Empathy Isn’t Enough
Supposedly, one of the benefits of reading books is that they can make you a better, more empathetic person—whether you pick up a novel that makes you feel for its characters, or a nonfiction book with a moral message. But what are the limits of writing that tries to provoke empathy in its readers?
When it was published in 2020, Jeanine Cummins’s novel which follows the harrowing migration of a Mexican mother and son to the U.S.,” in Cummins’s attempts to get her readers to see Latino immigrants as human beings. “What good, after all, does the mere acknowledgment of migrants’ essential humanity do for those whose lives have been shattered—and in some cases, ended”by U.S. immigration policies? she asks. In , Geraldine Brooks knowingly takes on the challenge of : two of her protagonists are Black men. Though she may succeed in gaining the reader’s sympathy, that sympathy “fall[s] short, aesthetically as well as politically,” writes Jordan Kisner, because Brooks’s portrayal lacks nuance and depth. “If readers feel sorry for Theo and Jarret without really needing to believe in them as whole beings, what exactly do their portraits accomplish?” she writes.
