by Michael Harper
August 15, 2025
Whites: Stories by Mark Doten; Graywolf Press; 160 pages; $17.00.
A common talking point in the post-truth era is that satire is ineffective because reality has become so deranged that art can’t be elevated to any further levels of absurdity. Mark Doten’s third book, Whites, directly challenges this assertion by using situational satire to frame his characters in a context that amplifies their privilege and self-modeled victimhood. Each story in this collection is from the perspective of a different flavor of whiteness on our contemporary political spectrum, running the gamut of Karens and January 6ers to Elon Musk and white saviors, politicians, Anti-vaxxers, and QAnon believers. What holds these characters together, besides their white privilege, is their unwavering belief in themselves and Doten’s ability to use story forms and situations that match the absurdity of their justifications.
By creating an entire book of short stories based on these characters with an array of formal structures, Doten provides space for absurdity to unsheathe itself. In many of the stories, Doten understands that the best way for these characters to expose themselves is to let their internal logic run its course until it dead ends. Some of these protagonists have been cancelled like the “World’s Worst Karen” and been given an online platform on which to defend themselves. The protagonist of the story is trained in the language of political correctness and tiptoes around the accusations about her, but as her retelling unfolds, she repeatedly blames several people of color in an effort to defend herself and prop up the successful non-profit she runs for the unhoused. In this way, Doten allows his characters the rope to tie themselves into knots. As their defenses unfold, they reveal more and more of themselves, and the reader sees the cracks in the logic they’ve created to delude themselves and upon which their identity is dependent.
Another effective formal choice is when Doten gathers a cacophony of voices together in a way that replicates a 4chan thread or comments section online. By mimicking a myriad of voices in a condensed space, Doten is able to put the various voices side-by-side and show what a convoluted mess they make. In “J6ers” a mixture of political espousals, military cosplay, and juvenile antics mix to form a block of rioters that captures not only the violence of the assault on the capital but also the childish and privileged defenses that followed in their court proceedings. The starkest example of this is men in military tactical gear interrupting their conspiracy theories about the left to debate how they can best film each other. In this form, a line of writing like, “The left has spent decades building organized yet decentralized modes of child molestation and pedophilia” can exist near “Podium. Podium. Pode. I got me a pode. It’s a funny word, right?” This juxtaposition of intense conspiracy theory and immaturity is head spinning but effectively captures the absurdity at the heart of their ideology and reveals that it is more about self-aggrandization and racism than any coherent political belief.
While Doten is a gifted ventriloquist performing these different voices on the page, perhaps his most singular talent is demonstrating the complexity of logic that creates the identities he’s satirizing. The skill Doten shows crafting these logical rabbit holes is why the satirical elements are so vital. They break the momentum of the world building these characters perform to reframe themselves and brings the reader back to a wide view outside their story of themselves to see the foundational humanity that is often being ignored or narcissism that is being justified. He leans on this situational satire to keep the wider perspective relevant. In an early story, “Even Elon on Human Meat,” Elon Musk is literally standing on a barely alive person during a stampede to escape a fire while he contemplates his own almost supernatural insights. In “Lord Wumpa” a business owner wears a racist mascot uniform while defending the company’s past institutional racism and articulating his vision for the company’s new BLM statement. This obvious unawareness leads to heightened situational satire that allows for a broader view of the story, breaking the spell cast by the different characters as they weave together worlds based on complex but internal logic. The stories are most disturbing, and perhaps most effective, when the reader falls into that logic, or sees the point that the character is making, but the situational satire is a blatant reminder against the internal logic of these characters who cast themselves as the centers of their small worlds.
Through his combination of situational satire and the formal choices of these short stories, Doten minimizes the risk of sympathizing with the voices he’s representing. Many pieces of art backfire in their attempt to be critical by inadvertently glorifying a subject when putting it in the center of a story. Perhaps one of the most relevant examples is the movie Fight Club. The movie’s intention to critique toxic masculinity isn’t explicit which creates a schism between artistic intent and audience interpretation. As evidence of this, one can look to the innumerable male dorm rooms plastered in Tyler Durden posters over the past 25 years that elevate this hallucinated character to Christ-like status. This creates an incredibly eerie feeling where life is imitating the satirical art on the screen through an audience of young men who are falling for the toxic logic inside the movie.
But in Whites, Doten’s intentions are always clear because his writing is more in conversation with a book like Catch-22 that uses satire and absurdity to break the bubble that a story world creates by drawing attention to the larger context of the situation in which the story is occurring. Doten’s persistent efforts to provide context and remind the reader of the perspective being represented allows for an intimacy with these characters that unveils a rot at the heart of American society, while not falling under its broken spell.
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Mark Doten’s Whites: Stories and Satire in the Post-Truth Era
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Alina Levkovich from Pexels
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
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