It’s a great honor to be standing here as the recipient of the 2024 Chowdhury Prize in Literature. I’m very grateful to everyone involved in this endeavor, primarily the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Kenyon College, The Kenyon Review, and the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Foundation. 

I’m also particularly honored to have been chosen by such an extraordinary panel of writers. David L. Ulin, Nicole Terez Dutton, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Claudia Rankine are among the most distinguished names in American letters and it’s very meaningful to me to be recognized by them. 

I thank you all.

Before I say anything else, I should mention that I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m being allowed to give this speech when this year’s USC valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, has been banned from addressing the USC community. Since I have a platform and she doesn’t, I will say that I think the cancellation of her speech is an act of cowardice, and a betrayal of the university’s mission. I stand in full solidarity with her, and I hope that the decision will be reversed.

Now that I’ve said that, I’d like to return to the remarks I’ve prepared. As the recipient of the Chowdhury Prize, it would behoove me to say something elevated and wise, to make you feel I’m worthy of this honor, this beautiful dinner, and an evening of your time. Rather than try to persuade you of my personal qualities, I’d like to take a few moments to make a case for what I do, which is to write fiction.

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that when Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516, it was taken so seriously by the church that there was discussion of sending missionaries to the imaginary island. I’ve always liked the idea of missionaries from the real heading off to convert the Utopians. It speaks of the power of fiction, and has something of the same quality as the ancient Greek legends about painters and sculptors whose work was so perfect that people thought their artificial birds and animals were alive.

Scholars generally date the rise of the novel as we know it to sometime in the eighteenth century. When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, he was accused of deceiving the public—and indeed he presented his work as if it were a true story. By the time Samuel Richardson published Pamela in 1742, he was at pains to point out that his characters were invented. Within a few years, people had become comfortable with a kind of writing that was neither news of real events, nor a wicked kind of deception. Fiction was its own third thing, an art form that put imaginary people in imaginary places doing imaginary things, and which solicited a kind of identification or sympathy from the reader—but importantly, a kind of sympathy that fell short of actual belief. 

To this day, the novel seems ambivalent about its fictionality. It takes pleasure in its inventions, but also works hard to make itself seem real. Novelists perform all sorts of tricks so that their work will give off the perfume of reality, even in kinds of fiction (like speculative fiction or magic realism) that, along other axes, are clearly not trying to be mistaken for documents of the world as it is. 

The novel’s blend of realism and fictionality has always been rather disreputable. It’s a baggy monster, with none of the pristine rigor or Modernist dignity of music or visual art. Emerging in Defoe’s time out of a primal soup of news, scandal, and polemical broadsides, its most important drivers were hack writers who found it was a good way to add a layer of plausible deniability to their libels of the rich and powerful. Perhaps because of these origins, fiction has always seemed slightly unstable. As is well known, the novel is dying, and it has been dying almost since the moment it was born. Perhaps this is why. This feeling of imminent death is because it’s always on the verge of collapsing into something else. It doesn’t float up towards the artistic sublime, but gets mixed up in reality, gets so stuck to it that you can’t get it off again, like chewing gum on a carpet. 

One thing we habitually forget is that fiction isn’t just an artistic activity, something safely corralled in its own space. Fictions operate all around us, in the most serious and important domains. The dollar is a fiction. So is the idea of Freedom, or the Human or the Nation or Nature. There’s a school of thought that says we’re in a post-truth era, which is to say that fiction has in some way got mixed up with the real in an even deeper way than before, that the stories we are now telling about politics and society have the capability to shape, or even generate, reality itself. 

If this is the case, then the practice of fiction—and of literary criticism—is vitally important. If we’re living in fictional times, then fictional tools will be needed to navigate them. Fiction is one of the best cultural modes we have to understand the complexities of our world. It has the ability to zoom out to deal with history and grand systems, then dive into the nuances of psychology, the secrets of the human heart. This flexibility makes it a way of knowing, as well as a kind of entertainment. And, of course, being able to imagine the world otherwise is a precondition for making it better. Utopianism can be the opposite of escapism. It can clear the ground for the new.

So thinking back to those early modern churchmen who wanted to send missionaries from the real to a fictional land, I imagine myself—and alongside me, many of you in this room—as missionaries going in the other direction, utopians on a mission in the real, to help understand, to make connections, to make change, and to mess around just a little, to trouble the simple opposition between the world as it is and the world as it could be.

Thank you, and thanks again for this honor.