Women Writers, Books By Women

 I read somewhere that men will not read women writers. More evidence we are idiots. Well, here are some items to think about.

Joyce Carol Oates has this fearlessness that probably will scare most men. She does not romanticize violence, she looks at it quite cold-bloodily. B-Sides: Joyce Carol Oates’s “them” addresses a different aspect of her writing, her interest in the white working class.

Joyce Carol Oates appears on college syllabi far less than such mid 20th-century male peers as Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) is included in short-story courses, but none of Oates’s 60-plus novels—neither her early masterwork A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) nor her Marilyn Monroe novel Blonde (1999)—show up with any regularity. Indeed, for most academics, Oates seems oddly peripheral to 21st-century literary culture.

There are myriad reasons for this neglect. In The Program Era, Mark McGurl made the case that Oates’s maximalist aesthetics and her prodigious output irked Alfred Kazin and James Wolcott alike. Elizabeth Dalton (“Joyce Carol Oates: Violence in the Head”) and Leo Robson (“The Unruly Genius”) maintain that Oates’s frequent depictions of violence unsettle readers who assume, as Oates herself put it, that “the territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic.” At base, though, Oates’s quiet disappearance from the academy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of her interest in white working and lower-middle-class life.

Most major postwar American novelists expressed little interest in disenfranchised whites who “failed” at embourgeoisement. Writers such as E. L. Doctorow and Roth focused on the upwardly mobile, John Updike and Richard Yates on the well-established middle and upper classes, while James Baldwin and Toni Morrison trained their gaze principally on poor communities of color. Oates, though, has returned insistently to the problem of nonmobile whiteness in Blonde; Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); them (1969); and other important works. And she has done so in an inimitable neonaturalist style, tracing violent narratives that (more like film noir than genteel literary fare) drive to a fated conclusion. For Oates, the desperate American need to claim and maintain whiteness, frequently by way of violence, emerges most palpably in working-class experience.

***

Them remakes the naturalist tradition of novels like Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893) for a society that seems as incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence in 2023 as it was when Oates wrote a half century ago. In this novel about a fated white working-class family, Oates provides a new perspective on the terrible “price” of whiteness James Baldwin spelled out in “On Being White … And Other Lies” (1984). There, Baldwin argued that “there are no white people”; white identity was a “lie” perpetrated at the expense of people of color. “In this debasement and definition of Black people,” Baldwin wrote, whites “debased and defined themselves.” Gripping, visceral, and relentless, them unmasks that lie of whiteness and, in the process, transforms the pessimistic determinism of a venerable literary mode into a lesson about the horrific persistence of American racism

I freely admit, most of my life I knew of Virginia Woolf only through the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I think I read her essay “A Room of One's Own” in my thirties, and maybe it was later. I never read any of her books until prison, where I came across The Common Reader and To the Lighthouse. I read a biography. I have yet to figure out why anyone would be afraid of Virginia Woolf. I did not get to see the movie, The Hours, but I think this BBC article's thesis may be right: The Hours at 25: The book that changed how we see Virginia Woolf

As in The Hours, this sequence in Woolf Works gestures towards Woolf's death, opening with a reading of her suicide note. It is a bookend to the ballet's beginning, which features the only recording of Woolf's voice, a BBC radio broadcast from 1937 called "On Craftsmanship". In it, she expresses the challenges of using English in writing, so enriched with "echoes, memories, associations" that it becomes impossible to deploy them to express a singular thought without triggering a thousand others. Woolf's legacy is to be tied so intimately to language that her image holds symbolic power in works like The Hours decades after her own lifetime. She continues to give an interpretative language to others.

In the broadcast, Woolf asks, "How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question". The answer, as provided by Cunningham in The Hours, is to retell the old stories in new ways, to place one foot in the past whilst acknowledging that we have no choice but to keep the other in the present. We lose a sense of the "real" Virginia Woolf, whoever she might have been, but it keeps her work fresh and alive in the way she so desperately wanted it to be. 

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf reminds us that we cannot write without laying down flowers at the tombs of the authors, poets, and playwrights who came before us. "For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." How Woolf is perceived depends on what we want her to be, so that when a passer-by sits on the bench in Richmond with her statue, the conversation can hold whatever meaning they desire. Like the artist Lily Briscoe at the end of her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf had her vision. Now we must have one of our own.

I have read several really good things about Ann Patchett, yet I have no time to read her, but having read Ann Patchett on Grabbing Galleys and Getting Drafts Done I think I like her.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

AP: Allan Gurganus, my sophomore year of college at Sarah Lawrence. Allan taught me how to work, then throw it out, then work some more. Preciousness is the death of writing, especially when you’re a beginner. At nineteen I would have happily spent a week crafting one perfect sentence. Allan didn’t let us do that, which was an enormous gift since one perfect sentence gets you nowhere.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

AP: I got the treadmill desk for my fiftieth birthday (I’m fifty-nine now). I wanted one because Susan Orlean had one. Susan Orlean is always ten years ahead of the curve and I strive to emulate her. In the past I had used the treadmill to answer emails or return phone calls but I never used it to write fiction.

 The Brisbane Time reviews Patchett's latest, A family’s season of revelations in the middle of lockdown (The Australian paper has a book review newsletter I suggest you subscribe to, it gives a different perspective and the writing is good):

At first I worried that Tom Lake was going to be a rerun of The Waltons, that folksy 1970s TV series. “Goodnight, John Boy” echoed in my head as I met Laura, a teenager who lands a role in a small-town theatre production in New Hampshire and winds up on a farm in Michigan with a brood of daughters. But this is Ann Patchett, weaver of lifelike human stories so artful that you can never tell where the twisted strands of lightness and dark will lead.

I soon saw that her ninth novel was an all-American version of The Decameron. Or The Magic Mountain, as Patchett wrote in The Getaway Car, a 2011 essay about learning to write: “That novel’s basic plot – a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement – became the story line for just about everything I’ve ever written.” (She also curses The Brady Bunch, “because all of it stuck”.)

***

Lovers of her writing will wonder how Tom Lake compares with her previous perfect novels about fractured families, Commonwealth and The Dutch House. The seeds of Tom Lake can be traced to another 2011 essay, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, but the novel is less obviously autobiographical than Commonwealth and emotionally warmer than The Dutch House. It perfectly completes a loose (and perhaps unintentional) trilogy with a wholesomeness that reminds us about American decency while refusing to be sentimental.

To say any more would spoil this Russian doll of storytelling, this play within a play within a play. Patchett writes with her usual humanity and time switches so fluid you can’t see the joins. Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time, an antidote to dystopian hysteria, the Patchett novel we need now.

Being sentimental is a fear of mine. I would like to see how she avoids this problem.

 

I do not know Ann Beattie, but the interview, Ann Beattie’s Characters Live in “Uneasy Coexistence”, left interested – if nothing else for executing an idea I have been working on for years. You can decide your own opinion:

In Ann Beattie’s Onlookers, the personal and the political aren’t as separate as its characters might like to believe. Set in present day Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally looms large in the public consciousness—so do the two most recent election cycles, the pandemic, and the intellectual battleground that the University of Virginia has become. Perhaps the most important image, recurring in nearly all of the collection’s loosely-connected short stories, is that of the toppled Confederate statues across the city. Yet despite the history happening all around them, the collection’s titular “onlookers” try to remain exactly that—distant, impartial, and removed from the reckonings happening all across their city and their country.

I spoke with Beattie about Onlookers, liberal bubbles, culture clash, and how to make your metaphors “jangle.”

Martin Dolan: I wanted to ask about the nature of writing a story collection centered around a particular place versus, say, a theme. I know you’ve written location-based collections before. What is it that attracts you to setting in fiction?

Ann Beattie: For one thing, I know Charlottesville very well. I first moved there in 1975; it was where my first job was right out of graduate school. I’ve been in and out of the city since I was 25 years old. Considering what happened there and considering my own long history with the place, I have a personal connection to it.

MD: So why a linked collection as opposed to a novel? Do you think a novel-in-stories lends itself to writing around a place or a moment versus something character or plot-driven?

AB: I wouldn’t say this is a conventionally linked collection of stories. They’re variations on a theme. You’re right that there are a geographic and thematic component, but there’s not any one real link. Traditionally, in novels-in-stories, people will have the same characters come up in story after story, and there’s some sort of trajectory. But I think this one dances around a bit more than those types of books—I wasn’t really going for that same sense of accumulation. The actual significance of recurring images, like the Confederate statues, actually vary story to story. There are common elements, but it’s meant to be more of a theme than about characters.

MD: I really love the scene in the story “Nearby,” where the two main characters are watching from their penthouse as the statues come down. And that comes back to the title of the collection—how these characters are adjacent to these protests and counterprotests, yet, for the majority of them, they’re passive. Do you think that makes for a more engaging story?

AB: I think those characters were right for those stories. They’re of a certain age, a certain social class. If you were up in that penthouse looking down, I’d assume you’d have a very different reaction to what was happening on the ground than the characters. Plus, in that story, the two characters of the husband and wife have different reactions, too. They were chosen on purpose to be perceivers, because I don’t think they’re representative of Charlottesville.

MD: For lack of a better term, it seemed like that sort of culture clash kept coming up story after story. Liberals and Conservatives, young and old, even transplants versus locals. Yet despite these characters being so different, the stories aren’t defined by that difference. It’s more of an uneasy coexistence.

AB: Yeah, that was intentional. Uneasy coexistence is right on target!

MD: These stories are all really grounded in the 2016-to-present moment—lots of references to politics and pop culture—but “Pegasus” is the lone Covid story. What was writing that like? Were there certain cliches you wanted to avoid?

AB: I do tend to write about what I’m immersed in, in terms of both my daily life and a day in the life of the nation. I spend the entire year of 2020 in Maine, because it was the safest place I had available, and I just couldn’t shake that idea of being locked away, of having to be masked. It was omnipresent in my mind.

MD: I think that story has a really great balance of sad scenes and moments of genuine levity. I know there’s humor in all your work, but do you think that its even more important in more socially or politically-grounded fiction?

AB: In general, I think that there is no such thing as ordinary life. There are certain things we have to accept, or learn to accept, but that also doesn’t mean we should lose our sense of humor—or our sense of anger! These are characters that are improvising. They can’t live their usual lives, either pre-pandemic or even before the changes in Charlottesville, yet they’re still moving forward. It’s not that in the past they were taking certain things for granted, or that they’ve become fundamentally different people, but rather that in new situations different aspects of themselves need to be called upon.

That the writers featured in 6 Difficult Women Who Live on in Fiction are all women might point out what men will not write about, how we do not think about certain subjects. I have read Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, did not know Anni Domingo, Breaking the Maafa Chain, and have heard of the other three and am quite curious to read them.

And if you do not get onto the college (and maybe high school) reading lists, you are going out of print quickly. Take a look at Women’s Books We’d Like to See in Print. Oates and Beattie and Patchett still live, they still write, and deserve reading. Mantel and Woolf having passed on, leaving behind books needing read.

sch 8/10

Updated:

Elder Care: On Alexandra Chang’s ‘Tomb Sweeping’ :

One of the final stories in the collection, “Persona Development,” asks what role tech can and should play in elder care. Here, a woman spies on her aging parents using a dystopian surveillance system, which her parents consented to having installed. Like Xu Bing’s 2017 feature-length film Dragonfly Eyes, which features no actors, only CCTV footage spliced from cameras all over mainland China, Chang’s story is told from a voyeur’s point of view. The woman, Patricia, watches through multiple “Eyze Cams” as her parents eat blurry plates of food and mill about their respective living spaces. Patricia’s father in turn spends a great deal of time watching a YouTube channel that recreationally surveils the streets of Zhuhai, China. As Patricia’s desire to check in on her parents from above develops into an unnerving addiction, the story interrogates the ethics of surveillance—do different rules apply to watching your parents than, say, watching your children, your pets, or strangers (as in the case of Dragonfly Eyes)? “It’s not stalking,” Patricia tells her husband, “it’s called elderly monitoring.”

Sarah Thankam Mathews Wants to Remake the World.

Lisa Jewell: ‘I once read 40 Agatha Christie novels in a year’  (a short interview)

‘A smorgasbord of unlikability’: the authors helping ‘sad girl lit’ grow up

If you’ve read a book by a woman, about a woman, that has been published in the last five years, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that this woman was the protagonist. The narrative likely circled around this character’s sadness, her passive struggle to overcome it, and little else. Typically, such stories have notes of darkness but will rarely deliver the actual thing. Usually the main character (like the author) will be middle-class, if not incredibly wealthy. Almost always she will be white. The book’s cover will probably feature a devastated-looking woman with her hair covering her face or her head cradled in her hands.

What you’ll have been reading is sad girl literature – a trend in literary fiction that has come to dominate publishing in the last decade. Books in this genre focus on navel-gazing characters defined by their vulnerability and erratic behaviour. The popularity of these books is difficult to overstate: you can see it in the commercial success of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which Margot Robbie is reportedly adapting into a film), Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – all of which continue to feature on bestseller lists and on viral BookTok videos years after publication.

sch 8/13