11 February 2026

Chomsky against Foucault against Dworkin – who cares?

Ideas overpower meaning in Sophie Ward’s packed novel

Poet in residence: Muriel Rukeyser. Photo by Tony Evans/Getty Images

There is nothing so deceptive as the finished work of art. The framed oil painting belies the abandoned sketches that linger behind it; the varnished jug bears no trace of its early collapse on the potter’s wheel; and the freshly minted hardback, which takes up a mere two fingers’ width on the shelf, represents only the tip of the library that underlies its creation. In her new novel, Our Better Natures, Sophie Ward undercuts such artifice by including a bibliography. Here, beyond the velvet curtain of published prose, is the whirring, steaming machinery of intellectual labour. Philosophers like Foucault and Chomsky have been enlisted alongside writers like Kafka and Hemingway, and feminists like Dworkin and Paley have been summoned to throw spanners in the patriarchal works. The message is clear: this is no ordinary story to be idly consumed, but a novel of backbreaking ideas.

Like Ward’s Booker-longlisted debut Love and Other Thought Experiments, Our Better Natures works within the tradition of philosophical fiction, albeit in a subversive way. If the novel of ideas tends towards aloof contemplation of concepts and arguments, Ward wants to ground philosophy in lived experience – to show how ideas shape, and are shaped by, real lives. In 1970s America, three women discover that “Justice vs Power” is not just the abstract title of the contemporaneous debate between Chomsky and Foucault; it is the framework through which they experience and contend with a patriarchal society.

Whether it’s the housewife Phyllis Peterson, who watches the men in her family leave to fight in foreign wars; the activist Andrea Dworkin, whose body bears the scars of domestic abuse; or the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who repeatedly risks imprisonment protesting against the Vietnam War, these are stories meant to testify to the material consequences of ideas.

Dworkin and Rukeyser were real figures. As well as being a philosophical novel, then, Our Better Natures is also a work of historical fiction. To say that this is an ambitious endeavour is an understatement. On the one hand, Ward is bound by the philosophical concepts around which the novel is organised, and on the other she is tied to historical fact. In practice, this double bind works like a chokehold, squeezing life from characters who are flatly emblematic of ideas, reducing story to biographical information and forcing dialogue into trite slogans. Instead of bringing Dworkin to life, Ward gives us Andrea – who bears little relation to the rageful author of Woman Hating but churns out limp platitudes like, “We mustn’t give up hope. Hope is the thing with feathers, right? They can’t clip our wings.” Where Ward might have given us a convincing psychological portrait of a woman driven by abuse to revolution, she instead proffers an absurd made-up story about Dworkin, Foucault and Chomsky getting stoned and putting on clown noses. Oh, the ideas!

That the clowning incident makes no sense is no doubt intentional. Like her fictional Rukeyser, Ward “refuses to surrender the art that clashes with the palate of interior designers with a trust-fund base”. Not for her, writing that “scans and makes sense and isn’t a waste of time. It is her time to waste.” Except it isn’t – it’s ours. There are limits to the reader’s tolerance for superfluity (we do not need to know the installation date of Phyllis’s freezer, for example). Nor will many submit, again and again, to googling obscure literary references (“What are patterns?”, “Oscar Wilde’s little tent of blue beckons”) just to parse a sentence. Yes, ideas have material consequences, but only once they’ve been made intelligible.

Dworkin believed that standard writing conventions such as punctuation inhibit our freedom; in reality, they are often the difference between gaining a reader and losing one. Whether Dworkin, Rukeyser or Ward like it or not, it is in the sentence we trust. Each one is a foothold, below which lies the abyss of incoherence. Every time a sentence fragment or a flouted comma comes at the expense of meaning, as they do so often in this novel, the reader loses faith in the path ahead. It doesn’t matter how hard the words strain for poetry (“The rain flies against the glass. As rain will do. The wind rattles the roof. As wind is wont”) – if they signal nothing, they are wasted. Ideas, too, are well and good, but if understanding a novel is contingent on ploughing through an entire bibliography, many will choose less backbreaking work.

Our Better Natures
Sophie Ward
Corsair, 288pp, £22