What would you do if you found out that a congressman’s wife had written a series of romance novels? Would you read them? And what would you do, hypothetically, if you read one of them, and found it not only creatively lacking but surprisingly racist? You can answer those questions for yourself; I discovered my own answers last week.
As a general rule, I subscribe to a theory of combatants and noncombatants in politics. Those who sign up to be in the ring are fair game for scrutiny and criticism; those who don’t, aren’t. In most circumstances, a congressman’s spouse would be a private citizen, a noncombatant, neither worthy nor deserving of scrutiny. But Anne Garboczi Evans, wife of Republican Colorado congressman Gabe Evans, is not just “a congressman’s spouse.” She is an author, having published at least twelve books which she describes as “intellectual romances set in unique locales and eras.”
While writing is a deeply personal and intimate act, publishing is an inherently public one. As Evans chose to put her writing in the public record, I believe it’s fair to analyze and critique that work as I would the work of any other author. But, just as Evans cannot be defined solely as “a congressman’s spouse,” neither can she be accurately defined as simply “any other author.”
By all accounts, Anne and Gabe Evans have a close marriage, they are partners; and Anne has never been afraid to voice her own opinions – something not all political spouses feel the liberty to do. Perhaps the mutual respect is rooted in the origin of their relationship: a shared education at Patrick Henry College, often cringe-inducingly called “God’s Harvard.” Both have spoken highly of the alma mater, and it even earned a small reference in the book I’m reviewing.
All that to say, I was interested in Anne Evans’ fiction not just because of what it might reflect of her husband, but what it might reflect of the beliefs and worldview they share with each other, and with millions of conservative Christians of a certain kind. As someone who studies and reports on the Christian nationalist movement, the opportunity to examine some of that movement’s creative output was intriguing to me.
That’s why I picked up Evans’ Veiled by Privilege, in which a homeschooled, Christian CIA agent and a Harvard-educated liberal atheist find themselves on a poorly paced romp across the Middle East, tangling with Saudi religious police, bizarrely progressive Al Qaeda terrorists, and a handful of painfully unexamined ironies.
In brief, the story goes like this. Harvard PhD candidate Kay Bianchi, desperate for a dissertation topic which will somehow automatically win her both a doctorate and a Harvard professorship, hatches a plot to embed herself in Middle Eastern culture, which she does by stealing the passport of a Saudi student – who, unbeknownst to Kay, was also a CIA asset – and traveling to Saudi Arabia under that identity. We are told that Islamic head coverings and Kay’s Italian ancestry make this plausible. Once there, Kay learns that she is to be wed to an older man (a terrorist!) in a marriage arranged by her custodial uncle. On the other side of the equation is devoutly Christian and ostentatiously homeschooled CIA operative Joe Csontos (the obvious Gabe Evans stand-in), who promptly falls in love with Kay and sets about attempting to rescue her from her captors, convert her to Christianity, and marry her – all of which, spoiler alert, he does.
The book is the first entry in Evans’ “Radical” trilogy, though it has a standalone plot, with the other two novels chronicling women in similar circumstances.
Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about the plot of Veiled by Privilege is that it was not the worst thing about the book. Unfortunately, by the time I finished reading it, the novel’s poor plot had taken a backseat to a number of more serious issues. Throughout, Evans’ story is bogged down by its author’s misunderstandings, biases, and lack of self-awareness.
The misunderstandings peppering the book’s pages were mostly innocuous, but made for a jarring read. There’s the moment early on where Evans remarks that a character had placed his hand on “the massive statue of some pretentious socialist in Harvard Yard.” The only statue in Harvard Yard is of John Harvard, a puritan minister who predated socialism by more than a century. There’s also the author’s own confusion about higher education, with Kay doing “graduate work” to pursue her “diploma” for her doctorate.
The bigger category of misunderstanding weighing-down the story, though, was Evans’ misunderstanding of the kind of pretentious liberals she was attempting to skewer, as if she could not extend either her empathy or curiosity far enough to render the characters plausibly or mock them effectively. As a result, the Harvard lib who Evans attempts to inhabit as her main character operates on an internal monologue which sounds nothing like any liberal or Harvard grad I have ever met. Instead, Kay’s inner life is dominated by a kind of inverted Fox News parody. Kay believes that “science has disproved the notion of God,” (no one with an understanding of science believes that it proves negatives), thinks that Jesus probably conquered nations like the Prophet Muhammad (something literally no one thinks), and – despite nearing completion of her doctorate in Islamic Studies – is completely unaware of traditional Middle Eastern gender roles until being thrust into them.
If Evans had troubled to render her liberal characters, alternately ignorant and nefarious, in a more plausible light, her attempts to skewer their beliefs would have come closer to success.
More confusingly, Evans consistently portrays Al Qaeda as being composed of liberal social justice warriors preoccupied with wealth inequality and the suffering of the poor.
Throughout the story, I found it difficult to tell who Evans disdained more: liberals or Arabs (not to be confused with Muslims, which we’re getting to). And that was the second major problem bogging down the book. For reasons which seemed more rooted in unconscious bias than active bigotry, Evans’ writing is overwhelmingly preoccupied with race in all its particulars. The skin tones of various characters are described literally dozens of times in the novel, which is a large amount for even the most multicultural plot.
The preoccupation with skin tone was not nearly as striking as the arrangement of it, though: without fail, Evans’ protagonists had lighter skin and her antagonists had darker skin. Even though Kay’s Italian ancestry is allegedly key to her being able to pass for Arab, her skin is later described as “ivory.” Homeschooled Christian CIA agent Joe Csontos is virtually translucent, incessantly described as “light-skinned” and “fair-skinned.” The Al Qaeda baddies, meanwhile, are darker than Joe and Kay, and not just because they are Arab. Antagonists were repeatedly described as “darker skinned” than most Saudis, or as having “skin charred by desert sun.” A random slave with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize was, for no apparent reason, light-skinned.
Though that would have been enough to consider the novel unduly racist, that is not where it stopped. Evans also describes Arab characters as “greasy” and “hook-nosed.”
Whatever unconscious bias Evans might harbor towards the Middle East’s Arab population, however, was overshadowed in the novel by her very conscious disdain for Islam. And it is there, on the grounds of an Abrahamic feud, that Evans’ effort really falls apart. While attempting to contrast Christianity, which she believes is good, with Islam, which she believes is bad, Evans ends up portraying both faiths as insular, close-minded, and male-dominated – and she does not at any point appear to have realized that’s what she was doing.
The driving force of the novel’s romantic plot between Joe and Kay is Joe’s desire to convert Kay to Christianity (he can’t marry her if she does not convert), and Kay’s initially persistent resistance to those efforts. Meanwhile, Kay’s Americanized ways lead her into trouble with various Muslim authority figures who, likewise, want her to conform more perfectly to their own religion. The similarities between Joe and the various caricatures of Muslim men Evans sketches are never highlighted, never put forth as ironies.
From start to finish, homeschooled Christian CIA agent Joe Csontos is a religious bigot. Despite being presented as having liberalized substantially since his homeschooled upbringing, Joe remains an unreconstructed Christian chauvinist. He comments that a professor might want a “fertilizer bomb” in order to “teach his students a hands-on lesson on original Islam,” refers to Islam as a “vile religion,” and comments on Kay’s “delusions about the Middle East being a beautiful place.”
He does not come to see the error of his ways. He does not learn about tolerance from the Harvard liberal he has improbably fallen in love with. The only indication Evans ever gives – in the epilogue – that Joe has softened his stance a single iota is when he says that he loves Middle Eastern culture but “hates how Islam has taken away all the beauty,” a nonsense statement akin to saying that one loves European culture but hates how Christianity ruined it with all those cathedrals.
In the end, after Kay has been properly baptized into the Christian faith and Joe has obtained her father’s permission, Joe proposes. Kay says yes. The only character who learned anything on their unlikely road to matrimony is Kay – but the lesson she learned, that Islam is bad and Christianity is good, is the final nail in the novel’s coffin, turning it from aborted art to attempted proselytization, and failing on both fronts.
Anne Evans is not her husband. I will not ascribe the flaws in her biases, plotting, or pacing to him. But I will not pretend that the ideas contained in Veiled by Privilege are unique to Anne Evans either. On nearly every other page, protagonists spouted the kinds of rhetoric I heard in post-9/11 Tennessee; the kinds of rhetoric which dominated national news last week after Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary: pure, unadulterated Islamophobia; a clash-of-civilizations mindset more fit for the Greco-Persian wars than the 21st century.
In most plots revolving around a cultural clash, the characters eventually realize their own chauvinism, they learn some sort of trite-but-true lesson about how we’re all human, or how everybody makes mistakes, or how we’re not so different after all. Evans, for her part, did not even attempt it.
There does not need to be a lesson in everything, but there is one here: Evans’ novel reflects a belief held deeply by the millions of our countrymen who subscribe to a militant and nationalistic version of Christianity, that the task of human civilization is not peaceful coexistence – the right and ability to live, love, and worship how we choose – but victory. The task is not to respect each other’s differences, it is to obliterate them, to not rest until everyone is brought in line. Hence Evans’ happy ending not being Kay’s liberation from the suffering which men and their dueling faiths subjected her to throughout the plot, but submission. Submission to the right man, the right god.
Say what you will about that belief, one thing is clear: it does not make for good art.
