As far as American literature goes, an all-white cast of characters is unexceptional and routinized to the point of banality. However, in the fourteen satirical short stories from Mark Doten’s Whites—each centered on a character who is…well, white—Doten does something unexpected. In mordantly comic prose, they write a whiteness that is sharpened to a point and deployed as a precise weapon, skewering white people at their most vulnerable angles. Take the title story, where a nonprofit manager working with unhoused people sees her career unravel after a video surfaces of her harassing a Black man. The internet backlash is swift, and she ends up, of all things, without a home. Her response to the controversy is a familiar white guise—not guilt or accountability but obfuscation, scapegoating, and self-pity. When she finally musters a shred of compassion—“I am so sorry that any of this had to happen to you”—it is directed only to herself. If Whites is about anything, it’s about self-adoration disguised as empathy. 

But Doten doesn’t just target “woke” liberals, there’s a wide range of whites in Whites: from a QAnon crank to a workplace Karen, an anti-vax nurse to a nonbinary sneaker podcaster—even Elon Musk. What do they have in common besides their UV-sensitive skin? They’re all a bunch of losers. The biggest loser of all might be the gay white supremacist featured in “Banana Bunch Challenge.” After murdering his parents, he plots a mass shooting at his school, only to have his plans inadvertently thwarted by Gen-Z students filming viral banana stunts for their YouTube channel. The shooter slips on a banana peel and blows his own face off—a grim relief. 

Slogging through this parade of white people behaving badly, even reprehensibly, requires a reader both generous and masochistic (we get enough white depravity IRL). While the book opens with a series of epigraphs in red-pilled Boomer-speak that insists these fictions “SPREAD LIGHT INTO DARKNESS,” the reverse may be true: the unbearable whiteness of the characters threatens to blot out all light. But it would be too convenient to castigate Doten for daring to inhabit the peepers of alt-right killers, mothers guilty of filicide, and serial-killer CEOs. Far more intriguing is the way laughter troubles easy judgments, disrupting our urge to categorize who is good and who is bad. Doten’s dark humor forces us to contend with the contradictions and absurdities between each narrator’s self-image and their ridiculous, often horrifying actions. Stick with Whites and you’ll be rewarded with savage, riotous comedy. And what better reprieve is there than to revel in the wreckage of white pieties?

Doten and I spoke over Zoom about mad monologues, white mass shooters, Trump, how to write the internet, and more.

Evander Reyes: What drew you to center this collection on white people?

Mark Doten: When the stories were starting to come together, race kept coming up as an explicit topic across the various narrators. White privilege, “wokeness,” white supremacist ideology. There’s a whole range of ways in which white people were kind of…navigating their whiteness. And I’ve always admired story collections that have a unifying theme. A big influence on this collection is David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. That book has a theme, but it can also do many different things and incorporate many types of narrative textures. 

I considered a different version of this book where it’s not all told from the point of view of white people. But at the time I started this book, it was a very stay-in-your-lane era of who gets to tell whose stories, and, of course, there are a lot of good arguments for white people to not write, for instance, Black protagonists. So I decided to run with that, to have the narrators or protagonists be all white people, and to try to push them towards various types of confrontations, often with race and their ideas of race. I’m interested in the places where these white people get hung up on race, get stuck, lose sight of themselves. I wanted to bring these characters, who have very different backgrounds and politics and ways of seeing things, to places where they were forced to think about race, engage with it, or obstinately do their best not to engage with race or think about it—which is never possible, at least not in the ways they want it to be.  

ER: That’s something I noticed about your collection—the many kinds of white characters that inhabit it and the ways they approach race. And while the white far right is a clear target, you don’t spare white liberals either. I was really struck by how your liberal characters respond when their whiteness is called out. They are often, as you said, stuck. They do not meet the moment with reflection or change, but rather with shame or anxiety, and a moral performance that mostly just recenters themselves. How do you think about writing the white liberal versus the white far-right characters? Do you approach them differently, or are they more alike than we might assume? 

MD: There are definitely ways in which they’re alike. In “Banana Bunch Challenge,” the story is mostly from the perspective of a gay incel white supremacist. He’s able to articulate his feelings about race in a way that feels direct and clear, at least within his worldview.

By contrast, in the title story, the protagonist works in nonprofit housing and sees herself as doing good. She talks about race superficially, gestures toward contemporary discourse, but isn’t really honest with herself or the reader. When she confronts a Black teenager she believes stole her iPad, her recognition of race doesn’t meaningfully shape the encounter. I think both characters could become less clear-sighted if challenged, but while the supremacist narrator controls the story and acknowledges race, the woman in the title story seems to wish race didn’t exist at all.

ER: While you approach “Banana Bunch Challenge” and “Whites” differently in terms of race, stylistically they are written in a similar way, using these intense first-person monologues. You put readers in close, often uncomfortable proximity to abhorrent characters. Can you talk about why you chose these kinds of mad monologues?

MD: “Mad monologue” is a good term for it. I’m very influenced by writers who work in that zone. One early model is Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. I’ve always been drawn to spiraling first-person narrators who overwrite, contradict themselves, and shift positions as they go. You see it in Kafka’s short stories, like “The Burrow” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” which use that kind of narrator. Thomas Bernhard is another key influence, with his intense, often unhinged first-person narratives, and Wallace Shawn’s The Fever shows how the form works in plays.

The appeal of the first-person monologue is that it imposes limits but gives freedom to move quickly from idea to idea or scene to scene. You can show self-contradiction, elaboration, or elision in real time. The performance of the monologue tells you a lot about the character in ways a close third-person narrator cannot, since third-person narration creates distance and doesn’t allow the narrator to undermine themselves in the same way.

ER: I thought a lot about elision while reading your stories. Every character seems to be hiding something from themselves and the reader, and each story contains surprising swerves.

MD: One fun thing about this type of first-person narrator is the flexibility it offers. In “Lord Wumpa,” the narrator is a Gen-X white man who owns a cookie factory in Minnesota. His monologue is addressed to a young, Black podcaster investigating decades-old murders of the company’s employees. By the end, you realize she isn’t conducting an interview at all. She’s tied up; the factory owner is wearing a disgusting old costume of the cookie brand’s mascot, and he either is—or believes he is—channeling an ancient demon from hell.

I enjoy playing with when to reveal information and when to keep deferring it, dropping little breadcrumbs that let attentive readers think, “Wait, what?” For me, it’s fun to have voices mutating and unraveling in the moment as they speak. By contrast, with third-person narration, there’s often more attention to stage-setting—dialogue tags, gestures, people moving and glancing at one another. A first-person monologue lets me skip all that and focus on voice, contradiction, and surprise.

ER: I could tell you were having fun writing it, and it was fun to read—I laughed a lot. Your stories produced many kinds of laughter: chuckling, LOLing, the hand-over-mouth kind. I also laughed when I was uncomfortable, which made me more aware of the thin line between humor and unease. How do you approach humor in satire?

MD: Almost all of my favorite writers are funny, often in a dry or darkly humorous way. Humor in my work often comes from observing how people deal with race—for example, the performative allyship of white people. But more broadly, we live in truly ridiculous times. The Trump administration, for instance, is absurd and terrifying, but Trump himself can be funny. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. That half-joking, half-serious mode gives him incredible freedom to disclaim things or change his mind, and I think it’s part of his success.

More generally, we live in a time when almost everyone senses that much of what we see is absurd or bullshit, just in different ways. People on the right and left perceive different truths and falsehoods, but everyone knows that half of everything is performative or nonsensical.

ER: To me your humor excels at handling that kind of absurdity. For example, in the first story, “Even Elon on Human Meat,” you’ve got Elon Musk literally walking on the body of a person while railing against wokeness. It’s such a grotesque image. And, you know, writing satire about people like Musk or Trump is tough because they already are self-parodies. But your story goes further, outpacing their already absurd realities in these really disturbing ways.

MD: I think with both Musk and Trump, if you just transcribe one of their speeches, or in Musk’s case, string together a bunch of his tweets, it already comes out strange and funny. There’s this sense of, how is this the richest man in the world? How is this the most powerful man in the world? That’s also why Trump impressions are so hard. He’s so bizarre and unpredictable that even great impressionists can’t quite capture him.

So if you’re going to write a monologue from Trump or Musk’s perspective, both of whom are already these weird, funny, infuriating voices, the question becomes: What can fiction do that they can’t do on their own? For me, one answer is the “time-freeze” moment. I love the way Thomas Bernhard does this in his work, where entire pages can unfold in the span of someone walking through a doorway. That’s something books can do that reality can’t.

In my story, Musk is literally walking on a person after a shuttle explosion. Then I freeze that moment for several pages. On one level, the drama is: will he get off this person? On another level, we’re in his head as he fixates on whether the person might be Black, what that would mean, and how the internet would react. He blames “wokeness” for making him think about race at all instead of actually helping the person. That layering—external action paused while the mind unravels—is the kind of thing fiction can do that real life Musk could never pull off.

ER: It’s one thing to be in Musk’s head, but going back to “Banana Bunch Challenge,” we are placed in the mind of a white supremacist killer—someone immersed in white nationalist ideology and white-genocide conspiracy theories. How do you write this kind of character in a way that doesn’t reinforce those ideas? How hard is it to write from the perspective of someone so unbearably negative?

MD: Since the early stages of this book, I knew I wanted to include a story about a mass shooting—not because I’m drawn to the subject, but because it’s been such a central, violent political event over the last twenty-plus years. Real mass shooters often have specific racist or incel ideologies, and my character combines elements of both. The challenge, of course, is how to depict these ideologies without reinforcing them. It’s tricky. What unlocked the story for me was Donna Minkowitz’s Slate article, “How the Alt-Right Is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism.” The article is about gay white supremacists. That contradiction fascinated me and allowed me to explore a more niche ideology within white supremacy. My character imagines his worldview to be intellectually sound—though of course it isn’t. One way to write this so it doesn’t appeal to white supremacists or their sympathizers is to make it funny in a way that ridicules that ideology. The book has a narrow audience, and the readers I imagine will presumably understand that it is satire. I don’t think many incel mass shooters would find my character’s portrayal of that ideology appealing. But of course, you can’t fully control how people interpret it.

ER: Who is your ideal reader for this book and what impact do you want these stories to have on them?

MD: That’s another tricky question, because I don’t really think about reader response or imagine an ideal reader when I’m writing. I know some writers use that as a strategy to drive their work, but that’s not how I approach it. A short story collection I absolutely adore is Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which engages with a lot of similar topics like very online culture, questions of race, and characters with weird, fucked up sexualities. I’d say readers who connected with that book might want to give this one a try.

As for effect, I don’t think most fiction is likely to have any direct, real-world political impact. There are certainly cases where fiction has done that, but for me the goal is different. In this very busy, overstimulated, seven-screens-on-at-once world we live in, I hope that my book can offer readers space to slow down, give their attention fully, and find something rewarding, pleasurable, and surprising.

ER: I thought about Tulathimutte’s book a lot as I read Whites. I saw many similarities, especially the way you both write about the internet. Similar to Rejection, your characters often feel deeply shaped, even warped, by their immersion in online environments. Their politics are influenced by the internet, whether through radicalization into white nationalism or the performance of liberal virtue. How do you think about the Internet as a structural force in your work?

MD: The internet is obviously a huge disaster and a nightmare—politically and in our day-to-day lives. It has its good aspects, sure, but what fascinates me is the shift from the idealism of the ’90s and early 2000s, when people believed in the internet’s democratizing power, to how radically that view has changed. Back then, you’d hear calls like “log off and go protest” during the Iraq War or even Trump’s first term, but the internet was already decisive in shaping politics. The toxic effects were undeniable—it skewed things just enough for Trump to win, which is remarkable. No one really doubts anymore the power of the Internet, of Facebook, or of Mark Zuckerberg.

One book I highly recommend is Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a memoir of her time as a Facebook executive. It gives a fascinating inside look at Zuckerberg’s politics and Facebook’s role in Trump’s victory. And as with any memoir, there’s the unreliable narrator element. She’s casting light on things we didn’t know but also burnishing her own reputation and minimizing her role in the harm. From a fiction writer’s perspective, that’s a really compelling kind of voice.

ER: How do you approach representing the internet stylistically in your fiction?

MD: I think fiction is especially well-suited to engage with it. Fiction has always been great at showing the individual in confrontation with vast systems of information. Charles Dickens did it in Bleak House with the thousands of pages of a lawsuit; David Foster Wallace tackled processing overwhelming flows of information; Joan Didion did it in her political novels, with individuals up against large amounts of information from government and intelligence agencies. Looking at how these writers dealt with pre-internet information overload can help us figure out how to do it now.

The challenge today is that the internet is designed to be compulsively distracting, to keep you hooked. Fiction doesn’t have to compete with that speed—it can sometimes do the opposite: slow you down, capture the weird state of doomscrolling for hours. That’s a very contemporary mode of being, and one I think fiction can uniquely capture.