How Well Does Contemporary Fiction Address Radical Politics? This week, Pankaj Mishra and Jennifer Szalai discuss the representation of extreme political ideas in fiction. By Pankaj Mishra Fiction by women seems the most sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radicalism. Pankaj Mishra In the 1930s, many politically engaged writers in the West were engrossed by André Malraux's "Conquerers" and "Man's Fate," both set amid the turmoil of the Chinese Revolution. Malraux was one of the first novelists to reckon with two new 20th-century realities: the revolt of the masses and the power of ideology. Aligned with working-class movements, his smart, self-aware characters made the conspirators of Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes" and Henry James's "Princess Casamassima" seem like petty and irrelevant hecklers of an imperturbable bourgeois order. But Malraux still found himself attacked by Leon Trotsky, who said the French novelist was too much of a bourgeois individualist, and not Marxist enough to comprehend the great events he was part of. An equivalent accusation was brought against many writers engaged with the energies, both liberationist and nihilist, released by anticolonial movements and the arduous process of state-building in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Fortunately, these breakers of long national silences (including Indonesia's Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Chile's Roberto Bolaño) were less compelled by Marxist dogma than by the nobility of individual passion for justice and dignity. The antiapartheid activists of Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter," the Trotskyist revolutionary of Mario Vargas Llosa's "Real Life of Alejandro Mayta" and the low-caste opponent of Communist government in Arundhati Roy's "God of Small Things" show how the wish for radical innovation has been diversely realized, and often corrupted, but never less than urgent. This longing for an alternative order could not have been similarly commemorated in post-World War II American fiction. While other countries struggled with genocides, military coups and economic calamities, the United States saw an unprecedented period of prosperity, nearing what Carl Schmitt called a state of "neutralization": the end of struggles between rival ideologies and systems, and the rise of a politics dominated by experts and mass persuaders. Writing as the clamorous protests of the 1960s faded away, Philip Roth seemed almost envious of writers in Communist Eastern Europe, who had gained moral prestige and authority through their perilous defiance of repressive governments: "There," he wrote, "nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters." The American novelist's unease about his comfortable isolation, frequently expressed through reflexive irony, rarely flowed into an empathetic understanding of those intractably embodying the will to change at home. In "American Pastoral," Roth himself seemed to equate political radicalism with a form of lunacy. The vicious attacks of Sept. 11 could only strengthen the tendency to see militant dissent as a species of pathology. Confronted with the facts of mass politics and ideological fervor, John Updike and Martin Amis psychologized them away as symptoms of sexual frustration. Presumably free of male anxieties, fiction by women - Deborah Eisenberg, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Dana Spiotta - has seemed much more sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radical thought and action. Depicting Robespierre in "A Place of Greater Safety," Hilary Mantel may have given us contemporary fiction's richest portrait of a revolutionary. Remarkably, almost all events and characters in these works are drawn from the past. But then the few people pushed to radical gestures in our own era of unparalleled conformity and political passivity are more likely to be scorned than admired.