WHITES: Stories, by Mark Doten
A sampling of titles from “Whites,” Mark Doten’s first story collection and third work of fiction, gives a quick idea of its subject and tone: “Pray for Q,” “J6ers,” “I’ll Be Slayin While Woke Yt Twitter Burns.”
These and 11 other pieces ventriloquize a chorus of white American grotesques across the sociopolitical spectrum, from anti-vax conspiracy theorists to latent racists in progressive clothing who profess to “do the work,” as the sham mantra goes. What unites them — us? — is their certainty that they alone, be they red-pilled or performatively woke, see things as they truly are.
That fiction cannot keep up with outlandish fact in American life has become a cliché. Philip Roth, who was already wringing his hands over this predicament in a 1961(!) essay, also coined a phrase that applies to our stupefying national reality: “the indigenous American berserk.” Doten’s approach to an already self-satirizing culture is to dive headlong into the madness, nudging our Trumpian times a few degrees beyond their naturally occurring hyperbole, often in the comic register of Donald Barthelme and his fellow Nixon-era postmodern pranksters.
In syntax and formal experimentation, “Whites” also resembles David Foster Wallace’s 1999 story collection, “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” especially in pieces like “Even Elon on Human Meat.” In it, the titular executive walks across a charred landscape after a rocket explosion and mistakenly tramples a stranger. Instead of helping, he gets caught up wondering about the race and gender of the person and the political dynamics of their situation. The “woke mind virus” — Elon Musk’s real-life bugbear — has cast him into “demented spirals of stupid and wasted thought,” he fumes, and “that meant I was not taking action, not saving her, I was still walking on the living human meat with its faintly pumping human heart.”
Like much of “Whites,” it’s clever, if not quite funny, because it aims at such an odious, bloated target and reads as a semi-plausible if exaggerated approximation of Musk’s actual ideology. Similarly, in “A Fence Is Not Walls,” a senator’s advocacy for tighter borders is indistinguishable from what our lawmakers routinely say: “Because of the failure of previous administrations to address this crisis, children are separated, and some children are lost, and some children die.”
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The post What’s Wrong With White People? A Story Collection Counts the Ways. appeared first on New York Times.
