Literature and Social Issues

Literature has a long history of exploring social issues. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – treatment of the mentally ill. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird – racism. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaiden’s Tale – misogyny and religious fanaticism. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye – internalized racism. These are a few on my bookshelves and I’m sure you could add your own favorite titles.

The list is long. Even Dr. Seuss addressed social issues such as the effect of consumerism and greed on the environment in The Lorax and discrimination in The Sneetches where the star-bellied Sneetches thought they were better because they had ‘stars on thars’.

I recently finished reading Pigs by Johanna Stoberock. The cover blurb describes the book as “An exquisitely wrought fable about the excesses of the contemporary world.” I was mesmerized.

The story is told primarily through the viewpoint of four children who live on an island where all the world’s garbage washes onto the shore. Their job is to feed the garbage to a small herd of pigs who eat everything. There are adults on the island but their only interest in the children, when they can catch them, it to make them clean up the debris from the adults’ bacchanalian lifestyle. The children find a man who has washed up on the beach. When they’re explaining their roles and the role of the pigs on the island, they’re amazed that it doesn’t seem to occur to the man that “he might be garbage too.”    

I have to admit that during the first half of the book, I often had to put it down and go think about something else for a while. There’s one scene where one of the children, who has poor eyesight, finds a pair of eyeglasses. She puts them on and for a few minutes sees the world clearly. But, rules are rules, and she obeys the rules that everything must be fed to the pigs. I cried when she threw the eyeglasses to the pigs.

The story is intense and the ending, in my opinion, was brutal. No happily ever after tied up in a neat bow with unicorns and rainbows; just a slight shift in how the world’s garbage is handled.

But I loved the book. It’s the kind of novel that I know I’ll read again and that every time I read it, I’ll see something different. I’ve already added it to my ‘books to give’ list. This is the kind of writing that encourages people to reflect on social issues – at least people who read as much to expand their minds as they do to be entertained.

Reading this book and thinking about how the story impacted me is the backdrop for a couple of revelations about my own writing. I’m currently shopping around a novel that I had a couple of non-writer friends read. One loved it and one thought it needed work. A few days ago, the friend that loved it admitted that she was just trying to be kind and that she really thinks the story is kind of light-weight and needs work. The novel is “okay for a first try” were her exact words. Ouch. She actually read the fifteenth draft. But they’re both right. The story can be much better.

The second revelation is that ‘much better’ means being willing to be more brutal in tackling the social issue that constitutes the theme of the story. Maybe it means letting myself feel more of what the characters are feeling. Maybe it means letting myself cry (or maybe laugh) while I’m writing.