Fine, let's talk about Elizabeth Gilbert's non-book

some thoughts on being cancelled and literature

The literary internet is a bit ablaze this week with the news that Elizabeth Gilbert — the author of Eat, Pray, Love — has pulled the publication of her upcoming novel because it’s set in Russia. In an Instagram video, Gilbert said:

“I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now — any book, no matter what the subject of it is — that is set in Russia. It is not the time for this book to be published. And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

This is something that the intellectual strain of the conservative press has been banging on about for years: the notion of cancel culture run amok. But this time, it wasn’t just the conservative press that was outraged. Most people understand that it’s a bit ridiculous for an author to cancel a book just because the setting is politically sensitive.

And the backlash against Gilbert’s decision has been particularly noticeable here, on Substack, where we all feel so strongly about our opinions that we write them up and email them out to people every few days. The Free Press — a Substack publication that was founded on the idea that cancel culture has run amok leaned into their schadenfruede as one columnist on the site wrote, “one must feel at least a little bit sorry for Gilbert: if she thought she was doing something here, and it seems she did, getting roasted by PEN America was surely not the result she had in mind … But beneath the secondhand embarrassment is an especially rich layer of irony, given Gilbert’s own oeuvre.”¹

In a Substack note, Sherman Alexie said that he hopes the literary community’s consternation of Gilbert’s decision “becomes a turning point in our culture—when more publishers, editors, agents, and writers rediscover their artistic courage.” Ross Barkan of the New York Times Magazine wrote on Substack that “there is a greater horror here, and that’s what this all might mean for the arts in this country … [art] exists to challenge, to illuminate, to bear us, as humans, to depths and heights we may not otherwise be able to access.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision obviously smacks of artistic cowardice but, really, this situation is so far removed from serious art that it seems a bit silly to get so exasperated by it. Serious art, we should take that seriously. But consider the medium Gilbert used for her announcement — she posted her apology/announcement video on Instagram. Serious writers, those who are out to create serious art (the kind that we should be concerned with safeguarding) do not give updates to their fans on Instagram. No, Instagram apology videos are a medium utilized by figures of pop culture: influencers, athletes, singers, Karens caught on the wrong side of a viral video.

Now, I’ve only read two of Elizabeth Gilbert’s books. I read Eat, Pray, Love when I was in high school; and maybe a decade or so ago, I read her debut short story collection. Neither of those books bore me to new depths or new heights. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned with Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision because she’s not a serious writer. But, it is to say that we should not be concerned with Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision because it does not belong to the realm of serious art.

Gilbert’s decision was made to please an audience and, as such, is one that belongs to the world of pop culture.² And while it’s fun to watch the machinations of the pop culture universe — I love Ted Lasso and Taylor Swift as much as the next millennial — I really don’t have the time to get bothered by its squabbles.

Serious literature is still there. It’s not going away. Often it seems that barely anybody reads the good shit anymore, but it’s still there. And a lot of the best writing that humans have ever accomplished is set in Russia and was written by Russians. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov and Pushkin and Lermontov and Turgenev. You could make the argument that the father of Russian literature was Nikolia Gogol, a Ukrainian. It was Dostoyevsky who reputedly quipped that all Russian literature “came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.”³

And serious literature — the kind that bears you to new depths and new heights; the kind that gets down deep and fucks around with the human condition — is often written by people with reprehensible political and social ideas. Knut Hamsun was a Nazi and his books are brilliant; so raw they’ll cut you to ribbons. Ezra Pound was a Nazi too and without Ezra Pound, we don’t have Ernest Hemingway. Come to think of it, Ernest Hemingway had some pretty shitty ideas himself. You don’t have to read those writers if you don’t want to and most people don’t. But they are the ones who accomplish serious art. And with their reprehensible ideas, they have proven that serious art endures despite the tides of cultural opinions. People who go in for serious literature still read Hamsun and Pound because we can’t get that fix anywhere else.

And so what, I say. So what that the world doesn’t get another Elizabeth Gilbert book? I do feel bad for Elizabeth Gilbert because, by tying herself to ideologies and the behaviors of pop culture, she transcended the role of a serious author. But then again, so what? The world has not lost a monumental piece of art. You can go to your local drug store and pick any two-dollar paperback off the shelf and get the same reading experience you would have gotten from the never-to-be-published Elizabeth Gilbert novel.

Let the world thrash, I say. Go outside, touch the grass and read a real book.

1. The Free Press is all up in arms about Gilbert’s example of artistic cowardice, but I doubt they’d have any applause for Sally Rooney’s decision not to sell her latest novel to an Israeli publisher. In an act of artistic courage, Rooney refused to sell her last book Beautiful World, Where Are You to an Israeli publisher in support of the BDS movement, which aims to put pressure on Israel’s often cruel policies toward Palestinians.

2. This is also not to suggest that serious contemporary artists don’t have large audiences. The painter David Hockney and the writers Elif Batuman and Don Delillo and Karl Ove Knausgaard and the violinist Joshua Bell all enjoy large audiences. But they don’t — or at least it doesn’t seem like — they make their artistic decisions because their audience demands such decisions. They seem to be driven by a deeper instinct, call it a muse or whatever.

3. Funnily enough, I haven’t seen any stories about Gogol’s sales going up after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don’t know if that didn’t happen. Probably he’s just too dusty for most people but he is hilarious and there’s a couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky — who are doing brilliant Russian translations — and have done two of Gogol’s books. They might have done more, actually. But I’ve only read two.