Brett Kavanaugh and the Witch in the Woods: The Millions Interviews Leni Zumas
Leni Zumas’s 2018 novel, Red Clocks, which has drawn wide comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, paints a chilling portrait of a near future in which not only is abortion illegal in the United States, a “Personhood Amendment” to the Constitution prohibits the use of IVF fertility treatments. The book, a national bestseller, won the 2019 Oregon Book Award and was named a “Best Book of 2018” by The Atlantic. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Notable, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and an Indie Next pick.
A longtime fan of Zumas’s work, I caught up with her at the Brooklyn Book Festival last year during the fraught confirmation proceedings of now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We discussed Red Clocks, as well as what Kavanaugh’s confirmation could mean for reproductive rights in the U.S.—a struggle even now unfolding in the American South, as states move to pass measures that would effectively ban abortion.
The Millions: Red Clocks is often compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, and rightly so—it’s a near-future sci fi novel, and the major factor that has rearranged the world is government regulation of reproduction, specifically as it applies to the female body. But The Handmaid’s Tale is also about religious fundamentalism, whereas Red Clocks seems as if it’s really more just challenging us to think through legislation—actual legislation that has been developed by actual American politicians—showing us both the intended and perhaps unintended consequences of that kind of legislation and how it could affect so many woman in so many ways.
We’ve got Ro, a single woman trying to get pregnant; Mattie, a high school student who’s unintentionally pregnant; and Gin, who’s being persecuted for offering alternative healthcare services to women. I think this book is such a service in the way that it helps us model those consequences.
: A lot of the legislation that’s affecting the characters in is influenced by evangelical Christianity…You know, is politician who in every way
