The terrible prospect of a second Trump presidency raises in my mind several questions, and one of them concerns our survival as artists and writers. How will we respond? I have been thinking of my 2021 novel A Time Outside This Time that was written during the years of the Trump rule. It was a novel about Trump and the pandemic, about fake news and the infodemic. Will I write another novel if Trump returns to the White House? (The above note is from the “Briefly Noted” section of the New Yorker, Dec 6, 2021 issue.) If Trump wins, I’ll feel that I’m in a lockdown, that a plague has spread across the country and maybe also the world, that I must focus on survival, and, crucially, that a part of that survival is the ability to write about it.
Update: I wrote the above and then decided to work on a longer piece that has been published by the Indian Express. A slightly different version is available on my free Substack.