Who're The Novelists Voting For? (Veiled Subscription Pitch!)

Earlier this week, Slate asked a bunch of novelists who they plan to vote for in the presidential election. Among other things, the responses should make you glad that poets, rather than novelists, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. More on that in a second.

Subscribers to the print edition of Reason will notice a resemblance to our November issue cover story, which is a presidential poll of folks in our universe, ranging from P.J. O'Rourke to Camille Paglia to Drew Carey. Our story isn't online yet, but you can get a taste from this Chicago Tribune story about it. You can get a look at the cover of the November issue and my Editor's Note (which also includes a bit on the cover story) by going here. The point, humble reader, is to subscribe to the print edition of Reason. You'll get the print edition a whole month before it's posted here in full. You'll get a year's worth of issues (11 in all). And if you act now, you'll get a free paperback of our brand new anthology Choice: The Best of Reason. All for just $19.95. If you want to renew your subscription, the same deal is available, too. Just go here and scroll down to the section titled "Three Great Ways To Get Choice."

Back to the novelists' votes: One interesting subtext to the whole thing is how it underscores the low status of novelists as cultural players (I've written about that here). I suspect that even pretty literate Americans will recognize no more than half the names in the list and that far fewer will have read anything by anyone on the list (and no, as someone who spent a good chunk of my 20s studying literature, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing; rather, it reflects a massive increase in our cultural options).

Out of 31 participants, 24 are voting for Kerry, four for Bush, and three for something else. But it's less who anyone is voting for than the reasoning behind the votes that is remarkable. Many of the responses strike me as unironic variations on Pauline Kael's surprise at McGovern getting creamed by Nixon: She famously wondered how that could have happened, as she didn't know anyone who had voted for Tricky Dick.

"Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry," says Joyce Carol Oates. Amy Tan inveighs, "I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he." "Kerry, of course," sez Jonathan Franzen, who adds, without explanation, "He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for." Asks Lorrie Moore, "Are there really any novelists voting for Bush?" Russell Banks will pull the switch, punch the hole, whatever for Kerry, but he'll do it glumly, knowing goddamned full well that the Bay State Blowhard's "election won't reverse our nation's rush to establish a fascist plutocracy, it's too late for that."

To be sure, some of the responses are interesting and well-argued. A few even show flashes of humor, or at least mordant wit. But the overall tone is one of smug, self-satisfied people who long ago stopped talking to anyone with a divergent viewpoint (in short, too many of the respondents sound just like the intolerant, right-wing, Christian jag-offs they say Bush represents). This poll, of course, tells us nothing about the election, but it may explain why novels are fading in terms of cultural hegemony.

Whole thing here.