There's a very famous remark of Stendhal's, which Irving Howe discusses in Politics and the Novel. "Politics in a work of literature," Stendhal said, "is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention."
I've been thinking about that remark alot while writing a piece for Democratiya about John Updike's most recent novel Terrorist (I posted about it briefly in the summer). It nicely captures the way politics, in the shape of radical Islamism, takes its place in the manicured textures of Updike's suburban phenomenology.
And it seems to me there's a presentiment of the difficulties Updike has in handling the point of view of his protagonist, Ahmad Mulloy, in something he says in this interview with Ian McEwan. He's talking about the dreadful scene in Rabbit Run in which Rabbit Angstrom's young wife drowns their baby:
I dreaded writing that scene. Some writers – perhaps you among them – rather relish scenes of violence. Having avoided violence in my life, I tend to avoid it in my fiction. Which is wrong, since violence is part of life. Yes, maybe it’s a key part of life.