At the New York Review of Books, I talk with the novelist Karan Mahajan about literature and politics. Karan’s got a wonderful new novel, The Complex, which I highly recommend. It’s about a right-wing Indian politician, who hails from an illustrious family of Indian founders. It’s an uncommonly subtle, at times sympathetic, account of a man, and his family, who are charming, ugly, lovable, impossible, cruel, selfish, narcissistic, people who live in a complex, both architecturally and psychologically, and who are complexed by that living. What I love about Karan’s writing is that he’s absolutely unafraid to go places where a lot of other writers would hold back or judge or feel the need to remind the reader that they’re on the side of the good. Karan’s not like that.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Mahajan: Now I want to pose a moral question. Obviously, what one doesn’t want to do, as a writer, is revel in the evil or badness of a character or the worst instincts of the right. This is a point Coetzee makes in “The Problem of Evil” in Elizabeth Costello. As a novelist, my own strategy has been to inhabit my “bad” characters very physically and to let their objectionable behaviors emerge sideways, through their actions. A character’s racism, for example, wouldn’t be the center of the frame, because making it central is what the person who is viewing them as a racist is doing. But when you say that you want to “see the world through [Thomas’s] eyes,” how do you avoid the problem of, say, overly sympathizing with his views?

Robin: As you were talking, I thought of Hannah Arendt, in her portrait of Eichmann. This is exactly what she does and always gets attacked for. She writes, for example, about how, at the end of the war, when all the Nazis are trying to figure out what’s going to happen to them, Eichmann’s obsessed about whether Kaltenbrunner, who’s his senior, is going to invite him to lunch. Yet he has no memory of all these details of a transport in which tens of thousands of people were killed. People thought that Arendt was trying to diminish Eichmann’s evil, but I think she was trying to do what you’re describing: to find a way into the being of somebody who could perpetrate such crimes.

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Mahajan: What are the other common mistakes that novelists and theorists make when writing about reactionaries?

Robin: There are two, and both speak to how well you write about the right. Judith Shklar, the political theorist at Harvard, wrote a book called Ordinary Vices. Her second chapter is about hypocrisy and why we hate it. But she takes great pains to remind us that hypocrisy is not the worst vice. I never appreciated her point until recently, but it’s useful advice for thinking about the right. The right’s hypocrisy often gives the left orgasms. The left always needs to relearn the lessons of Hegel and Marx—beneath any surface contradiction, there’s a complex and elusive unity. It’s our job to find it, not to dwell on the contradiction or hypocrisy, because dwelling on it keeps the unity in obscurity.

The other mistake involves how we deal with sex and shame. There’s an easy story to tell about the right’s sexual morality, which is that it derives from repressed “deviance,” that is from repressing desires that the right deems deviant yet members of the right still feel, only more so. It’s a convenient script that tells you little. Most people, across the spectrum, have all kinds of shame associated with sex. It’s part of what sex is, it’s part of what often creates desire. One of the virtues of your novel is how intelligently it deals with the subjects of sex and shame.

Mahajan: For me, my novels don’t work till I have the characters’ sexual drives figured out. I experienced this with my characters in The Association of Small Bombs as well. At the time, the larger discourse around Islamic fundamentalism was so puerile that it made my task easier in some ways. The idea that fundamentalists were committing terrorist attacks because they didn’t have sex! It’s shocking that this was a mainstream view.

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Robin: I wonder how this maps out for you in India. My sense from your novel is that weaving politics into the personal is not nearly as difficult there as it is here. Is that true?

Mahajan: Yes, but that’s because of an inversion of that Macaulay quote about government existing solely to keep the peace. When a government fails at basic tasks, it is suddenly everywhere in the lives of its citizens. To paraphrase Hegel, one’s spirituality is forcibly squeezed through the toothpaste tube of the state. And the history of government in India has been one of massive failures—corruption, infrastructural collapses, bureaucratic delays—which press down on the daily lives of individuals even in the middle and upper classes. Indians are more political because they have no choice but to be political.

Then there’s history. Most people in India are only two or three generations removed from the upheavals of India’s independence and partition. As a Punjabi from Delhi, for example, I can still connect certain social attitudes toward women or Muslims to the violence of partition. American literature would feel quite different if the War of Independence was just in the rearview mirror.

Read the whole interview here.