When writers nowadays invoke “politics” they are apt to be thinking about the intersection of public and private life, where the motives of individuals may well play a more decisive role in the action of a novel invested in political outcomes than in the programs of parties or movements. Not possible, any longer, for anyone taking up the subject of politics and the novel to ignore the fact that leading writers, from Mario Vargas Llosa and Milan Kundera to Pat Barker and Russell Banks, have taught us all—certainly they have taught me—to think of politics as a great deal more than the activities and stratagems of a political class, and to think of the private life as determined to a considerable extent by the wider public life.
I think this widening of the sphere of politics had led to an overall coarsening of life. After all, isn't it what totalitarian regimes were aiming at? Isn't that what made them totalitarian?
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