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By Robert Nagle

In a speech to Clemson University freshmen, Ann Patchett defends the university’s decision to assign her Truth and Beauty book to its freshman:

image“The people who oppose the assignment of Truth & Beauty, and oppose my presence here on campus today, do not do so for themselves,” I called out into the blinding light. “After all, nobody’s making them read my book. They are opposing on your behalf. They want to protect you from me. And since you’re just starting out as freshmen, let’s take a minute to think of all the other things you’re going to need to be protected from. Now, I used all possible restraint in making this list, because the fact is I could go on for the whole four years that you have to spend in college. You don’t want to pay good money to read about immoral behavior, friends, so Anna Karenina is out. It’s about adultery, a married woman’s affair with another man, and there’s a suicide. It’s scandalous, but you know, it’s also really long. Now, The Great Gatsby is going to have to go because it has more adultery and more scandal, in addition to alcoholism and murder, so that definitely has to go. It might be harder to let go of that one though, because it’s short and you may have already read it in high school. In One Hundred Years of Solitude you’ve got incest, which is a shame, because it is a spectacular novel. My personal uncontested pick for the best novel of the 20th century is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and I want to tell you, if I start talking about Lolita I feel certain the National Guard will come and remove me from this stage. Faulkner is gone. Hemingway is gone. Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Philip Roth, our three greatest living American authors, are strictly off-limits to you. Their books contain so much sex and filthy language it’s amazing I have mentioned their names on this stage.

“Or maybe those books aren’t the problem. Those are all fiction. Maybe what’s upsetting about my book is that it’s true, it really happened. So let’s make a pact today not to read any nonfiction that could be upsetting. If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer, humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting, too pornographic, then I have to tell you, friends, the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion that I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all.” (A video clip of the speech is at the bottom of this interview).

Well said, but the hullabaloo is hardly bad for her career (Mike Royko once wrote that he wished someone would ban his book..and cause his book sales to rise).  Requiring something for class has pitfalls. My high school literature teacher said that the best way to spoil your appreciation of a certain novel is to assign it to your class.  But banning it…that’s another story.

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