LIT LISTS: Seven novels that subvert social norms

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Seven novels that subvert social norms

A. Natasha Joukovsky holds a BA in English from the University of Virginia and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She spent five years in the art world, working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before pivoting into management consulting. The Portrait of a Mirror is her debut novel. She lives in Washington, D.C.

At Electric Lit she tagged "seven novels that irresistibly subvert social norms and etiquette," including:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The first time Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day, it was set in post-World War II Japan and called An Artist of the Floating World. But it wasn’t until he rewrote fascist propagandist Masuji Ono as English butler Mr. Stevens—seemingly, the paragon of Western etiquette—that Ishiguro won the Man Booker and later Nobel prizes. As Stevens’ unraveling interbellum memories reveal that his extraordinary professional “dignity” was not only performed in the service of a Nazi sympathizer, but personally cost him the most meaningful and transformative moments of his life, he is forced to reckon with just what kind of man his manners made him. I loved An Artist of the Floating World, too, but likely akin to the various prize committees, I viscerally find Ishiguro’s nuanced subversion of etiquette even more nuanced and subversive in the cultural context that broadly birthed my own—indeed, this is the innate power of social norms, and what gives such weight to their transgression. The Remains of the Day utterly destroyed me.