First, lemme say I generally have loved LeGuin reads in the past. I found The Left Hand of Darkness to be thought-provoking and well done, and (of course) the entire Earthsea series was brilliant. I finally made it through The Dispossessed, and am of two distinct minds about it.
Mind 1: Her prose is, as always, good. She tackles a topical topic (especially in the 1970s when she wrote this) and gives it some good thought. Her characters are fairly compelling, if somewhat thin. The story manages to move along and come to a satisfying place at the end, with illumination often provided through natural-seeming situations and dialogue. She manages to wrench the heartstrings a few times, too.
Mind 2: It’s preachy, and becomes artistically uneven as a result. The cover material suggests this book is an evenhanded exploration of capitalism versus a radical communitarian/libertarian alternative, but that is kind of like saying Glenn Beck’s Books are “explorations.” The Dispossessed is a unilateral condemnation of capitalism and almost a love letter to a particular conceptualization of communal social society. This bias affects LeGuin’s writing style: the exposition dumps often seem like lectures or cheerleading, the worlds are created barely more than minimally, and even her characters sometimes slide into caricatures whose sole purpose is to advance her political thesis. Here is my tongue-in-cheek fantasy of what Ursula K. LeGuin might have been saying to herself as she drew up the first outline…
“Okay, where to start? I know: two civilizations. One looks just like the US, and is full of spineless, weasely capitalists who are incapable of even imagining anything outside their crass, opportunistic capitalist worldview, and basically they’d all shoot a stranger in the back for two dollars, all except the poor people, who all get shot in the back by strangers. The other civilization is like the USSR, but how it should have been, without that repressive totalitarian thing. It’s the opposite of the Americ– I mean capitalists, so the people don’t own anything and they spend all day working very hard and starving and sometimes dying, even though they never get paid and nobody really cares if they stop working, and they almost never do anything we would think was really wrong, even though there aren’t any laws or police or religion or anything… they all just kind of know what’s right and wrong. They have a bleak, miserable existence but they are soooo soooo happy. Why? Just because, all right? Maybe because they are not dirty, evil capitalists. And they all have vaguely Eastern European-sounding names. And they can have sex with each other whenever they want, without any annoying consequences, like guilt or having to raise children. And the women all want sex as frequently and noncommittally as the men. Yes, this will do nicely.
“Now for a protagonist. Hm. Tall and rugged, of course, and really, really smart. In fact, let’s say he’s the smartest guy in the world, maybe in the whole galaxy. And he is really, really good. I mean, even Americans would say he’s really good. In fact, he’s so good that he makes the rest of his nonauthoritarian communist friends look lame by comparison. He mostly does really brainy math and physics and stuff, but he also gets out and works hard, just for fun, all day long, lifting and digging and hauling and staying nice and lean and well-muscled and getting dirty and dusty and grimy and taking off his shirt and… whew! I need some air in here!
“Okay, our character needs a love interest, and she is, let’s see… nerdy and brainy and fiercely independent and socially awkward and not very pretty, and she wants a lifelong commitment, even though she’s even more independent and strong and self-assured than the other communist women. But he loves her more than any of the hot girls he can have noncommittal sex with whenever he wants, even though many of them are presumably strong, smart, independent communists, too, and hotter than she is, and less demanding. And he likes babies! Yes, and children. And he makes a lifelong commitment to his not-very-pretty wife (note: this is not marriage, even though it looks pretty much exactly the same) even though almost nobody on his planet ever does this, and even though he could have sex with anyone he wanted, any time he wanted, with no guilt and no consequences. He’s just that great a guy. And he stays faithful to her for years and years, and they always have steamy moments when they get back together and wow, is it getting even hotter in here? Let me go put on something more comfortable. And dim the lights.
“This guy is so smart that even his own communist people don’t understand him and he has to go to the capitalist planet and make them all look very, very bad. Even the good capitalists (actually, there aren’t any good capitalists) look bad when they talk to him. And then he meets the poor people, and all of a sudden he’s singing and marching and defying the government and making impassioned speeches about property and freedom and oh my goodness I need to go lie down I’ll finish this in the morning.”
Yes, that was highly facetious. Sorry, Ms. LeGuin. The book just sometimes seemed like a Harlequin romance novel for frustrated mid-20th-Century progressive women. A hero with no flaws whatever, who does everything exactly right, all the time. A civilization with no flaws (except that this here new generation of young ‘uns is all forgettin’ the principles of the founding mothers!). Capitalists defend their lifestyle with the thinnest of straw-man arguments, and their civilization has almost no positive side whatsoever. Yes, there’s a Soviet-type nation on the planet, but it gets dismissed and the protagonist pointedly declines to travel there, so we never get to see what might have been a much more illuminating exploration of some of the ideas being dealt with in the book. The narrative stays firmly in the capitalism-versus-utopia vein. The writing was, as always, done pretty well, but it was a propaganda piece. It was The Fountainhead for ’70s liberals.
I will read more LeGuin. She’s still a good writer. Some of her books are at the very top of my personal SciFi/fantasy list, but this book is not among them.