Elizabeth Gilbert became famous because of her narrative nonfiction. Eat, Pray, Love, released in 2006, led to fame and riches and a well-deserved place encouraging artists to create and share. But this week, Gilbert is choosing not to share her first novel in 23 years. It’s all because of a war and the warfare that sensitive readers waged on her as-yet-unpublished novel, The Snow Forest.
The book is set in a Soviet Union that includes Russia. It’s action may take place in the 1930s, but I hesitate to say so because I can’t read The Snow Forest yet. The publishing company Riverhead seeded advance copies to some readers. Somehow, details of the book leaked out beyond that select group. Now, nearly 600 people on Goodreads have panned the book with 1-star reviews, commenting on a book that most of them probably haven’t read.
They are protesting a setting, from a book they haven’t read. “Liz, we don’t care that you moved us to tears with Eat, Pray, Love. Stay in your lane and stay out of Russia with your historical fiction. Says us.”
This is the mess that we’re in, now that places run by Amazon like Goodreads — and then the echo chamber of social media — become tastemakers for us all. Gilbert doesn’t know if she’ll ever release her novel. When you consider that it most assuredly was a couple of years of work to create this book, this is the greatest sacrifice of all.
It feels unprecedented in art, though that’s probably an exaggeration. You may be certain that crowd jeering didn’t rob the world of other novels in recent memory, not ones ready to be unleashed by Big Five publishers, riding on a hefty advance paid to a good author, within 12 months of release. Go ahead, find one or two. They might be Neo-Nazi polemics, or white supremacy apologia. Not a story about a family in Siberia trying to make things right against a Communist regime.
Gilbert doesn’t have a Richard Russo or Ann Tyler reputation at stake. Fiction has been an occasional thing for her, staring with handsome short story collection, continuing with a 2000 novel, and then another in 2013. She’s known for her fictional treatment of a privileged life, which readers adore, in Eat, Pray, Love. She’s an artist and entitled to all of that. If that beloved memoir got tidied up, relative to the truth, as it was finished, I’m okay with that. Such things happen to memoirs.
But Liz is not beyond reproach anymore, if the fate of her latest novel is a measure. Unfair is one thing. This goes beyond that. These echo hecklers are complaining about the injustices of writing about Russia now. They misunderstand the meaning of injustice. Give the book a chance? No, too risky. Art needs to march within the lines of consensus. Give us another season of The Walking Dead, or its spinoff. Or the novelization of the same. When a zombie franchise has an easier green light than a novel about the world’s history — when fantasy overrules fact — it’s time to wonder if any publisher can make a difference.
And while you’re wondering about that, and what it feels like to have to cancel your own novel because of social media shouting, consider this. If Liz was publishing her own novel, she might risk the outcry against her art for the sake of moving hearts with other readers. Yes, readers, not reactors. The heckling comes from people who ought to be reading books instead of war headlines. Or, why not both? None of them are shouting down the headlines. This is the fate of art that’s published by corporations.