the feminist librarian reads

To some portion of Franzen’s audience, such a picture of the relationship between the personal and the political will be unrecognizable. Only relatively recently in human history has it been suggested—the idea is often traced back to Hobbes, though it was most memorably articulated by Mill—that the individual ought to enjoy some protected private or personal sphere, free from the interference of government or society. One of the public services performed by a book like Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son about the “visceral experience” of being black in America, or a play like Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s epic about the LGBTQ community during the height of the AIDS epidemic, is to document the experience of those Americans for whom the right to be left alone remains largely a rumor. For such populations, politics is not a noisy room that can be entered into or retreated from depending on one’s mood; it is a fixture of their condition, penetrating transparently into the most intimate aspects of daily life.