In August, I read Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End. I’ve read all of her books and have always enjoyed them—if you’ve read both Lost Children Archive and Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender, let’s discuss—but this one is by far my favorite. It’s a bit fragmented, a bit collaged, gets into myth and ecocide and matrilineal lines of care. I shared that I thought it deserved more attention on social media and was sent this review, which I enjoyed, but it gave me pause in its characterization of fascist propaganda and sprawling fire mentions in the text as “customary liberal posturing.” The inclusion of real facts about fascism and climate change is posturing? And it’s liberal (pejorative)? Oh, ok. It would go on to also be cited by Bret Stephens in a bizarre Times op-ed about how the National Book Awards long-lists were not “national” enough for him anymore. Poor baby.

The propaganda, the refugee camp, the encroaching fires—these are not the point of the book and nor are they labored over. They’re part of the texture of the world as we (everyone, todo el mundo, the tout-monde—if you please) live in it, and of the world being depicted. Luiselli has published a book, Tell Me How It Ends, about translating for immigrant youth in New York. Where does a posture end and a politics begin?

There are many times when I encounter “customary liberal posturing,” of course: It exists, mostly on TV, in my experience, like on The Pitt or more recently Furious. Statistics are rattled off in a way in which no human being actually speaks, the way characters on Dan Fogelman shows give random heartfelt monologues. (None of this makes these shows unwatchable, by the way; The Pitt, Furious, and Paradise are all making important issues visible and comprehensible in a middlebrow way, though I also recommend reading Raechel Ann Jolie on the complications of Furious, specifically.) Fascism and climate change as part of the atmosphere or plot in Luiselli’s book did not strike me similarly.

In food writing, climate change often goes unacknowledged: When we’re writing about agriculture, sure, but it’s rarely presented as a reason to change anything about one’s way of life in consumer publications—that would be preposterous. Perhaps it would be a posture. There’s often a focus on solutions that may or may not exist (think lab meat), on silver linings of expanding tropical zones—like breadfruit growing in Florida, never mind what that would mean for the Caribbean islands where it already does. (If this sounds like a familiar complaint of mine, that’s because I wrote about it for Foodprint in 2024. I’m stlll mad!)

If climate change and fascism weren’t making appearances in contemporary fiction at all, the way they barely touch food writing, wouldn’t that seem strange? When I listen to “Between the Covers” with David Naimon (Luiselli was a recent guest), I feel such relief because climate change is real in his conversations. Non-human animals, even, are considered significant. (Am I posturing?) The novelist China Miéville, on an episode it took me a few dog walks to finish, says he enjoys “seriousness” in people, and serious people are aware of how bad things are right now. Even Marc Jacobs just told the Business of Fashion podcast, “There’s a world that’s in trouble, and why shouldn’t fashion be affected by it?”

Does this mean everything must be doom and gloom? No. I actually don’t think art has any responsibility to make political statements, nor to posture for the reader. But when I read, I want the doom and gloom in the vicinity simply because—and this is quite simple—it makes me feel sane. In Rachel Cusk’s Life of M, where our narrator observes a famous actress living an untouchable life, there’s this line: “We think again of the fact that nature has no nationality. Is this why it is doomed?” It’s a book about reality, and nature obviously has a role to play.

In the work I want to read, watch, and spend time with, this apocalyptic air is being dealt with: See “On Seasons,” from last October, about the On the Calculation of Volume series, and the book Sea Now by Eva Meijer, which ends similarly to Beginning Middle End but is also quite different—written with an omniscient third-person narrator, of the sort that can feel so fresh in our first-person world of immediacy (something like what the reviewer and writer Julia Kornberg has characterized as “broadernism,” in the aforementioned review).

To what extent is a writer—of fiction, of food, of anything—allowed to bring the killjoy that is current reality into our work, and how can we do it so that it doesn’t seem like posturing? I think of Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy, of course: To name a problem makes you the problem. How much can a person care before the care is called cringe? The fires haven’t come toward me yet but drought has, hurricanes have, heaping islands of sargassum atop the sea looking for a beach where they can rot have—and so I recognize a world that’s burning as the only one in which I exist.