In 2007, Barack Obama was barely in the running for the Democratic nomination, so how could I have known he would be elected president? How was I to know, either, that he'd push healthcare reform to the top of his agenda in his first year in office? When I delivered my manuscript the same month that the administration geared up for an all-out offensive on healthcare reform, I had a sick intuition that there was such a thing as being too relevant. My non-fiction agenda, initially ahead of its time, was in danger of becoming a political anachronism overnight. In the hopes of garnering what's called "off the book page publicity", these last few months, I've found myself in the perverse position of praying, in defiance of my own passionate support for legislation of this very sort, that Congressional healthcare reform would get hopelessly bogged down in internecine squabbles — just so long as no bill passed until after my release date. Sounds selfish? Hell, yes! That book was a lot of work!
Fortunately, So Much for That is set firmly in 2005-2006, and thus remains historically accurate regardless of any legislation in 2010. Being fiction, too, it's only fractionally about health insurance. It aims more broadly to capture the impact of grave illness on a marriage, Western culture's discomfort with sickness and moribundity and our universal discomfort with what my protagonist calls "the d-word". Luckily for me, death isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and will surely prove impervious to any Congressional bill declaring mortality illegal.
Nevertheless, readers who chafe that novels aren't speaking to modern predicaments should consider how perilous it is for writers to tackle topical subjects. Given the writing and production lag, the now will be then by publication. Hyper-relevance is a formula for the old-hat. The up-to-date slides to the dated in a heartbeat. Ergo, in describing a self-serving parliament in 1529 rather than 2009, Hilary Mantel was smart.
Meanwhile, if any budding novelists out there are searching for material that's bound to be all too germane for years and years to come? Here's a tip: write about Afghanistan.
