It can’t be easy being a leader in this day and age. Your every move gets scrutinized. Sometimes the analysis seems downright petty.

A case in point is the reading list President Barack Obama released to the press as he headed into his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.

These included Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Emma Donoghue’s Room, eight books in total. Seems innocuous enough.

What could anybody come up with to complain about this list? For National Review columnist Tevi Troi, it’s the fact that all but one of the books on the list were works of fiction. To quote Troi directly:

“Assuming that Brave New World and Frost are for his daughters [why would you assume that? –jb], this leaves six books that are presumably for presidential consumption. . . five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction. . . sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”

Out of touch with reality.

The National Review is a conservative publication; one imagines if the president walked on water, they’d print a headline saying “Obama can’t swim.”

This pettiness should not surprise me. What I can’t ignore, however, is Troi’s dismissal of fiction as a waste of time and “out of touch with reality.”

Never mind that this president may just have been looking for interesting things to read; anybody who says that fiction readers are divorced from reality are themselves divorced from humanity. If they think that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is just some ghost story or Harry Potter is some silly tale about duelling wizards, they are missing the fundamental truths of literature to such a degree that I honestly pity these critics’ mundane existence.

Of course, I am biased. I write fiction. But there is truth in literature that most normal people understand, even if the critics can’t.

Take Troi’s dismissal of Emma Donoghue’s Booker-nominated Room, wherein he states, “It is about a mother and child trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room. This claustrophobic adventure does not strike me as the right choice for someone trying to escape the perception that he is trapped in a White House bubble.”

What Room is actually about is the five-year-old child, named Jack, starting to ask his mother questions about why they’ve never been outside their 11-by-11-foot room. It comes out that Jack’s mother was kidnapped before he was born and they are prisoners.

This story is told from Jack’s point of view; it is a tale about the power of love, and the resilience people show in long-term horrific situations. To dismiss this as a “claustrophobic adventure” is an insult to author Emma Donoghue.

Young adult fiction, which I write, gets even less respect by people who don’t understand the power of fiction. They ignore the fact that the story of young adults is the story of coming of age, a universal struggle. Almost everyone understands what it means to rebel against authority and come to understand responsibility. Almost everybody knows what it’s like to fall in love for the first time.

Fiction covers these real stories in ways that are often more interesting and accessible than some non-fiction textbook. Indeed, as journalists, it’s our job to find the story in the news, the plot that makes readers care about what’s happening in the world. We take our cue from fiction.

Critics who feel the president should not be wasting time on fiction have no understanding of the mirror that fiction holds up to the reality of the reader. It is as though the critics themselves have never looked in a mirror at all. As a result, it is their understanding of reality that I have to question, and not the president’s.
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James Bow is a writer and father of two in Kitchener.
You can read more about him at http://bowjamesbow.ca/