Reading this review and your concern about the writer integrating a political manifesto raised an interesting meta-question for me - in what sense is it even possible to write about the political in the context of fiction? Because it seems inevitably didactic, inevitably degrading to the reader's enjoyment of the story. And yet, from first principles, there's no specific reason why this should be the case - if we're writing contemporary protagonists, people are living in an intensely political time, and much of their interiority is mediated by their models of political reality (or other ideological structures).
Possibly, you might enjoy my attempt to grapple with this problem in narrative form. I've written a novel - free on Amazon until Friday - about a young proto-incel in the early aughts. It's a balance between satire and realism, between psychoanalytic critique and an attempt at capturing psychological depth: https://www.amazon.com/INCEL-Novel-ARX-Han-ebook/dp/B0CCLTGRMQ/
Reading this review and your concern about the writer integrating a political manifesto raised an interesting meta-question for me - in what sense is it even possible to write about the political in the context of fiction? Because it seems inevitably didactic, inevitably degrading to the reader's enjoyment of the story. And yet, from first principles, there's no specific reason why this should be the case - if we're writing contemporary protagonists, people are living in an intensely political time, and much of their interiority is mediated by their models of political reality (or other ideological structures).
Possibly, you might enjoy my attempt to grapple with this problem in narrative form. I've written a novel - free on Amazon until Friday - about a young proto-incel in the early aughts. It's a balance between satire and realism, between psychoanalytic critique and an attempt at capturing psychological depth: https://www.amazon.com/INCEL-Novel-ARX-Han-ebook/dp/B0CCLTGRMQ/