Art and Courage

Claire McGowan’s novel The Fall shows that the difference between art and commercial crap isn’t talent. It’s courage.

The novel begins strongly, with honest, devastating descriptions of helpless, self-infantilizing womanhood. The main characters are Charlotte, a banker’s fiancee with a chi-chi job in PR, and Keisha, a mixed-race mother of a 5-year-girl who loses custody because she lets her boyfriend brutalize the kid in front of her. Charlotte is rich, Keisha is poor but both are comically pouty and inept at the most basic things in life. Both lisp through their twenties in the persona of cute little girls and eagerly hand themselves over to men who (mis)manage their lives.

McGowan shows how easy it is to drum up outrage over imaginary “racism” to avoid looking at the real causes of both white and black dysfunction. She demolishes the girl-boss mythology and does the same for the “black girl magic” narrative.

And then she gets scared of what her talent revealed to her. The second half of The Fall constitutes McGowan’s frenzied effort to downplay or outright deny the unpleasant truths she narrated in the first. Her ditzy, helpless damsel characters suddenly transform into heroic overachievers who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The swoony PR diva Charlotte begins to work in homeless shelters for minimum wage to pay the bills. To make up for the transgression of noticing how frivolous cancel culture is, McGowan squeezes into the story a ridiculous bit of #MeTootery and uses it as a way of excusing Charlotte’s self-infantilization.

Things get so cliched that McGowan feels the need to endow each character with a romantic and financial happy ending. The abusive ogre Keisha snags a rich, handsome businessman who showers her with diamonds. We all know how much wealthy, successful men enjoy the company of rude, piss-poor women with non-existent hygiene habits. The princessy Charlotte willingly gives up designer handbags and £800 shoes and goes to law school while settling down with an unemployed chronic patient.

Let’s look at the contrast between McGowan’s The Fall and Emma Cline’s The Guest. Both writers are gifted and can speak to the most unpleasant truths that nobody else wants to notice. But Cline is unafraid of her own talent. She doesn’t panic in the middle of her novel and start piling up cliches to protect her readers from reality.