num_pages: 16
description: In an election season widely seen as stranger than fiction we decided to turn to fiction to see how it might illuminate todays befuddling political climate. For the first time ever the Book Review has commissioned an original short story. The assignment: Write anything about this election season you like. The result Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies The Arrangements on our cover this week updates Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway  with Melania Trump as Clarissa.In an email interview Adichie whose novel Americanah was one of the Book Reviews 10 Best Books of 2013 said Woolfs novel both criticizes and is also complicit in a certain kind of conservative class-privileged England and I like to think this story has the same general spirit.Adichies interest began with Ivanka Trump who seems to me too thoughtful and too intelligent to truly believe that her fathers erratic ungrounded policy positions would genuinely be good for the United States. And so I imagined her as a kind of unknowable character and I needed a foil of sorts for her which is how Melania Trump became the center of the story.Fiction can remind us  and because of the blood-sport nature of politics we constantly need reminding  that the players in politics are first human beings Adichie said.
language: English
title: The Arrangements
publisher: The New York Times