Yesteryear and the conservative Christian "other"

On cringeposting novels and negative capability

Happy Mother’s Day! My review of the leftist-penned tradwife novel below — but first a few words on what good fiction can and should do :)

Panic all you will about the sloppification of the American intellect, but the literary novel is alive and kicking. There were 762 million books sold in 2025 – 184 million of those in the adult fiction category alone – BookTook has revived titles like Song of Achilles and I Who Have Never Known Men, and indie bookstores have reportedly made a “shocking, triumphant comeback.”

So it’s no longer enough to grin ruefully over a #1 bestselling, discourse-stirring novel and say, Hey, at least people are reading fiction at all, amirite? People’s reading habits aren’t at issue. It’s the novels that are – specifically their ability to function as novels. And if Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling debut Yesteryear is any indication, we have much to worry about.

So, how do I think a novel should function? The novel’s a deliberately spacious form, so there’s a lot of ways it can function well. A novel can investigate a counterfactual (Brave New World, The Plot Against America), hyperbolize the real (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Geek Love), or do a bit of both (The Intuitionist, The God of Small Things). A novel can anatomize a social class (Middlemarch), the inner workings of a family (The Brothers Karamazov) or a social class by way of a family (Disgrace, The Sport of Kings). A novel can imagine a point of view that requires some heavy lifting of the authorial imagination (Moby Dick, Sophie’s Choice), or enough humor and candor to defamiliarize what’s already close to home (Invisible Man, Orlanda).

Each of those books works well in different ways, but they’ve all cleared one major bar in order to do so: their minds aren’t made up on how their characters ought to be. Which doesn’t mean that none of them can expose a worldview (plenty do) or argue a thesis (plenty do that, too). It means that none of them have staked their legitimacy on the author’s self-gratifying worldview being the only true and right one. Even when the book’s main concern is a social or historical injustice that very clearly plagued the life of its author, there’s no virtue-signaling smugness. There’s wonder at the strangeness of the human mind, indignation and horror over what it can get up to in its darkest moments. But none of these books makes claims to knowledge its author doesn’t possess.

The novel – and really fiction of any length done well – is a place to ask questions for which one does not have ready answers. Novels counterbalance the slogans, op-eds, and hot takes that have been circulating right along with the printed word itself. Novels can expand our thinking on the most polarizing social issues, challenge our most dearly held beliefs. As paradoxical as it sounds, any writer who wants her novel to do this sort of uninhibited critical work must embrace the limits of her own knowledge, what John Keats called “negative capability.” She must accept her own naïveté or risk advertising it.

Any writer who wants her novel to do uninhibited critical work must accept her own naïveté or risk advertising it.

Before we get into the cringe naïveté of Yesteryear, I want to share two (scary, fulfilling) instances of negative capability from my own writing life. Having clawed my way through all 391 pages of Burke’s novel, I think the universe owes me this one.

During the height of COVID, I wrote a story called “On the Inside” that gave me a whole lot of epistemic anxiety. Its point of view alternated between a nonverbal autistic kid and his anti-vaxxer mom and described the series of events leading up to her booking a dangerous medical treatment for him called chelation. I was curious about what might prompt someone to adopt an anti-vax mindset, and curious about the consciousness of a narrator who never verbalizes his thoughts.

Of course, I was also terrified to write this story and trip the many political wires I knew I’d be tripping in the highly identitarian litsphere of 2021; I was also tired of obeying that same litsphere’s rules and still not selling many books. So I made a deal with myself: I’d write the story how I wanted to write it and then put an author’s note at the beginning disclaiming any intentions-to-appropriate or general bad vibes. Years later, it’s the hand-wringing author’s note that embarrasses me.

Benny’s mom falls down the research rabbit hole in “On the Inside.” (Like Natalie in Yesteryear, the mom in this story is a Harvard graduate)

The story ended up being one of the handful I’m most proud of in the collection. I loved writing it. I didn’t automatically adopt the mother’s tortured relationship to Western medicine or “plunder” her ASD son’s consciousness (I’m not sure such a thing is even possible, though bad-faith characterizations have existed in fiction as long as there are industry-wide hegemonies to support them). But I did find myself relating to both characters in ways I hadn’t expected to, and that was valuable to me.

After “On the Inside,” I got bold. I needed to write a novel to sell the short story collection because of my debut novel’s “bad sales track,” so I decided to write a book about a young con artist-cum-psychopath who’d do anything to get the one thing he wants. That “one thing” is a charismatic Adonis with a similarly amoral bent. The psychopath, a myopic little dweeb named Ezra, ruminates on his heartbreak over this man while doing things like instigating a civil war in a struggling South American republic.

I identified with Ezra’s gay sadness despite his insanity, and wondered if his single-minded love could exist convincingly alongside his antisocial loathing. Then the book came out and readers said they, too, identified with Ezra. I was relieved. I don’t have some definitive pronouncement on the human psyche’s concepts of victimhood and virtue as a result of this, but I do have a better sense of what we’re willing to forgive in the name of love.

The incomparable Gila Pfeffer put it best in her review of Confidence!

I’m glad I managed to ask the POV-based questions I did in “On the Inside” and Confidence, scary though it felt. I tried to approach those questions the same way I’d want another writer to approach the question of my consciousness: with openness, goodwill, curiosity. Without, as Keats would say, “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Say you’re not like me, and therefore have no idea what it’s like to discover your sexuality via the Power Rangers, question the realities of meat space while being cyberbullied, or cope with your first major heartbreak by trawling LiveJournal for “genderweird” posts. But you’re interested in these experiences, and really want to write a character who’s lived them. I’d say: By all means, go ahead! But consider them experiences you could have had in different circumstances!

No matter how much of an “other” I may seem to you, your job as a novelist is not to work inductively – i.e. “What a sad little life this lesbian millennial led! What sort of sad little consciousness might emerge from such a life?” – but deductively: “These are the circumstances of this character’s life, so what’s the consciousness to match them?” Wasn’t it a bunch of old white dudes doing too much of the former and not enough of the latter that first got everyone so up in arms about narrative appropriation and staying in your lane?

Now it seems the new David Foster Wallace writing supple sexy psychotically depressed tennis girls is a “culture and politics” podcaster and Bennington MFA graduate writing a conservative Christian influencer who hates those secular feminist bitches so much she could just smack them! (Sorry, Lord!) I’ve never felt such acute secondhand embarrassment for a writer while reading their work – and that’s saying a lot, because I’ve read Philip Roth’s entire Zuckerman Bound trilogy!

It’s not just that Yesteryear is a bad book – this much you’ve probably surmised from reading it yourself, or spending any amount of time on this website. It’s the ways it manages to be bad that are particularly hair-raising. If the Shy Girl controversy was an indictment of publishing’s viral cash-grabbery, then Yesteryear is something much worse: an indictment of our failed literary imagination.

I’ve never felt such acute secondhand embarrassment for a writer while reading their work – and I’ve read Philip Roth’s entire Zuckerman Bound trilogy!

Yesteryear has a brilliant premise: a famous Instagram tradwife (think Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm) is suddenly transported back to the 1850s. I was instantly sold on this and pre-ordered, expecting psychological realism crossed with satire crossed with a haunting speculative fable like Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Along with millions of American women across the political spectrum, I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of the tradwife influencer and have spent many curious hours consuming their content. I’d never heard of Caro Burke, but we seemed to come from similar backgrounds – lots of school, lots of feminism – and I was eager to see how she’d unpack her questions about tradwifery on the page. What a rich set of potential themes: womanhood, family, sexuality, faith vs. secularism, political polarization — the list goes on.

Lord, I had high hopes! But Yesteryear smote them so cruelly. So, so cruelly. The book is a smarter-than-thou shitpost that misses its target by such a wide mark it ends up being a cringepost. It’s a novel by a leftist about a conservative woman so crudely drawn it calls to mind the naïve stereotypes cult members hold about the outside world.