Posts
Late, but I have new info! Well, new to me, though possibly not to Jennifer Weiner, who it will be remembered, along with Jodi Picoult, took on the early canonization of Jonathan Franzen sometime in the distant past. AKA last week. Their point, or one of them, was their distress at not, as women, getting enough respect from the literary establishment. I was particularly struck by something Weiner said, which to paraphrase, was that she was no Jonathan Franzen, but why couldn't she be treated as well as Nick Hornby or Jonathan Tropper?
At the time, I had no opinion, having read one Picoult, almost all of Weiner, and one Hornby, with varying degrees of enjoyment. But no Tropper. However, I did have a copy of Tropper's THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU on my TBR pile. So I picked it up, ripped through it, and loved it! Yet also found that Weiner not only has a point, she has a major, scary point.
Omigod, that was a funny book! I thought I'd die when the D-cup mom having the affair with the female neighbor at her husband's shiva gives her kid a tube of K-Y jelly along with with tips on how to masturbate at Friday night dinner! Completely rolled on the floor.
It's actually the kind of thing Weiner can do just as well. But I have a feeling if she had, reviewers would have sneered. Tropper's book's a coming-of-age story about a 35-year-old guy, practically a genre, and a well-respected one. But if someone tried to write about a woman as whiny and distant as Tropper's hero, she'd get slapped around, I'm pretty sure. (Not meant as a criticism of Tropper; I have personally known a number of immature and self-pitying, although very smart 35-year-old males, especially when I was 35, so I know this is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed.)
Women in literature have to be somehow Better. Because if they're not, their biographers will be dismissed as trivial. If Weiner wrote a book about a family sitting shiva, in which all the characters were over the top, the heroine was basically a princess who needed to grow up, and by the end of the book, actually had grown up a bit, at least realized she had "options", as Mr. Tropper rather unsubtly put it, I think she'd be dismissed as commercial, trivial, and formulaic. Or perhaps the book wouldn't be reviewed at all.
I'll take Weiner's word for it that the NEW YORK TIMES hasn't treated her as well as the guys, because in a five-minute search, I couldn't find the reviews to confirm it and didn't want to spend all day on it--Tropper's came up right away, so maybe that means something. But I guess that's even a bit irrelevant. Tropper's book was a great beach read--and in fact, that was where I read it. But isn't it weird to hear that? Can guys' books (other than those of Nicholas Sparks and thrillers) be beach reads? Let me tell you something: If that book had a heroine instead of a hero, no matter who wrote it, it would have been so considered. The problem may not be with women authors so much as the perception of female experience, period. But that shouldn't be a surprise.
Still, it was. I was actually kind of shocked. In researching this piece I came across this amazing quote from the young and evidently oblivious female writer C.E. Morgan: "Male genius has far outnumbered female genius in the history of literature." Morgan went on to pronounce that this kind of discussion would stop if women would simply produce "more work of indisputable genius."
Aside from her grammatical issues, Morgan couldn't possibly know any of that, and she'd know she couldn't if she had the slightest grounding in what used to be called women's studies, though now I wonder if it exists at all. C.E.-cakes, listen up--feminists of yore tried tirelessly to get across the simple point that since men have consistently controlled the standards, sure, they've patted themselves on the back; sure they've considered women's books trivial, sure they've hired female reviewers with similar sensibilities. How many female geniuses have gone unsung and maybe unpublished no one knows. And Genius is always disputable--look at the Franzen skirmish. Plus, there's the small matter of perception of what constitutes genius, which, in a lesser way is one of Weiner's points. Only she's not talking genius, just fair recognition.
Evidently these early pioneers failed miserably. I'm horrified that we're having this discussion in 2010.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Begun by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (also hilarious, by the way)in 1929: "I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare."
ReplyDelete"The perception of female exerience," does, I think, lie at the heart of the problem. For years I've noticed--and been annoyed by--the paucity of fiction by women reviewed in The New York Times.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this great post. I've been following the discussion over the internets since Franzen got "canonized". I am working through my first novel and one of the things that keeps coming up is the awareness that no matter what I write, it will be viewed through this lens. One of the problems is that we don't have a cultural tradition of seeing women as capable of mastering a craft or skill, so that we don't see women's writing as an act of conscious intent. It's "talent" or "instinct" always.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've never read any Nicholas Sparks but my sense is that he is somewhat reviled in certain literary circles because he writes "beach reads". The sentiment is almost that men should be "better" than to write that kind of book (i.e. a woman's book.)