Fuck compassion

James Grainger, in a review of Colum McCann's Zoli in the Toronto Star, makes a point about compassion in literary fiction that should be forcibly tattooed on the forehead of every book critic and reviewer in Canada:

This narrative strategy is employed by many contemporary novelists and is quite simple: Find a tragic period in recent history (World War II, the Stalinist purges); gather up the right period details and then drop in a sympathetic protagonist. The result: instant pathos and a good chance at making an award shortlist or two.

By creating protagonists whose struggles to maintain personal dignity in the face of war, poverty and persecution are so patently tragic that only a sociopath could fail to shed a tear, these authors are inevitably labelled "brave," "humane" and, of course, "compassionate."

Why is this so hard to understand? Why are we repeatedly asked to admire writers for bringing us the shocking news that war is bad, or that bad things happen to good people? It's always frustrating to see ostensibly sophisticated readers and writers allowing themselves to be repeatedly taken in by the literary equivalent of a Ron Howard movie.


(The flipside of this, something I am depressingly familiar with, is the complaint that a given work of fiction "lacks sympathetic characters." About that, I've been planning to write something longer for a while now – a "defence of unlikeable characters.")