Sunday Salon - do female writers get the short end of the stick?

Apologies to those of you who have read versions of this discussion on other blogs or have followed a similar debate in the newspapers - this will likely be a watered-down re-hash of the arguments made in those forums. In which case, why am I choosing to raise the subject as a Sunday Salon topic?

I mentioned a week or so ago that I had noticed recently that my list of favourite writers was significantly skewed towards the male end of the spectrum. As a female writer myself, this worries me, especially because there is no easy answer as to why this should be the case.

Recent research, though, has shown that I am not alone in my gender bias. Although women buy the majority of novels, and whilst approximately the same number of men and women are published each year, it seems that women are vastly underrepresented in award-wins and reviews.

Here are some statistics, gathered by Bookseller & Publisher in 2012 and published that year in Crikey, which demonstrate a decided gender bias towards male authors having their books reviewed in influential newspapers, magazines and literary journals. In Australia, 70% of the authors reviewed in the Weekend Australian in 2011 were male, and of the authors reviewed in the now defunct Australian Literary Review in 2011, 81% were male. In the same year, The London Review of Books reviewed 504 males to only 117 female writers, whilst The New York Review of Books reviewed 627 men to only 143 women.

This pattern stands for other years, too. And those numbers should shock all of us.

From a personal perspective, it makes me wonder whether I am more inclined towards male writers because I read more of them, or because I read more about them in the literary pages. I don't think the former is true. I tend to read a fair spectrum of literature including relatively equal numbers of male and female writers. But it is certainly true that I am probably influenced by reviews I read, and if it were the case that, say, The Guardian online over-represented male writers in its positive reviews, that might subconsciously influence my preferences. And of course most of us are probably influenced to some extent by the short-lists of writers chosen for annual literary prizes. When writers receive such prestigious public accolades it is hardly surprising that the rest of us therefore assume their literary worth must be higher than that of other writers.

But none of this explains why prizes are awarded more often to male writers, or why male writers are more frequently reviewed. The statistics are particularly puzzling given that women make up the majority of the readers, unless it is also true that more men than women sit on the judging panels of literary prizes, and more men than women write the reviews. I have yet to see those numbers.

My guess is that all of this comes back to the invisible standards that still form the backbone of our society, much as we like to pretend things have changed. As a whole, society still elevates certain subject matters above others, and art that concerns itself with the preferred subject matters is considered to be 'high-brow'. Broadly speaking, these subject matters are what we might also call 'public' issues, and they include politics, war, philosophy, religion, sport, education. In contrast, art that concerns itself with the private sphere is classified as low-brow, or 'popular'. The subject matters that fall under the rubric of the private sphere include romance, sex, sexuality, childbirth and child-rearing, relationships. Laundry. Traditionally,  the private sphere is seen as a female space, whilst the public sphere is assumed to be inhabited largely by men.

When was the last time you can remember a romance novel winning one of the major literary prizes?

Tara Moss, who has written eloquently on this subject, quotes Dr. Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former editor of Australian Book Review and a former member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, as saying: ‘Most of the unconscious bias I have seen in the literary world, and I have seen a great deal, has been to do with the male-centered values of a dominant culture whose values most people wrongly think are universal and gender-neutral.’

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that literary prizes are still generally handed out to writers who deal eloquently with traditionally male-centred values, even if this is not a conscious bias by the judging panel, and that prominent reviews, in turn, are given to those books which critics believe may stand a chance of winning a prize.

The last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction were Jennifer Egan, for a disjointed novel on the abstract theme of time, and Paul Harding, for a novel about death and dying and time.

The last two winners of the Man Booker Prize were Hilary Mantel, for a novel about the political world of Thomas Cromwell, and Julian Barnes, for a story concerned with how our notion of selfhood changes over time.

The philosophical discussion of time is clearly a winning subject matter these days, ding ding ding! Take note, novelists! (And don't think it has escaped my notice that three out of four winning writers cited above are female...)

Of course, it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that the private sphere is female and the public is male, but the vestigal belief that these distinctions still exist appears to hover prominently in our subconscious. Jonathan Franzen deals with relationships and love and romance; but he does so in the context of political discourse, and in a voice that is less overtly emotional than the voice which dominates genre novels that are classified as 'romance'. Margaret Atwood also writes about relationships and love and romance, but she frequently does so (these days) in the context of philosophical discourse about the future. Both writers grapple with the intersection of private and public values, and I would argue that this is largely the case with most good writers. Certainly Egan, Harding, Mantel and Barnes all deal intimately with the minutiae of people's private lives at the same time as they tackle big picture philosophical and political themes. To assert that there was ever really a strict divide between the public and the private in art is to take a limited view of it; and to put any weight whatsoever on 'high-brow' versus 'low-brow' classifications is, these days, to miss out on a wealth of good reads.

Furthermore, there is no reason why a discussion about motherhood could not in and of itself also be considered inherently political. Or why men would or should be less interested, these days, in that discussion than they are in other political topics. The traditional roles and identifiers of men and women in society these days are themselves dissolving into one another.

But it is true, for example, that I read a book by Marian Keyes on holiday recently and it didn't occur to me to review it here. Why? Because I viewed it as indulgent holiday reading, something a bit lighter, a bit frivolous. How unfair to Keyes, who is in fact a very good writer. Although had I read a crime novel by a male writer I think my instinct would have been the same.

So what to do about all of this?

Inspired by recent discussions of this topic, some female bloggers have banded together to establish the 

Australian Women’s Writers Challenge.  I am too fickle with my reading to be able to stick to a geographically limited challenge such as this, unfortunately, but I am personally going to make a conscious effort to read a wider variety of female writers this year and to try to ensure that I assess them fairly alongside the male writers I read.

I promise to keep you updated as the year progresses, but in the meantime I would be interested in your views: DO female writers get the short end of the stick, or is all of this just a lot of hullabaloo about nothing?

Jennifer Egan - a visit from the goon squad

I put off reading this book for almost a year, due to a series of misconceptions I had formed about it. First, the cover of the paperback I ordered from Amazon is, in my opinion, poorly chosen - the graphic looks like a montage of photos taken at a performance of a children's entertainment group, which is neither appealing nor indicative of content (yes, yes, I know, never judge a book by its cover - but we all do, a little bit, don't we?). Second, the title - goon squad? It sounds like a book about old-time gangsters arriving at someone's door to rough them up a little - not my 'thang', as it were. Of course, having read the book I now get the title and appreciate it. Finally, I had formed an impression, somewhere along the way, that Egan's tour de force belonged alongside popular modern-day books such as Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story - books that are thematically linked by their dystopian outlook on life in the near future. I do like the occasional dystopian novel - l Iove Margaret Atwood's futuristic take, for example, in many of her books, from The Handmaid's Tale to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. But I get a bit tired of dire futuristic outlooks when they are paired with a cynical and ostensibly humorous narrator's voice that is really a weak pastiche of John Kennedy Toole's dark wit. Often the result is a dismal portrayal of a future just ten or twenty years hence in which nobody cares any longer about things we now care deeply about - in which it is in fact fundamentally uncool to care deeply about anything (hipsterdom on steroids?), but which we are for some reason supposed to find amusing. I had understood that Egan was a Shteyngart-esque writer, and this assumption, combined with the reference to goons, put me off in spite of the fact that a number of people had recommended her to me, and in spite of the knowledge that this book has won so many prestigious book awards (notably the 2011 Pulitzer and the (US) National Book Critics Circle Award ).

In fact, there are no goons in this book, not in the original sense of the word anyway. Instead time itself is referred to by one of the characters as a goon - coming as it does to roughen us up, to steal away our youth. And only one chapter - the last - takes place in the future.

After reading just a few pages of this book, I turned to Bibliohubby and told him I might have found a new female writer I adored, who - if the book continued as it started - I might end up listing in my top ten. This is significant because I realised recently, after reading a number of blogs on the topic and having a think, that I have a slight tendency to prefer male writers to female - not because of gender, of course, or not consciously anyway. The apparent preference is disconcerting. It worries me.

But more on that some other day.

The rest of the book did not unfold quite as I had expected. Indeed, to call this a 'novel' is to reinvent the term, something which critics and readers alike appear to have done with surprising ease, welcoming Egan's story-based form as an innovative and inventive post-postmodern way of telling a bigger story. Egan herself, though admitting that the format of the book makes it hard to classify, has said that she leans towards considering it a novel. Were one to categorise the book along more traditional lines, however, one would have to conclude that it is a book of independent short stories featuring characters who are all loosely interconnected. We meet some of the characters repeatedly throughout the book, sometimes through stories focused on their lives, sometimes through stories in which they play only a peripheral part. The stories hop around in time, from the 1960s to the near future, creating a vivid portrayal of the characters' lives as they unfold over a lifetime. We see them both young and energetic and old and rough - once the goon of time has ravaged them. The result is a vaguely cohesive tale centring largely on Bennie Salazar, a music producer, and his assistant Sasha. The cast of characters making up the meat of the book are all linked to Bennie and/or Sacha at some point in their lives, and most have something to do with the music industry and its profound changes over time.

In addition to the unusual structure of the novel - if one wants to call it that - Egan plays with form and structure within the stories themselves. The story / chapter that has received the most publicity is the one which is told entirely in the form of a Powerpoint presentation - something that the young narrator-protagonist of that story calls a 'slide journal', and which is indicative of the future Egan sees unfolding - one in which technology has taken over to such an extent that Powerpoint is writing, and where words like 'friend' and 'identity' have ceased to have any real world meaning outside of technology. I knew this chapter was coming and I was as curious about it as I was resistant to it. But in fact, in the context, it works beautifully. It's surprising how much can be told about character and meaning and story in just a few words on a Powerpoint slide.

In many of the other stories, Egan will pause in her narration to suddenly take us forward 40 odd years in a character's life and tell us where they ended up, or what happened to them - all within the space of a paragraph. Similarly we are sometimes thrown backwards to learn of a character's early, formative years. In this way time is constantly interrupted and warped, disturbing the usual linear coherence we expect from storytelling. One reviewer has pointed out that the originality here - because of course many authors use flashbacks and flash-forwards - stems from the absence of a narrative present. We can't pinpoint what the 'present' is, here, so even the use of terms such as 'flashback' and 'flash-forward' seems inappropriate.

One is left, after finishing the book, with a strong attachment to some of the characters, and with a sense of sadness about the inevitable changes brought about by the ravages of time. It is a book that will stay with me, I think.

My personal preference is usually for a novel that has some continuity of story. I rarely finish books of short stories, although I know the form is difficult to master and can be even more powerful than longer form writing.  As much as I admire Egan for her obvious electrifying ability to write in a variety of ways about such a cacophony of characters, I think I would have enjoyed this more if it had been written as a more traditional novel. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. One of the complications of the structure Egan has chosen is that one never knows which character will feature in the next story, or which character we will have the pleasure of revisiting later in the book. Some of the stories focused on characters I would otherwise have thought of as 'minor', and I was disappointed, then, at the end, to find that other characters who I would have considered to be significant in the overall plot never re-occurred. For example (spoiler alert!), whatever happened to Alice, the girl Bennie so loved who Scotty ended up marrying? And they were never tipped to be major characters, but the point of time was so powerful that I really wanted to know whether those two delinquent musicians to whom Scotty handed Bennie's card on the pier ever followed up and called Bennie, whether the dude ended up being the great musician his girlfriend claimed he was, whether they made it big. And I was sad to hear Bennie, late in life, talk about Sasha as having 'sticky fingers', something for which he ended up having to fire her. I never anticipated that ending to their friendship, which at times seemed like so much more than mere friendship, and it was strange having that unlikely fact handed to me as an aside in an unrelated conversation that took place years after the event.

However, I do understand that Egan's challenge was to write about time and its effect on people and their lives. This was very successfully achieved through the structure she chose, and would have been difficult to pull off had goon squad been written in customary novel-form.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. As much as I enjoyed a visit from the goon squad, I am left with a keen desire to know whether that strong voice I loved at the beginning of the book is able to be sustained through a proper novel - goon squad didn't provide me with the answer. I want to read Egan's earlier books, three of which are actual novels, to find out whether my suspicion that she belongs in my basket of favourites is justified.

Pros: Wonderful writing, intriguing characters, thoughtful themes.

Cons: As discussed above, I simply prefer a novel to a collection of short stories, and the fact that this was written in such an unusual way meant that I felt I missed out on some material that might otherwise have been included. Also, to be truly cynical, there is a touch of self-conscious try-hardedness (not a word!) here - it's a good way to win a prize, isn't it? To sit down and show you can write successfully in many different voices, to show off one's skills  by convincingly writing from both male and female perspectives, as a youth as well as a senior, in traditional formats as well as in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. I don't like feeling played, and there is a little bit of that going on here, even though Egan pulls this all off effortlessly.

Paul Harding - Tinkers

I have so much to say about this book, yet I must admit that my appreciation of it started off oh-so-slowly. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - not my favourite prize. I know it sounds incredibly snooty to say this (indeed, to 'have' a favourite literary prize at all), but my favourite literary prize is the Man Booker - only because I almost always love the books that win it. I equate the Pulitzer, for some reason, with dry, lofty writing - although I have just looked up a list of past winners and now see that this is completely unfounded: I love Jhumpa Lahiri and Annie Proulx and Carol Shields and Barbara Kingsolver and Geoffrey Eugenides and Junot Diaz and have heard wonderful things about Jennifer Egan, so I have no idea what I was thinking. So maybe, actually, it's because of my recent reading of Steve Hely's cynical take on literary writing that when I started reading this book it was hard for me to absorb the beauty of the language without feeling like it was all a bit too much, a bit try-hard.

Boy did that change.

Tinkers is our bookclub pick for this month, and although I will be away traveling when the Bibliofillies meet, I wanted to participate by at least reading the book, so I soldiered on.

Having reached the end, the words I now want to use to describe Harding's writing are the same words everybody else has already used - lyrical, eligiac, nostalgic. Beautiful. It did not surprise me to learn that Harding is also a musician - you can feel it in the rhythm of his language. It just took me a while to sink into the music of his writing and truly appreciate what I was hearing.

George Washington Crosby, a repairer of clocks, lies dying in the house that he built, surrounded by wife, sisters, children and grandchildren. The unusual nature of the narrative that is to follow is signified by the first line:

"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died."

The short novel that ensues is a meandering exploration of last thoughts and memories, stories layered within stories, lives overlapping lives and time folding in on itself so that one is left, finally, with indelible impressions of the transient beauty of both life and death, and of the importance of family.

Much of the core of the novel is dedicated to the story of George's father, Howard, told interchangeably in third person and first person. Howard is a peddler of wares, a salesman of oddities who wheels his wagon from town to town, through wood and vale. He is also an epileptic, in an age when this is not well understood or accepted. Certain unconnected moments in Howard's itinerant life are described in detail, and it is these that for me formed the heart of the story: his annual interactions with a silent hermit who, one year, needs his tooth pulled, and who gifts Howard before his death with a signed first edition of The Scarlet Letter, thereby confirming his onetime friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; the time he reluctantly set out to rescue George and return him home, when George had run away in shock as a young boy after witnessing one of his father's fits; the moment his (Howard's) father, suffering from an ailment of the mind that is described as a ghostly fading away of himself (Altzheimer's?), is removed forever from the family by men clad in black, and which Howard, as a boy, responds to by running into the woods attempting to find the teeth of his father hidden in an ear of corn, the hair of his father in the foliage, eventually sinking into a silt-filled pond and sitting like this, with only his head above water, for a whole night, during which he believes he sees the native American Old Sabbatis sitting similarly submerged, a still head floating on the water across from him, still save for the moment when a whole trout jumps out of the water and into the open mouth of Old Sabbatis. The tales are interwoven like squares on a patchwork quilt, and some take on the nature of fable, so one is not sure, for example, about the veracity of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, until George, 24 hours from his death, remembers he must tell his family about the signed first edition hidden in a safety deposit box.

I warmed to Howard and, through him, to George, and the reason this book resonated for me, and will continue to resonate long after the reading of it, is that this portrayal of death is as uplifting, somehow, as it is real. I cried when I finished the last page, but not from sadness, and it is hard to explain exactly why or what made me cry. There is a warmth and a relief, I suppose, in the knowledge that life continues in this winding fashion, that through us other lives continue, that through others, our lives will continue, and that the significance of a son to his father and a father to his son is not diminished by age or distance or by death.

At the end of his life George becomes aware of a person in the room with him, when he wakes (or believes he wakes) in the middle of the night. The person is familiar but he cannot identify whether the person is male or female, friend or family. The person, I believe is us, or God, or maybe the point is that God - what we think of as God - is in us, because:

"...the person radiated a sense of possessing hundreds of years, but as a simultaneity: The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once."

The person says:

"I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you."

It is, to me, as though we are physically represented in the story, here - that we are that person, at George's bedside, that by reading this book and understanding his thoughts and the reflections of time upon time, of George and Howard and Howard's father - three generations of men in the same family - we understand that we are both our literal age but that we are also surrounded by a near century of years: not just the century of the lives George brings to us, but the century of those actually around us, and we thank George for the gift of recognition, that this is what is possible in life. We thank Harding for that gift.

A profoundly moving book.

Favourite passages:

There are too many to list, but here are a few moments to remember.

Harding's description of what it feels like to have an epileptic fit is the most memorable I have read since Dostoyevsky - it makes me wonder whether he has personal experience of epilepsy.

"There was also the ring in Howard Crosby's ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug humself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy."

Those readers who have difficulty with the non-linear nature of the narrative need look no further than the pages of the book itself to find an explanation for why it is written so:

"George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment."

The notion (which should be depressing but somehow isn't, here) that all of us are living on borrowed time, fading even as we live:

"So there is my son, already fading. The thought frightened him. The thought frightened him because as soon as it came to him, he knew that it was true. He understood suddenly that even though his son knelt in front of him, familiar, mundane, he was already fading away, receding. His son was fading away before his eyes and that fact was inevitable, even though Howard understood, too, that the fading was yet to begin in any actual sense, that at that moment he and his son the father standing in the dimness, the son kneeling and partly obscured by the charred door, were still only heading, not yet arrived, toward the point where the fading would begin."

Overall assessment: Five out of Five.

Notes:

• I read this as an e-book. Discussion will come, on this blog, about the merits of e-books versus hard copy and all that goes with that debate, but for now: I wish I had read this in paper form. I want a beautiful little hardback version to call my own. There were so many passages I wanted to re-visit, and many times when I wanted to flip back to an earlier section of the book. Also, my feeling generally is that e-books are wonderful for reading genre fiction, but any book of tremendous literary merit - any book requiring some concentration and effort in the reading - is enhanced by a paper format. I think I would have appreciated the language sooner had I been reading paper. And I believe there is a tendency, when reading an e-book, to speed up one's reading - I found myself needing to consciously slow down, go back, read the last sentence again but slower, to take it in properly rather than to simply move past it. Having said all of that, the automatic highlight function of the Kindle app is great, and looking at a single page to see all of one's highlighted passages at the end makes reviewing far easier. Perhaps for a book like this it is in fact worth owning both versions, electronic and paper - what a boon for the publishing industry if this was the conclusion of many readers!

• You have probably all heard this story, but it's a good one and worth repeating. Paul Harding approached many publishers for many years with his manuscript and was repeatedly rejected out of hand. Finally, after Tinkers suffered three years languishing in a desk drawer, a small publisher, the Bellevue Literary Press, agreed to publish the novel. When it was printed it made so little noise that the New York Times failed to review it. And then it won the Pulitzer. Wow. An inspiring story indeed for any aspiring / struggling writer.