set in the late 20th century enables Powers to riff on certain moments in time, including the bombing of Earth First! activist Judi Bari, and also allows him to draw connections between activist moments. It’s no coincidence that one scene late in the novel takes place at Zuccotti Park, for instance.

What Powers does particularly well with his novel is to show just how easily the border between righteous beliefs and terrifying actions can, under certain circumstances, turn porous. Powers writes empathically about his characters’ struggles, and the turn that some of them make towards violence is seen as a betrayal of that cause rather than a logical extension of it. But that moment of action becomes shocking because of the measured rhythms of the novel until that point: you don’t realize that things are about to go terribly wrong until they do, and there’s no turning back.

That haziness is dramatized to a fantastic extent in R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries. At first, it seems to be the story of how a young woman named Phoebe becomes involved in a conservative Christian group whose opposition to abortion turns violent, told by Will, a man who’d once been in a relationship with her and is now wracking his memories to discover what happened. And if that was all Kwon’s novel was about, that would be enough for a compelling work on its own. But it’s not—the questions of memory and accountability raised here take the narrative to some interesting and disquieting places, and Will turns out to be something other than the wounded but objective figure he initially seemed.

The Incendiaries becomes a work about how easy it is to delude ourselves that we’re the hero of our own narrative, and the violence that those delusions can cause. And what makes it such a particularly searing story is the way in which it ties certain narrative qualities associated with radicalism and ties them in with other disquieting elements of human behavior. A sudden shift towards violence, an unshakable belief in one’s own righteousness, a self-justifying rationale: these aren’t only characteristics of extremists, and this book refuses to let anyone off the hook. It’s not as cut-and-dried as expressing empathy for someone with unpleasant beliefs; instead, it’s about the recognition of where those beliefs could be rooted in almost anyone.