It May Interest You to Know, But If Not, There Is a Scroll Feature

You already know your argument with your adversaries will be bitter and likely futile. Will your argument with your male allies be any more fruitful, though?

There has long existed a vigorously anti-sexist segment of male opinion. Doesn’t it have a single representative capable of writing a decent novel? Or is it that the sentiment fails to survive the transition from the political to the personal?

I freely admit my literary philistinism in having read virtually none of the works in question (actually, maybe not so virtually), but that’s fine, because I can sit here and just let Belle’s posts wash over me and be (a) entertained and (b) educated without having to trudge through all that verbiage. And it leaves me time to read Iain [M] Banks.

The literary posts here always leave me feeling slightly embarrassed about my taste in fiction. Strictly middle brow with a large heaping of scifi/fantasy. Having said that if anyone is looking for suggestions the Flavia de Luce Mysteries by Alan Bradley have what seems to me to be a well drawn and very interesting (though very young) female main character.

Doesn’t it have a single representative capable of writing a decent novel?

Maybe they don’t write the “Important Novels?”

I am amazed and amused people still read the “Important Novels,” or better, since people will read anything, that people still think that “New Important Novels” are “Important.”
(excluding of course those who are paid to read “Important Novels” and discern and declare their underappreciated Importance on a scale of 1-10.)
I quit, roughly about the time they came out, after Ironweed, The Names, and Falling in Place. Moved to phasers and gumshoes.

Could it possibly be that a theory of artistic production based on a hierarchy of novels of lesser, greater, and Supremo Ultimo Socially Relevant Philosophical Importance lead to mindsets that might themselves tend toward exclusion, sexism, racism?

Is litfic anti-democratic?

I think it is strange to judge the value of a book by how much it adheres to the moral values of its times (or to our moral values?).

For me the interest of a novel rests in part that it illustrates a different set of values (moral, social, etc) than mine: it’s part of entering a different world.

Foppe says:

Have yet to discover any female writers that interest me[.]

I’d wait with bated breath for the same contingent in previous posts–trying to convince Belle Waring she doesn’t know how to read the canon correctly–to swoop down on this as a shocking generalization, but I’m afraid I might asphyxiate.

There has long existed a vigorously anti-sexist segment of male opinion. Doesn’t it have a single representative capable of writing a decent novel? Or is it that the sentiment fails to survive the transition from the political to the personal?

I’m sure that sounded clever when you first typed it (skewering a slogan), but when did writing become, when has it ever been, apolitical?

@Belle

Certainly, most male writers can shoe-horn in a serviceable woman here and there but how many do so naturally and consistently? Ideas like the Bechdel test wouldn’t exist if women didn’t so often fill the role of structural support in literature.

The whole issue is clouded by the impossibility of imagining fundamentally different others. The primitive type from which all others in imagination are derived is the self, meaning that men must imagine women as men with special characteristics (and vice versa). Let’s get around that by considering only what one sex thinks; if the ideal of masculinity is constructed as an achievement then it implies a femininity that at least encompasses specific failures, and I don’t think it can be seriously disputed that the large majority of men make efforts to avoid being thought of as effeminate.

But there are reasons other than direct sexism for sexist writing. As saints make for poor drama, it follows that literary characterisation is the process of cataloguing flaws as much as anything else. Can a male writer of integrity write women whose flaws can’t be teased apart from their femininity? And female characters whose flaws are interchangeable with men’s are not female for narrative purposes.

@Bob

Maybe they don’t write the “Important Novels?” I am amazed and amused people still read the “Important Novels” …

It’s customary to restrict the employment of quote marks to quotations only.

20: Use-mention?

Let’s get around that by considering only what one sex thinks; if the ideal of masculinity is constructed as an achievement then it implies a femininity that at least encompasses specific failures, and I don’t think it can be seriously disputed that the large majority of men make efforts to avoid being thought of as effeminate.

And that’s the problem with conceiving biological sex as diametric (rather than a continuum) and gender as a rigid binary system. Nothing about the act of writing requires that men conceive of themselves as the opposite of women, or that men feature as the exclusive protagonists in fiction. It’s more than possible to imbue characters with dominant features other than masculine or feminine.

Ideas like the Bechdel test wouldn’t exist if women didn’t so often fill the role of structural support in literature.

Characters, supporting or otherwise, don’t exist independent of their authors. You’re missing the agency of the writer, here.

And female characters whose flaws are interchangeable with men’s are not female for narrative purposes.

Who says? Who says men are the default? Who says a woman is not a woman if she shares flaws with a man? A paragraph before, you said that masculinity was a strength and femininity a flaw. How does this follow?

I’m not sure I understand how “important” is being used here (it applies to Updike? I’ll admit that I’ve only read a very small amount, and didn’t really like it, but I always took him to be pretty middle-brow) but what I want to know is, what about J.M. Coetzee? Surely he’s more worthy of discussion, one way or another, than most talked about here. (I can’t exactly say that I _liked_ the title character of _Elizabeth Costello_, though I don’t think we were supposed to. I did think the main female character in _Diary of a Bad Year_ was pretty interesting.)

@Saur

What I wrote was that “if the ideal of masculinity is constructed as an achievement then it implies a femininity that at least encompasses specific failures”. “Then that implies” might have been better than “then it implies”, but I think it’s clear enough.

I guess I should throw in my lot with bob, and state that I am unimpressed with the quality of judgment of literature‘s politicians and policemen.

Are you talking about literary critics, or people on the interwebs who are being mean about your favorite authors?

I’d tend to concur with the OP. There are certainly no ‘lay-up’ counter examples.

I don’t know that he qualifies as an author of “Important Novels” so much as a populist author but Nicholas Sparks usually manages to create female characters who are human and often the catalyst for change in the male protagonist.

I’ve not read all of his works – so don’t shotgun blast me if he’s had some clunkers, but the half dozen or so I’ve read routinely include intelligent, thoughtful and emotionally solvent women (none of whom seem to be described on the merits of bra size either).

“the fact that he and Telemachus go on to hang the 12 faithless maids”

It’s not clear to me that Odysseus does this. He instructs Telemachus to kill them by sword, and then we hear about Telemachus speaking among “them” that the maids must not die “a clean death.” Then “they” hang the maids, and go back into the house. But who is “they”? Could just be Telemachus, Eumaios, and even that oxherd dude. It’s the same “they” that mutilate Melanthius’ body “in fury and anger.” I’d like to know if Odysseus was furious and angry in this scene, but I can’t quite tell from the poem.

What I found fascinating in the Norman Mailer I read, among the Important&tm; [Straight White Male] novelists is that he gives insight into another moral universe which is exactly the dominant worldview of his/my time. Updike or Roth’s misogyny was clear as air, a poison you’re not meant to see or taste until it’s in your nervous system. Mailer’s take on women is noxious, choking, thick and conscious.

Does that set of images add up to anything?

Another way of understanding the prison of the genre of litfic is to go back to the image from Lolita of the ape drawing the bars of its cell. Taken as a metaphor for all of literature, it should be enough to keep me depressed for the rest of the day.

33.2 is a decent description of much Japanese literature going back at least to Kawabata* of “Dancing Girl of Izu” and Snow Country. Maybe back to late Soseki. Osamu Dazai. 1st person narrator as despicable jerk who really should just die, and often does.

I’ve never been able to enjoy this group of Important Male Novelists either. But the reasons can’t be quite the same, because I’m not actually very sensitive to the representation of women characters. (Not a boast, to be clear.) There’s something else, a smug aesthetic conservatism to begin with, that got to me about these books. So when I come across a Katie Roiphe (was it her?) lamenting the passing of that golden era, I don’t know how to begin to think myself into the state of appreciation she takes for granted.

Alexander Theroux takes the theme of romanticizing/objectifying the female love object = narcissism = misogyny to a hilarious baroque extreme in Darconville’s Cat. I don’t know that men can do much else in humility but confess their eradicable subject positions. Groveling is good.

Maybe women-writing-men might be better because femininity is performative, not a position but a movement. Probably not, women-writing-men likely get it just as wrong in ways we haven’t studied enough because we have focused on the Important Dude Writers. But seeing how women get it wrong (which would need to be done by men) might tell us something about men.

Unless women can’t possibly ever get it wrong.

Neville Morley@39 – “However, would it be possible to have a link to the current list, or Franzen’s version of it, so that I can check that I haven’t accidentally enjoyed any of them without realising my mistake?”

I fervently hope this is sarcasm …

Meanwhile, two to add to your garden of dillweeds: Walker Percy and John Barth.

It’s easier to forgive Percy somehow, because he just comes across as a sweet man. Son of two suicides, adult convert to Catholicism, obsessed with Kierkegaard… all his stuff is about grappling with the meaninglessness of it all, and you just want to hold his hand and say “sh sh shh, it’s okay”. It’s true that he came dangerously close to inventing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and that’s hard to forgive, but somehow you have the feeling that if you could just go back somehow and tap him on the shoulder and whisper in his ear, he’d be all “Oh my! That’s a very good point!” and would have gone out and written a novel with actual female characters in it. Yes, I know. But that’s the feeling you get.

John Barth, on the other hand, was just a sexist dillweed.

Doug M.

Is there, by any chance, some interview or so where Ftanzen talks about the people in whose company he would like to be considered? The current list of Bellow&Updike&c. sounds plausible, but it would be nice to have it from the horses mouth.

At the risk of restating Neville’s point, we’re never going to agree on a statement about Very Important Male Novelists unless we know who we’re talking about. We could generalise about Franzen-and-Roth-and-Mailer-and-Amis, or Franzen-and-Amis-and-Rushdie-and-Ballard, or Franzen-and-Roth-and-Gaddis-and-Doctorow, but surely not about Franzen-and-Roth-and-Mailer-and-Amis-and-Rushdie-and-Ballard-and-Gaddis-and-Doctorow. (And Ishiguro, and Murakami, and…)

I guess I’d take V. I. N.s to be the kind of novelist whose latest book will get respectful broadsheet reviews and whose name gets dropped (if American) in the same sentence as the phrase ‘great American novel’; so Roth, Mailer, Amis, Rushdie, Doctorow maybe, Gaddis just possibly, but not Ballard or Ishiguro or Murakami, and probably not Pynchon (although a case could surely be made for Mason and Dixon as the Great A. N.). It’s interesting that the core names (as I see ’em) are the ones nobody’s had a kind word for (apart from Doctorow).

On the other hand, when I think of really good male characters in fiction, I think almost exclusively of women writers – Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Jane Rogers, James Tiptree Jr. (And D.H. Lawrence, of course. I did say almost.) Perhaps our Serious and Important male novelists just aren’t very good at people, other than a willy-waving protagonist – and the problem is less glaringly obvious to male readers because it’s easier for us to identify with the WWP.

Drat – bolding fail. Only the word ‘people’ was meant to be emboldened.

Do people in other countries refer to some subset of their nation’s literary output as “the Great [my country here] Novel?” Like, is there a Great German Novel or a Great Argentine Novel? There are certainly great (lowercase) Russian novels, for example, but I’m not aware of Russians doing that implicit caps thing that Americans seem to love so much.

I’m not aware of Russians doing that implicit caps thing that Americans seem to love so much.

We’re going to declare our independence from European culture by one-upping European culture.

That’ll show ’em!

What is going on here? Are we trying to find exemptions or build our own enlightened canon? Why? To get Waring-approval, or to look ourselves in the mirror and say “I’m ok, cause I read feminist books?”

Just look for the Patriarchy wherever you looking, I suppose when you feel like looking. I don’t think you have conscientious all the time. Listen to thems that finds Patriarchy and points it out. Don’t flaunt your noxious entertainments in mixed company.

I prefer “patriarchy” to sexism, or misogyny, or women-hating cause, to some degree or another Patriarchy is something we all do, I mean women too, and feminism is also something we all do.

Andrew Kliman at New Left, read this morning. Quiggin was around.

The basic flaw in the thinking of Kalecki, Graeber, and the zombie social democrats now, and of the Mitterrand government three decades ago, is political determinism. They think that the capitalists control capitalism––not the other way around––so that the system can become something it’s not once different people with different priorities assume control of it.

No, you don’t control Patriarchy or feminism.

The polemics of feminists or sexists, intending somehow to individualize or personalize these systemic problems, as if feminism or patriarchy was a possession to be cherished or nurtured or discarded or overcome…well I will leave such havings to the liberals and social democrats.

Frantzen or Mailer, or Millet or Greer ain’t scars, tattoos, or merit badges. They don’t belong to me.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the sexism question, but it seems incongruous to me somehow to put Pynchon in the same box as Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer et al.

I understand the reason – all famous white guy novelists from that latter half of the 20th century – but Pynchon seems to me to be up to something different from the others on the list. Maybe it’s just that I can’t work up much interest in the Updike, Roth etc. crowd but like Pynchon. Also, it seems that Franzen clearly wants to be listed in the Roth Updike & friends club, but I don’t get any sense that he wants to be compared with Pynchon (unlike, say, DFW).

But enough of this 20th century stuff. Why don’t we mix things up with a Trollope thread? Who’s up for “Septimus Harding: accomplice to genocide?”

A reliable source who read two-thirds of Freedom before exposing it to the elements tells me that what is annoying about Franzen is not only everything you said and the terribly written women but his Reed Richards-like ability to pat himself on the back about How Amazing it is that he is Writing Women Himself. Jonathan Franzen Explains Women To You! Now ain’t you grateful?

TJ: Yes, I had similar thoughts about the Sportswriter and ID (and the other one — can’t remember the title now). However, my memory of those novels is a bit fuzzier. But I’d always taken Bascombe’s character to be clearly ironic, especially in the portrayal his treatment of women. He’s clearly aware of his ‘soft’ misogyny, regrets it, but is simply too lazy to do anything about it (and too willing to use the excuse of the death of his youngest son to avoid change). If Bascombe is Ford’s doppelganger (which I’d avoided assuming until now), it seems like his function is one of fairly harsh self-critique, including on the woman question.

Okay, a case has been made, the burden of proof assigned. So I ask myself, what’s different about an important female novelist? Take George Eliot, for example. (There’s the name of the author on the flyleaf, yes, but that’s another story, or maybe part of the same story, but in any case, it’s not the author’s fault.) Take Middlemarch. Eliot does men really well, at least as far as I can judge from my acquaintances with the remnants of the kind of men she does who are still left over in our own time. The thing is, she does men well because she does society well, which is also to say that she doesn’t do men very deeply. Hardly her fault again, as, despite her observational skills, she isn’t a man. The society she nails in all its intricacy, though, isn’t all of society. Just up the road from the action in Middlemarch, there was all that horrible stuff going on that had Marx and Dickens so up in arms. But again, why would we accuse her of blindness? She was working on another part of the picture, and an equally valid one.

I do wonder, though, if Eliot’s focus on society, and her consequent evenhandedness, is necessarily a characteristic of her gender, or more a characteristic of her time and circumstances. The male faults in Homer might be excused by saying something like, Oh, that was a different time, and he was a creature of that time. Hanging maids was just what you did, and if there’s no evidence that women objected, it’s probably because women didn’t write epics. Maybe there’s some evidence in the historical record, but it seems hard to find. Come to the modern age, though, and these excuses can’t be offered without being seen for what they are, i.e. excuses plain and simple. Men write novels about themselves — that’s the accusation — and forget about everything else. For them, society exists at best as an admonishment, at worst as an adornment, to their own increasingly desperate attempts at self aggrandizement.

So when Belle talks about sexist dillweeds, etc., I’d agree that what she’s attacking is indeed a form of narcissism, a preoccupation by male authors with the male self in an age when that male self has no reason to be smug, in fact has no reason to believe that it has any right to exist at all. So modern male novelists, despite all the assistance available in history from the likes of Eliot, or Austen, can’t do society until they’ve done themselves. This may not be admirable, and it may bore the hell out of women, but it should be understandable. Context here, as everywhere, is all.

But if male novelists are guilty as charged, and everyone here seems to be agreeing with Belle that they are, what about female novelists, more or less contemporary ones? I wonder what Belle makes of Simone de Beauvoir, or Sylvia Plath, or Gillian Flynn. I ask because to me they seem as preoccupied with their selves as any male writer, although that preoccupation does seem more anguished than smug. Are they in rebellion from their reflections in the male gaze, or alternatively, can it be that the male disease of narcissism can spread across genders?

I think an argument could be made, although I’m not sure I’m completely ready to make it, that the device available to Eliot — the focus on society, and the understanding of men and women according to their places in it — is no longer really available to any novelist. These days, for reasons known to us all, it’s every man — or woman — for him/herself.

Everything Turns Out Alright

I shouldn’t talk about books, especially in a crowd like this, because I don’t actually know anything about literature. How much do I not know? I know so little that I’ve actually read the first three of Wolfe’s novels, each of which has made me a little stupider.

There’s a pecularity of those novels that I haven’t seen commented on. Even though his primary concern is status-worship, he undercuts that worship in each of those novels. In Bonfire and Man in Full, he shows how people of merit gain status because they deserve it. Then, in an unacknowledged paradox, the protagonists decisively prove their worth only when their status is removed and they are nonetheless revealed to be Men in Full.

He reverses that with Charlotte Simmons, who achieves high status but whose soul is nonetheless lost. I think we’re meant to see Charlotte Simmons as an unhappy ending, where everything only superficially turns out all right.

I somehow get the sense that this is all a effort to slam Franzen. After all, the others receiving the main brunt of the criticism, Mailer, Updike, Bellow, and even Roth, are not in a place where our disapproval is likely to have much impact. Franzen is likely to have more output, and he does have large ambitions with multiple allussions to Anna Karenina in Freedom for example.
I don’t know if Franzen gets to the heart of what it means to be a woman; I did see quite a lot of pages at least devoted to the characters of the mother and the lesbian daughter in The Corrections or to Pat Berglund in Freedom. I don’t know if he gets to the heart of males either because who really knows their own heart much less other peoples. I did realize with tears in my eyes that Walt Berglund is a stupid a**hole just like me.

All I know is that they made me read J. D. Salinger in high school, and my thought about him was “what a phony”, and I more or less ignored the genre of novelists writing Great Literature About Internal Angst And Disaffection ever since. Truth is, even as a relatively privileged male reader, I am a visible-minority-child-of-immigrants, and I really can’t relate to the subjects of their disaffection. I can’t imagine how alienating it would be were I female! So when I read for pleasure, I read what asks me, “what if?”

Belle thank you so much for writing this post. I hadn’t realized how pervasive the issue was.
Sexism indeed mars many alleged masterpieces. For example, when you start reading Bellow’s Herzog, you’re hit with so much immaturity in the choice of the female characters (hot Latin chick falling for the older male protagonist; bitchy, mean ex-wife, etc.) that it takes a lot of effort just to continue reading. I haven’t been able to manage to read past the first few pages despite many attempts over the years.

For those who are asking about the canon of American male novelists post-WWII, here is the selection made by the 7th. edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature:

John Cheever (1912-1982)
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)
Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
John Updike (b. 1932)
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
Richard Powers (b. 1957)

Donald Barthelme (b. 1931) (mainly a short story writer)
Raymond Carver (b. 1938) (ditto).

If Franzen wants to be an “Important Male Novelists of the Latter Half of the 20th Century” he’s gonna need a better time-machine.

(I’d also complain that “American” seems to be silent in the above, but when the alternative to silence is Pingo “Martin” Amis, it is a wise person who keeps their cake-hole shut. (I choose to think George Steiner said that, although he didn’t.))

TJ: thanks. Yes, Canada and its female characters are very different (as are the female characters in his collection of short stories (some of which also set in Montana) Rock Springs.

Interesting topic. IMHO:

DFW’s sexism is glaring and off-putting.
Pynchon’s sexism is negligible.
Mailer’s is obvious, and you may be sexist if you like that sort of thing
Updike? Never heard of him
Gaddis’s sexism is painful enough to qualify as interesting in its own right
Franzen himself is negligible, and his sexism is surely part of the package of negligibility.

Possibly the 20th Century has been rather sexist, on the whole.

Dave: Well, yeah, about the last part. But elites are often worse in significant ways than the general population. In US politics, for instance, there’s that weird combination of deep hatefulness, sadistic delight in others’ pain, and constant pants-wetting fearfulness. You can push the American public into part or all of that state without huge effort, but the majority don’t stay there the way the governing class does not without a whole lot of work on the goaders’ part. Likewise in literature.

It’s no mystery why ageing male novelists end up writing novels in which a thinly disguised self-insert character gets to explain at length why young people today are no good, while having lots of sex with young women with little or no personality but lovingly described physical features. Mid-life crisis, innit? Garland Grey handily sums up the genre as “Fond Memories of Vagina“. (Taking Amis’ The Pregnant Widow as the exemplar.)

Nor is it mysterious why the sorts of people who come up with lists of Important Novels fill them with Fond Memories of Vagina: they are ageing and male and confronting their own mortality and impotence too.

(ps Bleeding Edge is sexist in much the same way Vineland was, or in a proper subset of the ways Vineland was, and also it is great in similar ways.)

Right on Belle. Agree with this post entirely And the DFW piece you linked to which refers to the “mid century males” as “the Great Male Narcissists”. Reading books where (straight! rich! white! privileged! American! horny! friendless!) men have midlife crises does not inform one about the human condition in general.

I think that some of their reputation is due to the facile charms of their prose or the subject matter but to me this is like judging a painting based on deftness with brushstrokes or pretentiousness of the title.

That said, these writers do not belong in the same league as those who really grapple with “Big Issues” (Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) nor are they relevant today to “the kids” (unlike say Bronte, Austen, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Heller, Salinger, Kerouac ).

So, dustbin of history for the GMN, hooray!

“Reading books where (straight! rich! white! privileged! American! horny! friendless!) men have midlife crises does not inform one about the human condition in general.”

Sure it does. Provided that they have talent. That’s what this is all about. The rest is irrelevant.

Best suggestion for contemporary author of well-rounded female characters, from Tom: Kim Stanley Robinson. I LOL’ed.

I LOL’ed too. I have sharp memories of KSR’s landscapes (from the hyper-urban setting of The Gold Coast to the utter barrenness and bleakness of Pluto in Icehenge) and his dramatic set pieces (the fall of the cable in Red Mars; the flooding and evacuation of the town of Burroughs in Green Mars), but even if you offered me $1000 I do not think I could name a single one of his hundreds of bland identikit characters. Who played that futuristic musical instrument in The Memory of Whiteness? Who met the yeti in Escape from Kathmandu? Who was the guide in Antarctica? There must have been such characters, but I can’t remember a thing about them.

@16/saurs: to explain myself a bit further: my point wasn’t to suggest a. that I’m well-‘read’ when it comes to literature, and b. that I’d weighed ‘the category’, and found it wanting. My point was merely that I simply haven’t read any works that stuck with me that were written by female authors. I realize that my statement was easy to misread in this fashion, and I apologize for not putting it more clearly. Again, the only female author who comes to mind who I’ve read (besides some obligatory Jane Austen, which I found boring because of the oozing elitist Victorian sensibilities that form the context of the novels) is Ruth Klüger, who in fact has quite a bit to say on the topic of males excluding women from conversation..

How do people (esp. the post author and other womenpeople) feel about Norman Rush? I loved Mating; it was recommended to me by a young male novelist who said it had the best female narrator he’d ever read. Apparently Rush himself set out to write “the most fully realized female character in the English language.” But I haven’t had the fortune to talk about it with many women readers. (My wife found the main character exhausting, but not unbelievable.)

You know who else is a sexist dillweed? John Crowley. I thought of him because, just as Belle said, here is a great artist whose novels are rendered un-enjoyable because of this fundamental failure. And he himself seems to value the worst parts of his work more than the parts which display his actual talent.

Positive attributes: *A bridge between fantasy-genre-lit and high-serious-important-lit (those circles overlap hugely among readers, but few enough writers are in both categories, and many of the serious-lit writers using SF/F elements are quite sure they are not thatkind of writer {Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy}). *Astoundingly gifted stylist. *Astoundingly inventive use of the obscure magical lore of the past (fairies, alchemy, prescientific cosmology, etc.).

Negative attributes: *Women are not people, but Mystical Avatars of Dimly Grasped Spiritual Insights; each woman represents a different insight, one grasps at the insight by sleeping with her. *Sexual urges are Mystical Imperatives, and they just come over a guy and what can he do but give in? He’s not to be held responsible.

Garth Rees:
… but even if you offered me $1000 I do not think I could name a single one of his hundreds of bland identikit characters.

To me, that’s odd, because one of the (many) things I enjoyed about the Mars trilogy was the extensive focus on a small set of fairly distinct main characters. So I can remember Nadia and Maya, along with Nirgal and Michel and Sax, rather clearly. (And so far I’m really enjoying his version of Galileo in Galileo’s Dream.)

Feminists are particularly unnerved by the likes of Franzen because his works condemn Modernity for the shallow dead end enterprise it is and Feminism can not exist without an ethic of Modernity. Since Modernity is objectively failing humanity, Franzens musings are doubly terrifying as public consciousness may be aroused.

@104: how convenient.. Care to make your aphorism interesting by clothing it, or do you prefer to leave it like this, hoping it will be perceived as gravely substantive?

Re: women novelists: I am reading Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, and she is kicking ass thus far.

Dave Maier @101: Chris Ware, yes. I’m finding Building Stories to be a genuine old-fashioned difficult-in-a-good-way read, one of those modernist things that makes you do all the work but rewards you for it. So I have to finish it when I have a vacation. But it’s not sexist or dillweedish at all, I don’t think, because it’s not a Novel with all the baggage of the form, perhaps.

I’ve been trying to figure out the least-thread-deraily way to state the point that Wm S. Burroughs is not the only ‘important’ (or possibly ‘important’) 20th-cent. male novelist who is/was not heterosexual. Indeed Belle did not say he’s the only one, but it’s an impression that some might draw nonetheless from the OP.

Re N. Rush’s Mating (98,101): agree, thought it was quite good when I read it — a long time ago.

OP: This is something a number of commenters have accused me of lying about.

Gulp. Not me, I hope. I formally disavow ever having had such an opinion. Only meant to question whether your approach to literary judgment was at fault.

OP: Can people write themselves out of this corner, or just override all barriers because they are great artists? … Yes.

That’s what I think too.

OP: The point here is not evaluating how many grams of feminist OKness each book achieves so that I may weigh it against the feather of Ma’at and either send it on its way or let it be devoured by the terrifying crocodile-headed goddess Ammit. The point is rather, I judge novels that were written during a time when men perfectly well could have known that the women they spoke to were intelligent human beings, in which the authors nonetheless fail in varied awful incredible ways to represent the 51% of humanity involved, to have failed qua novels.

Not sure I understand this. How is sending a novel on its way or feeding it to Ammit because it’s sexist different from judging it a failure because it’s sexist? Is it a matter of the degree of sexism, or its centrality, or the lack of compensating merits in the novel?

“But the story had taken hold of me with its bulldog teeth
It would not let go until I learnedthat
sometimes in tragedies
there are no villains
only people like ourseves”
Chitra Batterjee Divakaruni

Thanks for the post, I enjoyed it. As a cis-straight-male, much of what Belle points out often passes me by, but I have found the authors called out (Roth, Updike, Franzen, etc) unreadable for different reasons.

I think I actually made it through an entire Updike once, and one Roth too, around high school or early college age. That was before I fully trusted my judgement and thought that a novelist so “important” must be good so it would be unfair to judge without reading the whole thing. I’ve gotten over that and have put down two Franzen’s without qualm (Connections and Freedom, I think) part way through.

Franzen seems to me quite different from Roth and Updike, though. I experience the older gents as weirdly obsessed about sex in a way that is boring and unenlightening.

Franzen seems like a failed Tom Wolfe, even though he’d probably be offended to be mentioned in the same breathe. All the shallowness of Wolfe, none of the wit.

I enjoyed very much “The English Patient” but now wonder how it comes across in its treatment of women. And I think Michael Ondaatje is considered an “important” writer, no? (Honest questions, not rhetorical or trying to be provocative.)

Updike, like Pynchon tho of course in a very different way, can be just an amazingly fine writer … his prose really gets going sometimes.

OTOH, there is stuff like this (quoting my own blog, sorry):

“Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike — I’d bogged down about 50 pages into this volume of the Rabbit tetralogy, but Updike’s death made me pick it up again. The man writes beautifully and has a certain amount of insight into human nature, but Rabbit’s serendipity in falling into bed with admiring women seems a bit, well, serendipitous … oh, wait, that’s what you’ve read everywhere else about Updike? well I guess it’s true then. I’ve currently stalled again at the realization that Thelma’s illness, which had added some poignancy to her evident crush on Rabbit, was apparently a plot point motivated by the goal of getting Rabbit to fuck her up the ass. No, really.”

For a considerably less learned take on the question raised by Jerry Vinokurov @56 – do other countries have a “Great _____-an Novel”? – there was a recent thread on Obsidian Wings not long ago.

Also interesting: William Burroughs, the supposedly non-sexist one of these novelists, is also the only one who actually killed his wife. Shot her in the head. Even Mailer just inflicted a minor flesh wound when he stabbed his wife.

So I’m wondering about whether one can be “sexist” from a women’s perspective? If one writes a novel where the men are almost caricatures of negative masculinity and the characters are very focused on their own femininity, does that equal a sexist novel? For Roberto Bolano, I think one can go back and forth on whether his novels are sexist, or rather portray a world where violence and sexuality cohabitate in extremely uncomfortable ways. I’m inclined to go with the latter, but I think Nabokov is another case where grappling with sexuality in a way that is imperfect and primarily written from a male perspective risks sexism.
Basically, regardless of the “very important novelist” question, how can we tell when the novelist is sexist? Public transcripts and interviews? Underdeveloped female characters?

@122 Let me put it this way: how much and which kinds of agency is ascribed to Lolita, and what are the kinds of actions and motivations that drive her? How easily was she bribed by the various carrots offered; does she ever do any soul-searching? How strongly did the novel make you think about the ease with which the male protagonist gets away with it all? Do you ever see him dwell on the question whether he might’ve set her down a bad path by ‘raising’ her the way he does?…

124: what is your point? Lolita is a great novel…Lolita has a very realized character with lots of agency. Humbert is very irritated by the way his nymphet doesn’t cooperate with the program. And the ending is devastating.

This thread is at least making me feel better about prefering SF/fantasy to The Great American Novel. From SF, we’ve had Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Doris Lessing, etc. (Though SF has also produced a large number of authors whose treatment of their female characters is really, really offensive. Too many for me to single out any particular one).

Mailer wrote an essay about Tropic of Cancer where he marvels that some time later he learned that Miller had hemorrhoids while writing the book, something he found hard to imagine. Miller mentions in the book that he has hemorrhoids.

Mailer was probably skimming with one hand when he “read” the book.

(I either wrote or read somewhere that Tropic of Cancer should make us glad that Nietzsche was reticent about sexual intercourse.)

SusanC, there are a gazillion acclaimed mainstream novelists who are women and/or feminist, but the problem is there was a club of Major Important Novelists who were reputedly More Serious, and it seems like being a sexist dillweed was a basic requirement for entry, and Franzen seems nostalgic for those times.

But yeah, what you said — for all the raging sexism of some SF/F, when feminist authors raised their voices, there were readers/fans to recognize their importance.

I think it highly unlikely you’ll find a counter-example that disproves your thesis, because there effectively are none. Because, far from being some sort strange cohort of men with odd and unusual attitudes to women combined with great literary ability, they were, and still are, a pretty average cohort of men with very typical attitudes to, knowledge of and degree of interest in, women and their interior lives, combined with rather greater than usual literary abilities.

In short, they pretty accurately depict how most men feel and think about most women most of the time. It’s not just fiction, it’s the real world of late 20th century Western mostly white men, as told to you by actual representatives of that species.

I know, it makes you wonder why there hasn’t been some sort of protest against such attitudes, some sort of, you know, movement, to try and change men’s behaviour and so forth. I have vaguely heard of such a thing, but I know very little about it, and based on many recent news reports of women’s experiences on the internetworking thingy everyone’s on nowadays, it doesn’t seem to be making much of an impact. Quite the opposite in fact.

Whoops, the Womens Room was by Marylin French, not Mary Gordon. Great book though.

*victims’*

@Josh K-sky —
an old friend of mine once said she thought Mating was the only novel by a male author she had ever read that had a female character whose mind seemed real.

there was a club of Major Important Novelists who were reputedly More Serious, and it seems like being a sexist dillweed was a basic requirement for entry

Maybe the cause and effect is backwards. Being a MIN puts you in one of the remaining holdouts where the early-capitalist pattern of class relations between Man and Housewife still applies (the others are Russian oligarchs, Premier League footballers, and European royalty)[1].

Just Google image search those guys WAGS and say I am wrong…

For them, the most efficient way to get more affection, emotional support and sex is not better personal grooming or basic emotional literacy, but to put more effort and focus into their career. For them, the thing with the Scott Pilgrim stars is not a CGI metaphor – they actually have award ceremonies and hand them out. If that was your lot in life, then there’s a fair chance you’d be a sexist dillweed too.

[1] compare with actors, where getting with a non-peer is notable enough there’s a special phrase for it: dating a civilian.

On Mailer, I read The Naked and the Dead, but so long ago I don’t remember. Ditto Dear Park. Only a year or two ago I read his long essay in The Faith of Graffiti, which I thought was a superb piece of cultural criticism.

But what I really remember was a short story in his collection, Advertisements for Myself, the one that had a Lego city of the future on the cover. There was a story there where the whole point was screwing some woman in the ass, that that was somehow her essence and when she gave that up… Well I thought THAT was so strange, warped, and stupid I can’t forget it.

It isn’t just the novelists. Name one male actor today who doesn’t rely on a grab-bag of silly egotisms, has any moral gravitas to call upon, and is capable of acting “having insight” without a ridiculous look on his phizz. Thinking = shoegazing. In fact, name any male, in any profession whatsoever, who isn’t a bonehead. It’s the stupider sex by far. Yet if women are so smart, why do they keep marrying these idiots? As I think S.J. Perelman once said (now there was a writer!), the whole culture is rocketing into the toilet.

We would all think it a very idiotic objection to The Good Soldier Švejk that women weren’t allowed to serve in the military at that time and so it didn’t bear reading

Huh? … is this just some hipster name dropping? Cuz it doesn’t make sense.

I would agree that the nineteenth century American writers often handled female characters far better or at least in more depth (or with more effort on at least portraying female characters in a comparatively deep way) than the Great Midcentury American novelists did.

It was probably a bad thing, overall, for the Great Midcentury American novelists to so heavily pursue a certain vein of male sexual narcissism – as opposed to the nineteenth century writers, who ultimately were more concerned with marriage. Perhaps you can argue it begins with Hemingway, then O’Hara and Henry Miller. On the other hand, I think those authors would have completely plausibly argued that they were mirroring society in some respects.

In many ways, people are still commanded to write like Hemingway (clear, short sentences, emphasis on verbs and actions, few digressions, etc) – when, of course, that’s simply just a style.

Hi Belle,
My goodness! You didn’t even start in on Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway, authors so sexist they even turned my complacent male stomach. But I tremble at what you would do to my beloved JRRT. At least he made Eowyn into a heroine, eh?

Doing a quick search it seems someone else already mentioned Marquez. Maybe malecentric but probably not in the category of “sexist dillweed”

76, 143

Mentioning Richard Powers brought something to mind. Powers has written some excellent women characters — Karin Schluter in The Echo Maker, for example — but most relevant to the OP would be Galatea 2.2, which can be read as a parody of the Important (white male) novelist genre. The narrator (named “Richard Powers”) helps create a computer program designed to read novels, an AI litterateur called Helen.

dillweed seems a bit overly anti-male if one is interested in equality between the sexes

MG @163
I was going to mention Richard Yates.
Two others who haven’t been mentioned and who don’t fit neatly into the OP’s boxes are Auchincloss and (perhaps a closer call, on some views) Robert Stone.

That cross-posted with LFC. No Grace Paley, either.

but the list in the OP is basically people a conservative male reader who was born no later than 1955 would have heard of. … no Flannery O’Connor,

For what it’s worth, I know quite a few conservative Catholic men born no later than 1955 who love Flannery O’Connor. They think (rightly, I’d tend to think) that she’s really a pretty conservative Catholic writer with lots of very traditional views, including gender views, at heart.

@169
That’s my point. That’s a very narrow range of the good fiction writers working mid-century, only those who were arguably doing one particular thing–and only those which a particular kind of man who was an adult by 1970 or so would feel were comfortably both “contemporary” and “great.” That’s filtered down (maybe because of Boomer influence) as some kind of complete canon, which it’s not.

@170
I didn’t mean O’Connor was objectively speaking a feminist, but that that particular kind of man whom I’m describing would likely see her mere existence as an aspect of feminism–so, “no taint of feminism” meaning simply “no women.”

That’s my point. That’s a very narrow range of the good fiction writers working mid-century, only those who were arguably doing one particular thing–and only those which a particular kind of man who was an adult by 1970 or so would feel were comfortably both “contemporary” and “great.” That’s filtered down (maybe because of Boomer influence) as some kind of complete canon, which it’s not.

This seems true. But it’s still kind of a thing, isn’t it? This idea of the Great American Novelist, and they kind of all turn out to be these weirdly narcissistic men who are also misogynist to varying degrees.* Of course, there are really brilliant novelists in the same period who don’t have the same failings, but—strangely—they also fairly consistently seem not to have the same cache. (Flannery O’Connor seems a somewhat extreme case, but you could probably say the same about Doris Lessing, and The Golden Notebook could surely hold its own with any other novel from the last 50 years. Not American, I realize. But still.)

I guess I’d defer to you on this, or to Belle, or to whoever knows more about fiction that I do, which is probably most people here. But the category BW’s honing in on, rings true to me, as does the critique of course. I guess in one obvious sense of “canon”, I would say it _is_ the canon, for sociological and other reasons, tho largely sociological reasons.

(Not that I don’t love some of this stuff. To take a non-American example that I think would fall squarely within the scope of BW’s critique, I love Hopscotch, like really love it. Also Pynchon of course. I’m not going all geo or anything—I do think that at least partly for the kinds of reasons that Anderson was mentioning in the last thread, having to do with identification, it, umm, can be easier to downplay how significant the failure to properly craft female characters is if you’re a man reading these novels. That’s kind of awful, isn’t it? In limited defense, I really love A Passage to India—tho even there, it kind of becomes possible to identify with Aziz by the very end.)

*Pynchon’s a bit of a weirdo obviously. Presumably he’s a narcissist, though who knows!

Women can never be sexist because they are perfect so all the male characters in books written by women are perfect. Haha you are very confused because you asked a question and that could conceivably have been the answer! Women can be prejudiced against men, but because a system of society-wide, pervasive discrimination against men doesn’t exist, women can’t be said to participate in it (null set and all), and so they can’t be “sexist against men,” that’s just not a thing they can be.

If I could, I would apologize on the behalf of male-kind that you had to spell this out. Luckily we are not a kind!

To be fair, there’s a long tradition of missing the point of Lolita, and not only men do it. Dorothy Parker:
“It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls… In twelve-year-old Lolita, he finds his ideal nymphet.

She is a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered. He knows that; he knows all of what she is. That the knowledge cannot turn away his obsession with her is his agony.”

Or this bit (by a guy) from an old NY Times article I was looking at yesterday: “”Lolita,” for instance, was not about pedophilia, but about yearning, ridiculous, unrequited love.”

Foppe @180: I couldn’t figure out how to read your comment any other way. Make a clear point, or stay in that pigeonhole.

Isn’t Vikram Seth a Very Important Novelist? I am ravished by his prose and appreciative of his well-drawn female characters. It’s the women I remember from A Suitable Boy.

This is merely a paraphrase of what others have argued more eloquently upthread, but I’ve pretty well come round to the “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” position. That is, someone like Alison Lurie is never going to make it onto a list of late C20 Very Important Novelists because she is even-handed in both irony and sympathy and lacks a Totemic Everyman struggling against the world as protagonist – and of course because she’s a woman.

@Phil #187: actually I think the same would be true for someone who based their ideas of what A Novel should be on Trollope.

Belle’s list of ‘pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century’ is ridiculously parochial: every name on it is American.

There haven’t been any ‘Important Male Novelists’ of a non-American nationality since Thomas Mann? Please. Many- I suspect most- important novels of the last sixty years were written by people who lived outside the United States. Some of those people were men, and some of those men (Vidia Naipaul, say) had clear problems with women, but others, as far as I know, were not actually misogynists.

I am bored by Brits and Europeans who mock Americans for being ‘uncultured’ and ‘vulgar’ when the United States has been, and still is, one of the most creative societies we know of. But it’s equally disheartening to hear a cultured, liberal American spouting off as if ‘important male novelists since 1945’ automatically equalled ‘important male *American* novelists’, and the rest of the world was stricken by some form of literary paralysis.

(Footnote: my favourite post-1945 American novelist is Anne Tyler. ‘Saint Maybe’ is the best of hers that I’ve read. Norman Mailer is an important figure in the minds of students who have signed up to do a course involving his works, and nowhere else. I can’t see what’s so Important about Updike either, and having wasted a couple of afternoons on ‘Mao II’, I am through with the vacuous Don DeLillo.)

re: 118

Is Michael Ondaatje a major novelist? Isn’t “who cares?” the apt reply. I’ve read and re-read my favorite of his, “Anil’s Ghost”, many times. Anil’s portion of it seems to me to be another Odyssey, and I don’t know the sources of the rest. (Maybe there aren’t any.) But I wonder if his books aren’t closer to prose poems than to novels. Usually prose like his is Grim Death so I don’t recommend him as a model, but he pleased the hell out of me in that one and a couple of others.

Oh goody, Walt is still strutting his stuff as the self-appointed hysterical policeman of the Crooked Timber comments threads. ‘You fuckin’ asshole, you fuckin’ try it on with one of the CTers and you fuckin’ cross me, pal! The big man of the internets, is what I am! Jus’ tryna keep the fuckin’ civility goin’ here, fuckhead!’

Dan, have I frequently insulted you? If so, I apologize. In general I find the comments of yours that I’ve read around the Internet fairly interesting.

Re: Flannery O’Connor

First, I would argue that O’Connor had an intentional strategy of playing a role outside of the mainstream of American writing of her time. She was explicitly allied with Southern writers who saw themselves as opposed (often politically as well as aesthetically) to the United States as a whole. Is it improper to see O’Connor as an outsider when that was an intentional strategy on her part?

Second, if you read O’Connor alongside of Bernanos or Greene or Undset, it becomes clear that she’s not so much interested in American themes as in Catholic ones.

Third, in her time-period, O’Connor was viewed as gleefully indulging in some pretty extreme aspects of Southern life. We shouldn’t forget what that exactly was about – we’re talking a period in which many members of O’Connor’s political class thought it was a great idea to blow up African-American churches. It’s not exactly strange for most other Americans to be more than slightly dubious about how the bizarre lives O’Connor seems to delight in related to their own.

re:192 Jeffrey Davis 09.24.13 at 1:44 pm

>Is Michael Ondaatje a major novelist? Isn’t “who cares?” the apt reply.

Of course, if that were the question.

But the question I wrote (in post 118) was:

>>And I think Michael Ondaatje is considered an “important” writer, no?

And the context for this question is Belle’s list of Important Male Novelists (later clarified to mean mid-to-late 20th century American). Now Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and is now a Canadian citizen, so maybe that doesn’t count as ‘merican enough. Probably, I’m guessing maybe the real context is Important USofAmerican Male Novelists…

So I guess I still have two honest questions:

1) Does Michael Ondaatje fit the Important Male Novelists category under discussion?

My impression is that The Establishment literary gatekeepers take him very seriously.

2) How is his treatment of female characters from the point of view of Belle’s criticism of that category (whether or not he fits the category)?

It’s been quite a while since I read him and I’m not certain I would have noticed, sigh.

Thanks Jeffrey Davis and MG for reading and responding!

@Walt at 200

Thanks. I think most of us get that.

Personally, I lived in a house with a professor of English in the 1960’s and 70’s, and although his speciality was Dryden there was a lot of reading of contemporary novelists in the house. I had a technical bent and never studied literature formally beyond Freshman year in college.

So that is the context of my question, which may really be to Belle herself, about Ondaatje. Clearly he wrote during the latter half of the 20th century. Clearly he is highly regarded by the literati. But since I’m not in that game I don’t know if he fits.

I’ll bow out now, since I seem to be lowering the IQ in the room…

@Gareth in 189.

Ugh.

@Dan Hardie in 190.

Yeah it’s true. I dunno, everybody gets to have their blind spots and the Anglo-centrism of Belle can be excused as long as her cause is righteous.

The older I get, the less I find any book to be important ; except to me. And whenever someone tells me a book I don’t much like is important, important think: “How can you say that?”

It keeps me out of certain conversations.

Also, and this is not my solidarity speaking, but the sky pixie’s honest truth, your writing is some of the best, tightest, funniest here, and the only reason I lurk. Keep on keepin’ on.

“Best suggestion for contemporary author of well-rounded female characters, from Tom: Kim Stanley Robinson. I LOL’ed. ”

Um, in the somewhat older department, Douglas Adams? William Goldman, perhaps? Samuel Delany?

In the newer category, Neil Gaiman? Charles Stross? They all have their issues, but they’re better than the crapsack pile of authors you have rightly savaged in this piece. I see that other commentators have mentioned other excellent male authors who wrote important books.

“I do just happen to be talking about this one set of American writers though, maybe I should have made that clearer for readers who didn’t wade through comments to the other post. ”
Well, I guess that’s exactly the point. Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t in that set of writers so he does tolerably well. (All his characters are pretty much equally flat.) This particular set of authors which you excoriate is, objectively, bad.

” William, the idea is meant to be that there is a preëxisting canon of Important Male Novelists of the Latter Half of the 20th Century. I’m not doing the selecting, merely commenting on my reactions to the selected. Franzen, whom we discussed below, seeks to join a very specific list of writers, and it is these and a few others (and not, in fact, Burroughs–or Bowles, or John Kennedy Toole) who make the cut traditionally. The list of genuinely excellent authors of the latter etc. would obviously have Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin on it.”

And this is the problem. The standard or traditional “literary canon” in the American university is garbage. For a while, I thought I was one of those people who opposed the concept of the literary canon. At some point, I realized that I believed in the concept of a literary canon, I just thought that the “English professor canon” was wrong. My literary canon still has the Odyssey on it, but it also has Five Children and It; The Wizard of Oz; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Princess Bride; I, Robot; The Left Hand of Darkness; and of course The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I am sure Stephen King belongs on the list but I can’t decide which book. There are others.

And what my canon doesn’t have on it is anything by Faulkner or Hemingway, let alone Updike or Mailer.

The crucial elements of the canon are books which you have to read in order to understand later books; books which other books reference; books with true impact on society. Obviously, the Odyssey and Iliad are in this category. As are large parts of the Bible, and many other religious works. In more recent works, you’ll notice (if you know your history) that my list contains authors who are seminal; whose work has influenced many, many other writers and society as a whole. Nesbit invented the children’s book as we know it today, for instance.

Now, the standard British 19th century “literary canon” actually does contain authors like this. Like them or hate them, Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Thackeray, Hardy — they were all *important* historically.

However, there is something wrong with the American “literary canon”. Mark Twain was indeed important and influential. But the 20th century authors who professors shoved into the “canon” — they simply weren’t, for the most part. (Arguably Hemingway should be included — for his newspaper reporting not his novels. Faulkner? Not even successful in his lifetime.) Meanwhile, many genuinely important authors were being ignored, generally because they wrote in unpopular genres.

And it got worse after World War II — the supposedly Important Writers simply aren’t important at *all*, while the real important writers were ignored as writing “lowbrow” stuff. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is possibly the most important work of fiction published in the 20th century, but it’s been taking a really long time for English professors to notice; perhaps because it managed to be in three disfavored genres simultaneously (science fiction; humor; and adaptation from another format, namely radio).

What’s wrong with the American “literary canon” is a form of pretentiousness. This form of pretentiousness often is a mask to cover biases — a mask which the bigot uses to excuse the biases to himself in his own head. You spotted one of the biases. I hope I have helped describe the pretentiousness. The pretentiousness can be used as a cover for any number of biases.

Gareth Rees:

“I have sharp memories of KSR’s landscapes (from the hyper-urban
setting of The Gold Coast to the utter barrenness and bleakness
of Pluto in Icehenge) and his dramatic set pieces (the fall of
the cable in Red Mars; the flooding and evacuation of the town of
Burroughs in Green Mars), but even if you offered me $1000 I do
not think I could name a single one of his hundreds of bland
identikit characters. Who played that futuristic musical
instrument in The Memory of Whiteness? Who met the yeti in Escape
from Kathmandu? Who was the guide in Antarctica? There must have
been such characters, but I can’t remember a thing about them.”

While it is true that Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t known for
characterization, I think you exaggerate the problem here a bit.
The female guide in the novel “Antarctica” is actually one of his
better characters, though you might need to hang out with
outdoors jocks a bit to get that. In some of Robinson’s later
works, such as the 40/50/60 series (aka “Science in the
Capitol”), there are a number of reasonable and memorable female
characters (though there’s probably an inverse relationship
between reasonable and memorable in this case, and maybe there
always is).

(As for “Red Mars”, I get the sense that no one wants to point
this out because KSR is such a good guy, but the characterization
there is a mess of ethnic stereotypes. The russian lady is
paranoid, the American white guy is forthright and trustworthy,
the asian lady is inscrutable, the black guy is sneaky, and so
on…)

My particular Belle-gored ox in this wholesale literary denunciation is Pynchon. However, given her description of the circumstances and amount of time she spent reading Gravity’s Rainbow, it is hard to take her seriously in that regard (and I would make the exact same observation about any of the male posters on this thread if they were to describe a similar context.

Two observations, then. First, it clearly escaped Belle that the only characters in the novel who blessed with any state of grace or stability are women. Second, in this day of Internet enabled fan/slash fiction, pray entertain us with your much better ending for the novel. I’m quite willing to read the 10-20 pages or so that it might take you.

Heinrich Böll won a goddamn Nobel prize for literature, and he certainly didn’t neglect the ladies in his work. Neither did Gunter Grass. Coetzee ought to be labeled “Read at your own risk”.

Contemporary American authors are likely as as unedifying as broadcast television dramas from the same era. They had the same audience.

I think part of the response is that if you criticize a writer someone loves, well then THEY. GO. CRAZY. I know if anyone says anything bad about Tolstoy the red mist descends. I’ve found myself arguing online that Tolkien wasn’t that sexist, or that Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn’t that racist, which is usually a sign that it’s time to unplug the Internet cable.

@ Kid Geezer
I wish Pynchon had never learned to write. Painful stuff

@ Tom Allen 199
Is it really that good? I was half thinking of getting it after an interview I read with her..

Joseph Brenner@216: The female guide in the novel “Antarctica” is actually one of his better characters, though you might need to hang out with outdoors jocks a bit to get that

Surely the essence of effective characterization in novels is that the reader does not have to be familiar with real people of a certain type in order to “get” a fictional character? One can “get” Elizabeth Bennett despite never having hung out with Regency landed gentry.

In any case I am an outdoors type myself so I don’t think my lack of personal experience can be to blame for my failure to recall any depth or subtlety in the characterization of Val in Antarctica.

No. It seems your definition of ‘important’ is skewing your choice of reading, so not surprising that your results are skewed. I’d suggest that you drop everything else for a while until you’ve finished reading all of Pratchett and Banks.

Who cares about most of these guys anymore? Like many other authors who reflected their times, they were important in their times. But apart from a few old fogies like me, who remember them from their youth as being important authors, has anyone even heard of them today?

The ones I am most familiar with are Bellow and Powers. Bellow is irredeemably sexist, but he was also a momma’s boy, who seems to have hated his many wives for not being good enough mothers to him and, if Ravelstein is evidence of it, a repressed homosexual as well. The first of his books I read was Humboldt’s Gift in which his depiction of wife #3 Susan Glassman was so obnoxious that it ruined the book for me. She reappears in More Die of Heartbreak as the status seeking hostess who would be the great author’s wife. The woman he remained with unto death, Janice Freedman, is treated brutally in More Die of Heartbreak and depicted as his maternal angel in Ravelstein. All his female characters are objectified in ways that make them one dimensional. I have other raps with Bellow as well.

But then I was recently married for the first time and still in my honeymoon phase, before I’d had much of a taste of what a harridan a woman can be. Fifteen years of marriage has shown me a lot about the woman I’m stuck with that is recognizable in Bellow’s women. And some of that creeps into one of my female characters, a battle hardened vet with PTSD and all its attendant symptoms, unleashed on my hapless male protagonist.

Powers, on the other hand, can hardly be accused of sexism, but I sort of wonder how manly Belle Waring might find him to be. Really, what Belle is ranting about is the tendency of men to view women as suitable vessels for bearing children, just as women view men as suitable providers. I don’t enjoy seeing men depicted by women as meal tickets any more than she enjoys women being depicted as tits and ass. But, from an evolutionary standpoint, it is perfectly natural to both halves of the human species and nothing anyone needs to go off about.

As for discussing the meaning of life with a woman, I remember a man I was close to once telling me how much he loved his wife, to whom he stayed faithful till death did them part, but also how much her conversation bored him. With several years of marriage under my own belt now, I can better understand his feelings. My marriage consists of nothing but games (hers) and power struggles that I suffer for the sake of our daughter. There is no possibility of discussing anything with my wife except the price of necessities.

Tim Chambers writes: But, from an evolutionary standpoint, it is perfectly natural to both halves of the human species and nothing anyone needs to go off about.

Bingo!

Clearly the problem is that you’ve read too many books.

mid s/b mind.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is possibly the most important work of fiction published in the 20th century

Whaaaaaa….?

I mean, I do love me some Douglas Adams, but a) I’d never say he had anything remotely approaching “fully realized female characters”, and b) this just seems… wildly exaggerated, to put it mildly.

@ Ronan(rf) 224

Yes, it really is that good. Her perceptions are very sharp–it would be considered a novel of ideas were it not for well-rounded, utterly believable characters.

Dan Hardie. The History Man came out in 1975, and I was an undergraduate at Sussex starting in ’78, though on the other side of campus. As for its accuracy: I don’t know what the lecturers had to say but among the undergraduates — there was a lot of talk, and some speculation about individual characters and who they might be based on, but let’s just say there was no consensus. But then again, there was no consensus on anything else either.

Dan, my wife, who attended an open day/interview at UEA in the early 80s, reported back that Bradbury’s behaviour towards the candidates was blatantly Kirkian – largely ignoring the men and older women, and verging on the inappropriate towards the younger, blonder women. She concluded that either he was completely without self awareness or he actually felt that Kirk was an acceptable role model.

She went to a different university.

For me, there’s been much valuable stuff in this thread. If Belle thinks that it may yet drive her insane, thinking about it at greater length may help drive me in the other direction. For that I’m grateful, not least to Belle herself. I’ve gotten a free ride, in other words, and she’s paid the ticket. Not fair, but I should say thank you. So I do.

As the wounded limp off to look for another thread, one thing seems painfully clear: freedom is invisible if you have some, painfully visible in its inaccessibility if you don’t. If we’re really for it, a great part of how we define it has to come from those we’ve deprived of it. We should take our fingers out of our ears when they speak. At very least.

JanieM struck a spark for me when she compared the reaction to my dislike of country music with the reaction to Belle’s complaint about the male canon. Janie has a point. I can escape the cult of Merle Haggard and its worshippers — there are other countries, metaphorical ones, anyway, where no one’s ever heard of him, and they’ll take me in. Where can Belle go, I wonder, where the patriarchy won’t shake its collective finger at her no matter what. Clearly, hers is the more serious claim to injury, and should be respected accordingly.

Chris Bertram makes a serious point about my generation of men, at least in the West. There’s one thing I would add, though. Whether or not he realizes it, he’s talking about low-status males. We weren’t just out to smash the smug suits behind desks who claimed that their — and only their — rules were eternal, and so Vietnam for you, boy, and no backtalk. We were also out to smash a definition of masculinity which excluded us. Jocks and loudmouths, save the fucking for the fighting men types, toadies to the suits whether they knew it or not.

So naturally we cheered when Joan Baez actually proposed creating an alliance of girls who say yes to boys who say no. Beyond that, we hadn’t a thought in our wee heads about the women’s auxiliary. The Seventies were indeed a very strong dose of reality for us, and much deserved. We weren’t the innocents or rebels that we thought we were, and the women who supported us then, perhaps against their better instincts, have spent a good deal of energy since trying to set us straight. With mixed success, I admit. To the extent that we thought smashing the part of the patriarchy that had oppressed us meant replacing it, and inheriting its privileges, we’re guilty as charged, even if we aren’t all important white male novelists of the post-war period. (Please note that the context for this reflection is 1968 in the U.S. What was going on simultaneously in France, Germany, Holland, etc., I’m not qualified to to address.)

As for the novelists in question, it wasn’t clear to me at the outset who was on the list and who wasn’t, but as that became clearer from the context, I realized that I didn’t like any of them myself. It wasn’t exclusively their attitudes toward women, although I have to admit that the under-the-desk scene in The Dear Park, much of Roth after Goodbye Columbus, and nearly all of Updike put me right off my feed. Mostly, I suppose, I disliked them because I thought of them as an Establishment logjam that needed to be broken up if anyone was ever going to get anywhere at all. Much ado about very little was my take, which isn’t what Belle is complaining about, I realize, but it did afford me the excuse not to be offended by her complaints. I’m not and never have been them — really not — so I don’t have to wade in, etc.

Except, of course, I am them, sorta, in that we were formed in and by the same environment, if not with exactly the same results. When geo defends their artistic achievements, I think he has a point, and shouldn’t have been mauled quite so badly for making it, but it’s hard to extend the argument very far in that direction before you encounter Leni Riefenstahl, and then, all of a sudden, you’re splitting hairs. Better to take Belle’s criticism as it stands, I think. We do have a long way to go still, and I’m damned if I know what all will pop up along the road. In any event, it’s not for me to say.

No one should play dumb and pretend they don’t know how these older novelists form a group, or why critics were pleased to place DFW there, or why Franzen wants to get up in there so bad.

I’m really not playing dumb (and I don’t think I’m the only one here). I’m British, I don’t read much literary fiction (or any American literary fiction, really, apart from Pynchon who I didn’t even think was ‘literary fiction’, so there you go), and certainly I’ve never felt even slightly tempted to read Updike, Roth or Mailer let alone Franzen. (And Updike’s literary? In fact, are we even talking about ‘literary fiction’ or have I just brought in a red herring?)

So when I said I didn’t know how you were defining the group of writers you were talking about, I really meant I didn’t know how you were defining the group of writers you were talking about. Unless by Important Male Novelist you mean “American-born novelist aged 50 or above who competed with Saul Bellow, idolises Saul Bellow or won’t admit to idolising Saul Bellow but sure as hell writes that way”, in which case it’s a mercifully short list & lets out several people who are arguably novelists, male and important. (Where do you stand on Salinger, btw, if he’s not too triggerish? I liked “Raise High…” once I tuned in to it – it’s kind of like a James Thurber story directed by Stanley Kubrick – but I couldn’t get through “Seymour”.)

Incidentally, I may be forgetting someone, but I don’t think I’ve see anyone springing to the defence of what you might call the core group – Mailer, Roth, Updike, Bellow. I think “Why four celebrated late-C20 novelists strike me as sexist dillweeds (and Jonathan Franzen)” might have got a lot less pushback.

@Walt: I do not know why people get angry when their literary heros get criticized. I like reading literary criticism and I have yet to read a review that said “This book was simply perfect, I would not change a single word. Bravo!”. I think thoughtful criticism informs one’s reading, even of beloved authors. But that’s me.

@William Timberland: I do agree that the lack of class-conciousness of the GMN really bugged me. It’s as if they didn’t have to think about ordinary day to day worries (Will I keep my job? Do I have enough to eat? Will I have a place to live? How will I protect my children? Am I safe?) and all they did with this freedom was think about boobs and bitches. And this was heralded as “great insight”.

@Nathanel: Agree with your comments on the irrelevancy of the American cannon but can’t agree with your dismissal of Hemingway and Faulkner. I love those guys flaws and all because of the beauty of their prose as much as the content.

@Dogen — have not read the Ondaatje but “The English Patient” sits on my bookshelf. I keep meaning to read it! I don’t know who the contemporary novelists who write reasonable characters are — that seems like another thread.

Phil:
Yes, Updike’s literary.

And Updike’s literary?
Jesus. Whatever you think of him, whether you enjoy him or not, Updike is most definitely and unequivocally a literary writer. This is on the order of asking “Is Melville literary?” “Is Hawthorne literary?” “Is Flaubert literary?” “Is Stendhal literary?” “Is George Eliot literary?” “Is Hilary Mantel literary?” “Is Nadine Gordimer literary?” “Is Thomas Mann literary? “Is V.S. Naipaul literary?” “Is Robert Stone literary?” “Is Edmund White literary?” “Is Donna Tartt literary?” and so on…

And on T Chambers on ‘Ravelstein’: Of course Bellow must have been gay, or “a repressed homosexual” in Chambers’ words, because Allan Bloom, the thinly disguised subject of ‘Ravelstein,’ was gay. QED! Along w/ Hector’s nonsense about women and evolution, the remark about ‘Ravelstein’ is a prime candidate for silliest remark on this thread.

We all are some boring-ass nihilists.

When nothing matters, nothing’s interesting.

Phil @ 253:
I’m really not playing dumb (and I don’t think I’m the only one here).

No, you’re not the only one, though I’m probably worse because I don’t even have the excuse of not being American. I’ll admit that I’ve heard of all the [American] writers that Belle mentioned[*], have read reviews of a few of their books, and have even I can kind of summon up a vague sense of “Yes, these are prominent American novelists”. But I’ve never read any of of them (I tried Updike’s Roger’s Version once, but gave up after a few chapters), so I don’t have a good sense of why they necessarily belong in a group. (Also, I have absolutely know idea “why critics were pleased to place DFW there”, since I haven’t read anything by him, either[**].)

[*] But maybe not William Gaddis; his name sounds slightly familiar, but if someone had told me he was British, I’d probably have believed them.
[**] Apart from his nonfiction history-of-infinity book, which I quite liked.

Geez! Sorry, Belle. Really didn’t mean to offend you so much, but upon rereading I still find that passage a bit murky. I do not think Pynchon is sexist, certainly not in the sense that the other offenders are and I do not think he should even be included in the whole “literary fiction” category. I doubt that he sees it that way. Franzen, who sounds utterly boring, clearly aspires to that category as other have pointed out.

Btw, I have read GRcover to cover three times. First in April/May 1973, next in 1974 and then again in 1975. And have dipped into it many more times over the years. So bully for me.

(sidles away)

This is on the order of asking “Is Melville literary?” (and much, much more).

Give me a break – I did say I’d never read any Updike. I just found it hard to believe, as I typed those words, that a bunch of novels which are basically (from what I’ve heard) about an affluent middle-aged guy drinking whisky, having sex and feeling vaguely discontented could actually be, well, literary (and no, Moby-Dick is not about a trip on a whaling-ship, even on the surface). And I wondered (slightly more seriously) if ‘important’ in the American literar… dammit… in the context of American literature meant something slightly different from the ‘literary’ of Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis et al. (Not that they’re innocent of middle-aged guys drinking etc etc.)

OK, so Updike is literary. And thanks, bianca, for the link to the blog post, which I found a useful clarification of what it is we’re talking about. There are writers who do that thing you describe, and writers who don’t (and generally aren’t trying to). You could classify, or criticise, writers in a variety of ways…

Does That Thing (hereafter DTT), but not as well or compellingly as he/she thinks: Franzen
DTT but too often and too well, so that you start to feel like a voyeur spying on a narcissist: Amis (M)
DTT in ways that aren’t immediately obvious: Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson
DTT in a genre that makes it not immediately obvious: Dickens, Ballard, more than one other sf writer
Doesn’t DTT: most sf writers, most crime writers… and, actually, not a few writers of literary fiction (which is a genre)

William Gibson’s superficial profile is so garishly pop-techno that the poetry of his work gets neglected and has to be insisted upon, which I am doing.

Canadian, doesn’t count.

I think I’m going to type out my rant, put it in a bottle, drive down to Long Beach or Pedro or wherever the boats take off from, sail out to Catalina, and toss it out enroute for the frolicking porpoises to play with. That’s what I’m gonna do. Later.

Gibson’s as native-born as the current US President.
John Irving, who should have been on the list too, whose women are delightful and seriously respected, is another ex-pat American writer.
Unless we’re determining authorial essence by where they receive their royalty checks.

StaTUE. Man, do I make fun of people who commit that typo in legal briefs. I deserved that.

This seems quite serendipitous:

http://gawker.com/tough-guy-lit-prof-im-not-interested-in-teaching-boo-1388680687

“Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

Belle, would that divorce were so easy. In the society I live in, divorced fathers don’t get visitation rights. And were you suggesting we even have sex? That’s for making babies here. Affection? Unheard of, except for something red in the lunchbox.

LFC,

It isn’t the Ravelstein’s model was gay, but the love the narrator manifests for him that is never expressed for the women in his life, and the way he glorifies the shopping and such that the two of them do together, that indicates where his tendencies lie.

actually, thinking about it, Douglas Coupland has flirted on several occasions with I Am A Serious ness, and his female characters seem pretty all right and not obviously DC in a frock

Here’s another vote for Absalom, Absalom!, which I read in college and was a real kick in the head. On the other hand I couldn’t get through As I Lay Dying, which I picked up because it was short. Go figure.

It’s an interesting literary trick to present a monstrously loathsome character through either first-person or tightly identified limited-third POV, such that we see through the monster’s eyes that all of his cruelty is justified and he is the real victim, yadda yadda. Humbert Humbert being the most extreme example, nearly everyone in the Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series being a current pop-culture example.

But good god, this “Tim Chambers” character breaks my suspension-of-disbelief antigrav unit. No one could be that abusive, that explicitly, with getting any kind of clue about what a monster he is. Real abusers obfuscate and play ignorant — this guy lays it out there in clear words. If he were real I’d tell him to find a counselor who specializes in working with severe personality disorders. Luckily, he cannot possibly be real.

I’m voting for performance art – Fitzgerald and Chekhov as manly manly manly men with hair on their chests? C’mon, that’s a send-up. If he had said Hemingway, then, I might have bought it.

@Chris, 231 – most excellent. There really is something about the post-war period when things went haywire even as Henry Luce was proclaiming the American century, getting spaced on LSD (yes he did!), and us kids were doing duck and cover bomb drills in schools.

And the country went bonkers on comic books, thought they were corrupting the minds of youth.

Some scattered comments:

1) As a side note, in my undergraduate years I took a course on Milton, 10 weeks of Paradise Lost. Can’t say I really liked it, but I did come away with the sense that that was one great piece of literature.

2) And there are those who think Armies of the Night is better than any fiction Mailer ever wrote.

3) And then there’s John Barth. It’s been so long since I’ve read him that I can’t speak to his female character, nor, for that matter, to his male characters either. At some point he simply became unreadably dense (Letters). If I were to re-read any of his stuff I’d be looking to see if his characters are anything other than vehicles for his prose and his ideas. As I recall, he spent several pages in Giles Goat Boy working up to an outrageous joke on Gorgeous George, transforming it into George’s Gorge.

Also, I just bought an original paperback of Miami and the Siege of Chicago for $2. I lived through it, but I never read it. It looks like my kind of thing.

Henry Farell,

Yes, I can see its much easier to dismiss as ‘troll’ whenever anyone happens to point out inconvenient facts. Unfortunately, the facts are the facts.

Can I jump in from the other side here? Let me say that I don’t think much of female “canonical” writers of the mid-20th century either, given the only one I remember from HS is Margaret Mitchell and GWTW. >>Shudder<< It's enough to put you off Romance Writing for the rest of your life! Can there be any more stereotypical women (No!) Men (No!) Sympathetic Black Slaves (No!!) Gawd what a nightmare: 1500 pages of complete unutterable trash! It's the one assigned fiction book I didn't finish in 4 years of HS.

Well, let me put in a word for Light in August as a worthy Faulkner read. Among the handful of novels I’ve read more than twice.

Well, let me put in a word for Light in August as a worthy Faulkner read.

Umm, no. You’ve got to put in a word for Light in August as a novel that will fuck with your brain and make you not sleep that well at night and just be more or less the best and most awful thing that’s happened in your life for some time. Seriously, I don’t even know the South, and that’s how good it was.

Jerry Vinokurov

I didn’t say it was published, Jerry. It’s been a work in progress since 2009. A single chapter is on my website. Otherwise, I intend to keep working on it until I no longer go back to it when trying to start something new.

Ah, finally! After all this train-wreck, you guys have gotten to Fa(u)lkner. One of the greatest bad writers of all time! I think “Absalom, Absalom” is his greatest work, despite his own estimate,- (no one captures the hopeless folds of time like that maiden aunt),- but my personal favorite is “The Light In August”. (I’m a slow reader, so I haven’t read near as much literary fiction, especially contemporary, as others here,- and tend to read more non-fiction, but it practically read itself).

O.K. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

RM,

But good god, this “Tim Chambers” character breaks my suspension-of-disbelief antigrav unit. No one could be that abusive, that explicitly, with getting any kind of clue about what a monster he is.

WTF? Am I the monster here?

I said my wife is a harridan because she will scream at me for hours for buying her the bag she wanted for her birthday. And then a few weeks later she’ll scream at me for hours more because she saw a woman with a bag she liked that she knows I won’t buy for her because of the way she screamed at me for buying her the first one. She does have her redeeming features, which are all the old-fashioned housewifely crafts and skills that contribute to the oikonomia. But the change in personality, once our child was born, so wore me down that there is no love lost between us.

Plume,

The Gold Bug Variations was my introduction to Powers and still one of my favorites, next to The Time of Our Singing, in which the mother and sister, though not central, come off very strongly as real women. I’ve read everything of his but his latest novella (published online for some reason,) and wonder what has become of his more than prodigious talent. Generosity was easily his weakest book.

A book critic for the L.A. Times once drew an unfavorable contrast between the New York scene of self-involved writers (Bellows, Updike) and the West Coast detective genre (Hammett, Chandler, Ross MacDonald), arguing that the latter, among other virtues, exhibited more of the social awareness found in the work of earlier authors like Sinclair, Lewis and Steinbeck.

Belle,

I only meant it seemed a good idea not to have sex with you personally. No one who thinks women are screeching harridans interested only in mind games, money, and meal-tickets can possibly be any fun to fuck. Them’s the breaks.

That’s what I would call a presumptuous ad hominem attack on someone whose situation you can’t possibly know anything about. I had many wonderful loving relationships with women at a time when I wasn’t gainfully enough employed to even consider marriage. That’s the breaks of being a writer. But none of them were harridans with whom I couldn’t converse on a variety of depths

But what would you call a woman who lights into you for three hours because you pulled the equivalent of a ten dollar bill from your front pocket before pulling out your wallet to pay for groceries, then continues for another half hour at two o’clock in the morning after you’ve been awakened by a phone call informing you that your father has been paralyzed by a stroke?

What do you say about a woman who constantly asks for your preference, then declares she likes the other one better, just because it’s not my taste. Is that a game or something else

Unfortunately, I am in a cross cultural marriage, and was too blind sided by my initial attraction to her to recognize her limitations (from our culture’s POV. )

At the least, she is an extremely insensitive human being. I think you are a little too snappy in your judgements regarding men and have some serious issues that need to be worked out.

Yes, Faulkner & yes A Light in August.

And for all you Pynchon fans (I’m one), there’s Zak Smith’s illustrations for GR:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm

On the character Tim Powers, the Marvel wiki page at http://marvel.wikia.com/Timothy_Chambers_%28Earth-616%29 says:

Nothing is known about Timothy, save that he had a son named Johnathan, who would one day become the mutant villain Empyrean, and that he himself was a mutant whose mutation rapidly aged him; by early middle age, he resembled a frail old man in need of a walker.

…which would explain a lot.

rm

The truth is there are as many abusive women out there as there are abusive men and you and Belle Waring are exhibits One And Two. I am not afraid to say that my wife is Exhibit Three because I have been so disaffected by the abuse I receive at home.

I implied that having experienced marriage to a very angry and abusive woman I understood Bellow somewhat better in that one novel of his that I had read at that time. But after reading all his work and discovering what he thought of all his wives, I figured it must be his problem. That doesn’t make me a misogynist. Or a monster. Or anything else.

I wasn’t looking for therapy. But after the two of you launched your sexist and misandrist attacks on me for simply making clear how a woman can sometimes be in the wrong, well, enough said. It’s like arguing with my wife. She always right and I am always wrong, because a man can’t possibly be right about anything. Can he?

Perhaps I am in the wrong to say such things about my wife but they were definitely benign compared to what was assumed and said about me.

I found Absalom! Absalom! tough-going, though a great book. If I were trying to convince someone to give Faulkner a chance, I’d probably recommend something with a more accessible prose style, like “The Bear”.

like The Bear

LOL Walt

As long as favorite works of Faulkner are under discussion, I’ll pipe up and put in a word for The Hamlet. It is beautiful, beautiful, and somewhat easier going than any of his other books (of the subset that I’ve read and found worthwhile).

333: Eudora Welty?

Ronan: Capote’s (fairly) short novel: Other Voices, Other Rooms.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Absalom, Absalom! Getting it out of library today.

Cheers. Will watch out.

Bastard Out of Carolina is great, and new-ish.

Charles Chessnut, for a circa-1900 middle class black perspective, and a great writer.

I love DFW as an author. His prose is sparkling and reading him is like dipping into the mind of the smartest, warmest person you know who is telling you something really interesting. His suicide was a great loss.

@335:

Great bad writers: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Melville. As opposed to the tradition of more formalistic control and “fine” writing style, along the lines of Flaubert, James, Proust.

The blogger’s argument, to the extent that it reaches the level of argument and not just complaint, seems to be that self centered male authors are bad because they are male. You might plausibly argue that being self centered makes you a bad author (you might, but plenty of counter examples abound and writing is probably at least a little bit inherently narcissistic). In truth very few authors create “plausible interior lives” of any sort at all, let alone for the majority of characters in a novel. Indeed if you look across the whole of literature you might be tempted to find another rubric for greatness other than “plausible interiority”.

Perhaps it’s the fictional wrapping that makes this post’s Author upset. Because these are stories and not true accounts, the blogger has trouble accepting that the writers don’t want to spend more time with characters who have plausible interiority. I can understand that, I prefer to interact with humans that are not hollow machines as well.

Still the author doesn’t demand like-ability only plausibility. I guess maybe the problem is with the concept “plausible”. Plausible as far as I can tell means something that you can imagine a person doing without laughing or straining too much. However I’m afraid that the plausibility that we are bandying over is actually of a more subjective flavor. With implausibility defined as “something I couldn’t imagine myself doing.” But that seems to be more of a failure of imagination on the part of the blogger. Many people do things that I cannot myself imagine doing. I often read books about those people and frequently I find, given the circumstances of the book that those actions I wouldn’t take are indeed plausible. But of course I’m not a woman in 19xx year or a woman in 2013.

Perhaps the blogger’s argument is not that male self-centeredness is inherently bad, but that only novels with plausible interiority for female characters are good. I think that this is probably a little broad. So before we toss the baby out maybe we should stop to consider why we read; personally I don’t read to experience my own brain. I get plenty enough of that. I read for great writing, for new perspectives and for escape.

Take one example: the male characters in Austen’s novel have no interior life– this doesn’t prevent the novels from having something important to say. In fact, I love them because I get to spend time in the somewhat unfamiliar brains of females who lived long before anyone I know.

Granted it is interesting when an author steps outside a personal perspective and imagines the lives of others, but doing so is not a pre-requisite for good writing. The number of author’s that can plausibly write in a voice other than their own is vanishingly small, which, I think, causes this argument to collapse even further. It’s as if the author believes that any insight from a politically imperfect perspective or a politically imperfect time is fatally flawed. That would disqualify nearly every work. (For my own part I’m tired of reading about rich people, a sin that affects many author’s of both genders. I guess only rich people have the time and energy to sit down and pound out a novel though.)

Mailer is a buffoon though, and Roth is mostly a buffoon too.

@Bob McManus

Thank you. I find those statistics very supportive. Most of the expat men I know here would agree with them implicitly.

Belle Waring@314 – “The problem is not that I say, “book X lacks realistic female characters” and then you swoop in and save the day for The Canon by saying “but Belle, hahaha! Book X lacks realism in a dozen other areas as well. ”

That’s hardly Nabokov’s argument, it’s certainly not mine. He’s arguing that it’s always possible to set up an arbitrary test – realism in his example, feminism for some in this thread, dsquared’s facetious cocktail party test, etc – which the novel can then be made to fail & so what ? For Nabokov the Realism test doesn’t reduce Bovary at all. Since in his estimation Bovary is a great novel it’s just yet more evidence that criticism by realism is flawed, not the other way around. Although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of a corpus of neuroscience study which purports exactly that with respect to how it is readers form judgements when reading fiction ie if the characters’ behaviour does not match the reader’s expectations, the she (the character) is not plausible, she is poorly drawn and so on.
Anyhoo, I better bow out now.

“I really am at a loss for words, here.”

If true then that was an excellent recovery.

I haven’t read the whole thread, so forgive me if this point has been made, but this argument seems a little circular?

Your Updikes and Roths and suchlike are all a specific type of book from a specific type of author about a self-obsessed litrary dude. Everything in those books is objectified from the perspective of the author, with women probably getting the short shrift most of all because they represent such a source of insecurity for the writer.

If those books had more three-dimensional supporting characters, and less of a pretentious shoe-gazer perspective (altho those guys are probably generally looking down at a part of their body which is a bit higher up than that)… they’d no longer be in that canon. I’d contest that you can’t elevate that genre, just escape it.

I don’t think it’s really a particularly big deal either. This type of author is fading drastically from popularity. Most literary prizes (to my limited knowledge) in both short stories and novels seem to be going to ladies, who are (in my limited experience) often much more interesting writers than the aforementioned shoe-gazers. it’s like getting mad at nu-metal circa 2006. it’s a genre which is clearly on the way out.

This ‘you gotta read the “impotrant” stuff’ is and has only ever been a poly to get shit authors read. But YMMV.

(You really should get a service that would allow commenters to use preview.)

@356

People are different in different parts of the world. In Japan, where everyone is raised as homo economicus bringing up the meaning of life with one’s wife will most likely be silenced with this rejoinder: what does it add to my household budget?

To say so is not being sexist.

And if your job does not require 6 to 8 hours of nightly overtime, so you’re likely to be around the house more that she would like; you will be hounded, harassed, and bullied to get out there and make more money somehow, even if it means flipping burgers.

And you won’t get any thanks for any of it, or sex, or even affection. Anything thing a man does here is just a matter of course. But should you fail to express your appreciation for every little thing she does for you, she becomes a hound in hell.

To say that such a creature is a harridan is an accurate description. Not sexist.

dsquared #349 –My admiration for you reascends to the boundless.

@367

I never said Pyncheon was important. Or contributed a great idea. Every book of his I tried to read I threw against the wall. But what makes Pratchett any more important?

@369

After hearing so much from women about what beasts men are for the past thirty years, I don’t see what is wrong with saying that women can be beastly too. The only experience I can offer is my own. But I’ve heard plenty of horror stories. And I did call out the beast in Belle Waring, which was largely my intent.

Frankly, I think it is something that ought to be aired, because there are millions of men in this world with viciously domineering wives. And may there would be less domestic violence if women would keep their traps under control.

nighty night, sleep tight

This thread increasingly has the feel of evidence to be one day introduced by the prosecution.

Tim Chambers: forget the sexist books and the internet debates. Given everything you’ve said about your wife in this thread, your statement “there would be less domestic violence if women would keep their traps under control” makes me worry for her physical safety. If I knew where you lived I’d be asking myself seriously if I have a responsibility to phone the police because that sounds like a precursor to a crime.

If you read Elizabeth Warren more carefully, you would know that she places the effect of women entering to the workforce to be entirely secondary to the primary effects of debt build-up from financial deregulation, and the increasing inequality in incomes.

But I want to know about the other thing you wrote, “What separates important from unimportant authors is their contribution to intellectual history.” –Does this mean there are no important fiction authors besides Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Joyce? Who else would you name, and what, specifically, was the contribution? Because contribution to intellectual history is a pretty rare achievement.