My Year of Reading Women hits the halfway point. Time to think! About Agency! Female Characters! Power! Feminism! And much more!

Time for some thinking! Just about halfway through this “Year of Reading Women,” let’s take a step back. Anything learned thus far? Observations? Surprises? Insights? None of the above?

First of all, although this is not at all fair to each individual book (THEY didn’t ask to be included in this dumb project), I have to take a look at this group of work through a somewhat “feminist” lens. It is, after all, why I’m doing the project. What’s a “feminist lens” I hear you ask? Well, for my idiotic purposes let’s just say it’s to examine how these books portray female characters, and the extent to which those characters have agency.

What’s interesting throughout all these books is the relative paucity of female agency. Not that a female novelist writing a novel has to use that space as an opportunity for wish-fulfillment or to redress social wrongs, but I remain just a teeny bit surprised at how, well, male-dominated and/or male-validated a lot of these books are.

The eponymous Olive Kitteridge (from Olive Kitteridge natch) and Hanna Heath from People of the Book are probably the two most independent, powerful “heroines” (term used very loosely) I’ve encountered. Although Olive relies more on her husband and son than perhaps she would like to admit. Hanna Heath, for her part, is a single women, an accomplished PhD, and renowned expert in books who travels the globe taking on high-profile projects. She also has a somewhat progressive sexual attitude that puts her more or less on equal footing with a couple different men she encounters romantically. This kind of independence and accomplishment for a female character really stands out in this crowd of characters across all these books. That I’m accidentally making her sound like James Bond is a testament to how lackluster so many of the other female characters have been when it comes to independence and agency.

I suppose that Amy Dunne from Gone Girl [SPOILER ALERT] should also probably be counted as independent and powerful, even if she’s also a legitimate and terrifying psychopath. And I suppose the characters in Arcadia are fairly balanced on the whole, though the book is dominated by its male protagonist, and features a commune/cult leader-type (male, obv) who uses his position of authority to take sexual advantage of much younger girls.

But many of these books -- most recently and notably in The Flamethrowers -- tend to be male-validated if not actually male-dominated...to a surprising degree! The protagonist and narrator of 2/3rds of The Flamethrowers we know only as “Reno” -- that’s where she’s from, not her actual name. And her entree into the heady world of avant-garde art comes only as a result of her attractiveness and the (sexual, imbalanced) relationships she forges with older, more powerful, more successful men. She’s not utterly without agency, but she’s also not using these men in the same way that they are using her. Perhaps (Probably?) this is a legitimate and accurate portrayal of the 1970s New York art scene, but it doesn’t paint women in the best (or most powerful) light; most of the relationships between women center only around who’s sleeping with whom at any given time. In the sexual merry-go-round that occupies all the characters in the book, it’s the women who are the painted horses and the men who are making the decisions, moving from seat to seat (as it were?). The women powerlessly cycle up and down, weathering the vicissitudes of time, while the men take what they want when they desire it. Partially this female powerlessness IS the point of the novel -- the story is a kind of bildungsroman for Reno, who gets swept up in many different forces beyond her control -- but it’s still a pretty grim portrayal, not celebrating the sexist world of art, but also not acknowledging much in the way of female power, or even foreshadowing much in the way of female power. That is, I didn’t get the impression that Reno was on her way to assuming all sorts of agency in her own life as a result of the events of the book.

Maybe worst (saddest?) is Ava in Swamplandia! who seems like a real Huck Finn-esque girl, spunky and self-reliant and willing to take tricky matters into her own hands. Until [SPOILER ALERT] the narrative lens twists and what was once a plucky rescue mission becomes reframed as an abduction complete with terrifying preadolescent sexual violence. Of course, Ava remains spirited and independent -- external forces violently taking advantage of her doesn’t take that away from her -- but she is essentially punished in the novel for having an innocent and adventurous spirit.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell featured virtually no female characters of any importance, and those that were perhaps most important were unalloyed damsels-in-distress. In The Accidental Tourist, the world of the book essentially pivots around the decisions of one man. He’s the decider, nobody else. The Interestings, like Arcadia, has nuanced and balanced characters. I’d still argue there’s a general lack of female power in the book, although it probably does the best job of all these books by allowing a certain measure of female power to exist, allowing women to make their own choices, and punishing purveyors of sexual violence.

But. As I’ve already mentioned, this project is just an exercise in reading books written by women, not finding books by women that have a particular type of female protagonist. Or immersing myself in literature with a specific feminist agenda. So this is an unfair analysis for sure, which is why I guess I should say that it isn’t even analysis. It’s just one particular man’s impressions based on one particular way of looking at these books at one particular time. I’m sure you could just as easily mount a defense of “The Interestings” as a brilliant look at complex female relationships and the way women cannily navigate through a male-dominated world.

In fact, I suspect that these books really suffer from nothing other than “realism” in portraying their female characters. In some ways this reminds me of the recent little flap over Claire Messud being asked whether the narrator of her most recent novel is likeable enough. Just as Messud argues that “likeability” isn’t the point of her characterization, so too is it undoubtedly a function of my own limited imagination to assume that female authors would imbue their characters with more “agency” than a male author might. Yet I confess to feeling just a slight bit of surprise that I have not encountered more “powerful” female characters in this random little group of novels by women.

Books Thus Far

The Flamethrowers

People of the Book

Linda Ronstadt

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

The Interestings

Swamplandia!

Arcadia

Gone Girl

The Accidental Tourist

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Olive Kitteridge

Feel free to follow the progress! Here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/110449-martin?shelf=yearofreadingwomen
 

Review: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Flamethrowers is an odd book -- artsy with really incredible writing but possibly pointless? I found myself quietly gathered up by understated prose, floating dreamlike across pages and pages until eventually the whole thing was finished and it felt like it had only just begun. Nominally about a young woman who moves to New York City in the 1970s to become an artist, The Flamethrowers is more about mood, social upheaval, avant-garde art, class, sex, and power. Oh, not to mention relationships and capitalism.

It’s a heady book, full of ideas at every turn, yet almost totally plotless. Never one to worry too much about plot, I really enjoyed the almost hypnotic, rhythmic prose, and sharp insights. I even felt like most of the characters were ciphers, yet in context it totally worked! The words and actions were all believable in the heightened milieu of egotistical artists and highfalutin theorists, even if we don’t ever get much specific information about any of the characters. As an example, we never even learn the name of the protagonist who narrates 3/4ths of the book -- she’s known simply as “Reno” -- as in Reno, Nevada, where she’s from. But, though it sounds weird to say, the book wasn’t really about character OR plot.

What WAS it about? I guess I don’t really know. It definitely had a whole lot of ideas, many of which felt relevant to our current time and climate, without any explicit parallels ever getting drawn. More than anything, I suppose, it simply EVOKED...moods, feelings, times (the ‘70s) and places (New York City, Rome, Italy). In this way its formless form perfectly fit the gonzo, cerebral subject matter. Mostly though, the writing was so effortless, so beautifully crafted, that it alone was worth the price of admission.

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Review: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this trip backwards through time with the "Sarajevo Haggadah" -- a real book whose history Geraldine Brooks has fictionalized in "People of the Book." With a contemporary book scholar as our through-line and guide, various tiny clues held within the book flash us backwards through time where self-contained chapters illuminate each element. What held me back from loving the book were the somewhat thinly drawn characters, most of which we don't end up spending much time with, thanks to the high-concept and elaborate structure of the book.

More than any narrative or character, "People of the Book" is really about the inestimable value of books and the people who love and care for them. Indeed, Brooks dedicates her novel to "the librarians" -- but for me, the high concept wore a bit thin after awhile (back and forth, back and forth, item->explanation, item->explanation) and I didn't have any characters to cling to that I was fascinated by or particularly invested in.

At the same time, the different historical periods we visit as we follow the Haggadah back through time are all fascinating. It's always illuminating to put the ethnic/religious/cultural tensions we experience in the current day into a (much) larger historical context. And at the end of the day, this is a fun, slightly nerdy read that elevates the love of books to something primal, critical, essential. I love getting to wallow in that fetishistic passion for books, especially printed text.

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Review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good friend of mine recommended this book to me, going so far as to pull my magnetic "to do" list off my refrigerator and scrawling the title and author's name across my list of badly-needed groceries. This was a recommendation of unexpected, unusual force. My wife read it first, wept at the conclusion, and told me it had taken her awhile to get into it, but she really enjoyed it in the end. This is all to say that I came to this book with overly heightened expectations. Further, it's always tough on whatever book you read directly AFTER something you really loved.

So it is with all this preamble that I offer my groundbreaking literary analysis on We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: meh. I liked it OK. The twisty, turny, time-bending story of a different family and the trauma that tears them apart and marks them for life, I found the book more about ideas than people. And the ideas are good ideas, fine ideas, interesting ideas -- ideas about memory and trauma and humanity and family and science and knowledge and love. It's just that, aside from the main character and (unreliable!) narrator Rosemarie, nobody really convinced me. Nobody jumped off the text and reminded me of real life.

The whole novel felt like a phantasmagorical noir where there's no mystery (except the mystery of memory!?), full of seemingly important objects that are either all red herrings or all symbols of something I didn't understand, and characters who cruise in and out of the narrative without any clear objective. (If you're looking for examples, I will simply list with no spoiler alert required: the wrong suitcase?, Madam Dafarge?, Harlow?, the building manager?.) It just felt like a daisy chain where the daisies are all different flowers and aren't even really tied together.

I have to add that the "Unreliable Narrator" doesn't grip me or shock me anymore. We get it: everything's subjective. Anything else you'd like to add? Also, the "Slipperiness of Memory" as an overriding theme feels like well-trod ground; it's a common enough theme that you've really got to hit it out of the park for me to be onboard. As we all get used to big reversals and giant reveals, it's increasingly dangerous to hang any literary hats on that sort of thing. I feel like, yeah, I expect this narrator to be unreliable and I expect that the things being told to me will get reversed/twisted at some point over the course of this novel. So the art has got to be not in the reversal itself, but in WHAT the reveal tells us as readers. Does it illuminate the story or character in a radically new way? Change our understandings fundamentally but still coherently? Or does it simply reinforce what we already believe? In the case of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, too many of those reveals don't reveal enough. And since we're fully aware of the unreliability of the narration, we're just waiting for reversals from the first anyway.

Still, the story is tragic enough and oddly compelling enough and well told enough that I made it all the way through without incident or compulsion to abandon ship. The thematic material -- all the capital i, Ideas -- offered plenty of grist for the mental mill. But I didn't attach emotionally to any of the characters the way my wife did, and I probably knew too much to be carried along on a blind roller-coaster ride the way my friend was. Overall, I enjoyed the book but it simply didn't do anything special for me.

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Review: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just about as close to perfect as a book can get, for me. A big cast of finely crafted characters, a sweeping swath of time, big themes captured in small human scenes. "The Interestings" follows a group of friends who meet at a summer camp for the arts in the early 70s through the next four decades. Lovely to read from beginning to end, there's not much more to say.

I'd call "The Interestings" Franzen-esque as a compliment, but Wolitzer's humor doesn't work as well as Franzen, while her characters and relationships feel much more real. Less satire, more social. So to call this book Franzen-esque would probably be a disservice to both. But I'd argue that the elevation of Jonathan Franzen to "Great American Novelist" and the attendant controversy (see any op-ed Jennifer Wiener has ever written) surrounding HIM, has actually allowed THIS type of relatively plotless, character-driven, "reflection of our current times" kind of novel to be considered a possible Great American Novel. There's no leaden, thorny philosophical issues being overtly debated here, no characters feel like authorial stand-ins, no post-modern tricks, nothing heavy-handed -- it couldn't be easier or more pleasurable to read; in these ways I feel like it diverges from what might previously have been the "Type" of novel that gets consideration as a "Great American Novel" status, but this more egalitarian era (The Franzera?), it seems to be getting more weight and consideration. I couldn't support this shift more!

The way Wolitzer manipulates time in this novel -- she covers 40-or-so years -- is really unbelievable. The rippling way she moves the narrative ribbon from the "present day" back into the past and then forward again -- a trick that I often find off-putting -- was as elegant as anything I've read. There's a particular pleasure I feel as a reader when everything is so carefully, deftly, masterfully constructed that structure becomes invisible, and you're carried along as if on a white water raft. The water, just like this book, never seems to exert any energy, you're simply propelled unstoppably, joyously onward.

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Embracing Weirdness: What I Missed in Swamplandia! (Or Did I?)

After thoroughly not enjoying Swamplandia! I went searching the internet to help understand why so many people were totally on board with this acclaimed book that I didn't like at all.

It's clear Karen Russell is phenomenally talented, first of all. Nobody that gets a major work of fiction published in the first place is a hack. (No, not even Dan Brown.) Further, nobody that gets recommended for the freaking Pulitzer Prize is without an abundance of talent. (We can happily exclude poor Dan Brown from that particular list!) So it's not about talent, it's just about personal preference. And I love figuring out why my personal preference hasn't, in this case, lined up with what seems to be the General Critical Consensus ("GCC").

This interview with Karen Russell from my favorite site, The Millions, gave me a lot of important context. It's instructive to hear how inspired she was by George Saunders, another writer I like but that I know other people loveloveLOVE. I can see how she's inspired by Saunders' zaniness. But three key differences between George Saunders and Russell:

1) Saunders is really really funny, like hilariously funny, and

2) Saunders has the gift of making you care deeply almost instantly, and lastly

3) Saunders is generally working in allegory.

I never felt emotionally connected to the characters in Swamplandia, and I never felt like it was all that funny. It was also too literal; as far as I can tell it was meant to take place on Earth, in the present day. Saunders tends to operate in the future or some cracked-mirror version of Earth. If Swamplandia! was meant to be in an alternate version of our planet that was not at all clear to me. There were some amusing moments and lines, but mostly I would describe it as "zany" or "kooky" or "looney" rather than "Funny." Yet it makes sense to me that Russell sees this book as Saunders-esque. It helps me get what kind of a tone and mood she was going for. Obviously some people feel she succeeded; that's great.

Another interview with The Rumpus that she gave when her most recent work came out gives some further insight. The key here is her love of short stories: 

You can really come at some of the same themes and preoccupations from different angles, sort of like turning the facets of a little jewel. And then you can also hop bodies and continents, so there’s sort of this pinwheeling freedom, but there’s also this way you can maybe achieve a composite portrait of something that’s different than what you can do with a novel. You can occupy these really different points of view from story to story.

But this sounds like exactly what was going on in Swamplandia -- taking different qualities and moods and tones and characters and combining them, no matter how discordant. Perhaps that kind of stylistic hybrid is really better suited for a short story collection where each piece can stand apart? Or maybe I just parochially like my fiction slightly more straightforward, my genres less commingled?

What's clear is that for a lot of people this book really worked -- people responded to the humor and wild shifts and nuttiness. I always hate to think I missed something -- some key plot point or character moment -- that would part the clouds and change my mind in a burst of sunlight. But in this case I think it's purely just a matter of taste and preference. Exactly what I didn't like was precisely what a lot of people loved. Weird! But good to know! To each their own!

Review: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book didn't do it for me. I probably should have abandoned ship halfway through, when I stopped to read not one, but two, other books. Instead, I came dutifully trudging back to deliver the coup de grace (to myself!).

So I'm not sure what all the buzz was about here. (NOW I understand (1/3rd of) the Pulitzer debacle!) I found almost no relation to actual human life in the pages of this book. I found almost no character or situation I could relate to or even imagine understanding. I found the plotting shoddy and the tone disjointed. Everything felt like some kind of confusing mix up -- like Paul Thomas Anderson somehow found himself directing an episode of Friends, with all the stars replaced by the cast of The Hobbit. Nothing about it made any sense whatsoever.

Now, there were certainly some lovely, elegiac passages of writing; some of the descriptions of grief and heartbreak really resonated. But that was it. Aside from those few (and far between) pages of beauty, any semblance of truth faded and was replaced by the Marx Brothers in a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Maybe for some of the people who loved this book it is exactly that kind of lunatic high-wire act that was appealing. Certainly if there are points to be awarded for unapologetic, aggressive, untethered weirdness, Karen Russell deserves all those points. Consider those points to be granted. Unfortunately, the rest of the scoreboard was disappointingly empty for me.

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Review: Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Arcadia by Lauren Groff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I completely enjoyed this book without ever really loving it. Set in a late-'60s/early-'70s commune in upstate New York, the novel follows Bit Stone, whose birth coincides with the founding of the commune; the story spans the course of many decades until Bit's late middle age in the somewhat near future. The unique subject matter and the real-feeling characters are top-notch. I also loved the vast swath of time Groff covers, showing the vast range of people and emotion from the inception of the commune through its life and (spoiler alert?) eventual dispersal (I can't imagine that's a spoiler in a realistic novel about a hippie commune, but I'll play it safe). I loved the thematic arguments throughout about how and why we humans live together, and might live together more peacefully, more happily, more sustainably. Or not, as the case may be.

Just two complaints that kept me from really loving this book:
1) the writing was slightly too stylized for me to love. It was just trying too hard to be super-delicate, gossamer, elegant, natural. Sometimes it succeeded and worked to lovely effect, sometimes it was just affected. Stylized writing is tough to pull off under the best of circumstances, and I can't imagine how especially tough it would be to pull off for 300 pages. That I enjoyed the writing at all is testament to great skill, but I can't pretend that it didn't aggravate me at intervals.

2) The final sections of the book reminded me a ton of the later portions of Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad." As in that book, Groff takes us into the realistic semi-near future, a daring act which paid off hugely in "Goon Squad" but here feels (again) like it's just trying slightly too hard. The contrasts Groff intends to underscore in the "near-future" ending of the book have already been made, and more subtly, earlier in the text. It doesn't help that the incidents of the final section of the book all feel like faits accomplis, and there is no mystery, tension, or wonder to keep the pages turning. While it's not a "plotty" book, enough happens and the character arcs are so compelling that the pages keep turning...up until the final section. The emotional climax of the book comes sooner, I think, than Groff intended.

Although if I'm being honest with myself, I am probably looking for more nits to pick than I would otherwise, since this book really resonated on uncomfortable levels for me, especially as a semi-recent father; in an interview at the end of the book, Groff herself talks about how the novel grew out of her conflicted feelings of conceiving and delivering a child into a troubled world. I certainly understand her point of view and connect with those uncertain feelings, maybe too much for my liking.

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Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


By now (August of 2013) the hype around this book has reached such lunatic heights that you can't read it with a completely open mind. But I think I came pretty close, knowing nothing whatsoever about the plot or twists, only aware of its popularity and my various friends' reactions to the end (ranging from "standing ovation" to "rage").

While probably needing no introduction, Gone Girl is a chilly thriller that centers around a wife's disappearance on her fifth anniversary and the twisting, turning weeks and months that follow. It's a bit mystery, a bit thriller, and a lot psychological horror.

Way darker and much more dismal than I anticipated, it's still a page-turner that very much keeps you guessing, even as each specific section goes on a bit too long -- especially the first section, which I would argue ultimately reached the level of "plodding." I understand the device of establishing a straightforward narrative before twisting it, but the establishment went on too long and was actually too straightforward. Obviously the twists and turns (when they came) were great, but the first section was almost a dull standalone thriller unto itself. And you never want to use the words "plodding" or "boring" to describe even a section (or a page!) of your breathless summer thriller.

Overall, it's not the kind of book that's particularly up my alley -- if I'm going to read a fun summery book I'm probably looking for more fun & crackle & sparkle (think Elmore Leonard) than the slow, dreary closing of a heinous vise. Less horror, more thrill. I'm ideally looking for: one car chase, maybe one gun fight, and three decent one-liners. Probably a tiny bit of triumph even in defeat. This felt more like an awful, yet compelling, CNN special on the most toxic, irredeemable people of all time. I can't blame Gone Girl for not being an Elmore Leonard book, I just happen to prefer reading a breezier kind of summer read.

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Review: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book that makes me glad to be undertaking this "Year of Reading Women" project. In our now-centric culture, where the laws of hype and marketing would have us believe the Next Thing is always the Best Thing Ever (corollary: there's always a New Next Thing), there's rarely a time when I feel compelled to look backwards to a work of fiction from 1985. Even an acclaimed bestseller that got made into a movie. In some ways reading The Accidental Tourist in 2013 is a small metaphor about the pleasures and benefits of taking a break from sprinting endlessly forward, allowing a brief moment to reflect back a bit.

Despite the fame of this book (& attendant movie) I knew literally nothing about it. Same for Anne Tyler, who I've obviously heard of, but who I'd never read, or formed any kind of opinion about. Turns out she's exactly the kind of author I'm happy to have finally read, at the recommendation of a friend who saw my "YoRW" project.

"The Accidental Tourist" tells the story of Macon Leary, a staid forty-something travel writer living in Baltimore whose marriage is falling apart following a tragedy. Saying anything further than that about the plot or the characters would be a disservice to the book, I think. I enjoyed going into the novel with zero expectations. Suffice it to say that all the characters are neatly and expertly drawn, in the wonderful space in between comedy and tragedy. Not quite over-the-top enough to be parody, but not so sad and serious that things fall completely into woe.

I enjoyed this book through and through; it features great writing full of pathos; deep emotion; deft humor and evocative characterizations. I thank Katherine Gotsick for the suggestion and look forward to more Anne Tyler, within or without specific reading projects!


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(The Lack of) Women in "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell"

I'd suggest that anyone doing a blind-reading test would have no idea whether this book was written by a man or a woman. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most people would assume it was written by a man, given that nearly all the major characters are men. As the title may suggest, there were, in fact, no female lead characters in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  Indeed, author Susanna Clarke is quoted as saying:

I deliberately kept women to the domestic sphere in the interests of authenticity ... it was important that real and alternate history appeared to have converged. This meant that I needed to write the women and the servants, as far as possible, as they would have been written in a 19th-century novel.

Now, that quote is according to wikipedia -- so who knows about the accuracy (the citation is behind some kind of paywall), but regardless of authenticity, the quote is accurate. The female characters in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell were for the most part confined to the domestic sphere, and even moreso, were generally "damsels in distress" and/or "keeping the home fires burning." This is not to say that they were not fully formed characters or realistic humans with great strength, but only that they had little in the way of "agency" and their lives were largely dictated by powerful men. Realistic to the time period (the beginning of the 19th Century), but also intriguing to me through the lens of a year of reading women authors.

At the same time, part of the purpose of reading women authors for a year is to dispel the myths that there are perceptible differences. There are certainly none to be found here. Although this book may be a poor test case, since in everything from marketing to cover design, there seem to be none of the outward marks of the gender-based double standard. The cover design is iconic and bold without any stereotypically gendered colors, and features big text across the front cover (I've read that a big typeface cover design announces that "this book is an event").

So perhaps it's some food for thought that this book -- without any particularly prominent female characters or overt feminist themes, and with its doorstop size -- received the kind of marketing, buzz, and ancillary design that may more typically mark a big, bold debut novel by a man. I'd be curious if the leads were Jessica Strange and Ms Norrell how the reception, marketing, and popularity might have changed.

The fact remains, though, that this excellent work primarily about men and magic got a big push from a major publisher and was a big hit. And it just so happened it was written by a woman. Seems like a win-win to me.

Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a behemoth, people. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages, a thickness well over shoulder-bag-acceptable measurements, and a weight I estimate to be roughly equal to that of my 20-month-old daughter (who is admittedly only in the 25th percentile of her age group for weight), you have got to really be into this one to lug it around and haul it out on a commuter train. After more than a month of reading I had succumbed to some kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome and couldn't ever remember reading a normal-sized novel.

The point is, for all the hassle it entails, an epic like this better deliver the goods. Fortunately, it's a pleasure to read, through and through. Only perhaps twice did I feel impatient and wish that the damn thing would just get on with it already. (And I am an admittedly antsy reader, with a wandering eye, easily drawn over to a shelf of unread books.)

Set in a slightly askew version of England towards the start of the 19th century, the novel details the efforts of two very different magicians working to bring magic back into practice. As you might be able to imagine (or might not, I don't know!), the action takes place over the span of more than a decade and aside from the titular magicians, features a sturdy cast of well-drawn supporting characters. Realistically, one needs a vast swath of time and a dense cast of characters to keep any engine purring over the course of 1000+pgs.

I am also not enough of a book-nerd or a fantasy-fetishist that I want to study the scale of maps of fictional lands, nor am I compelled to have to memorize a set of impenetrable genealogical charts, nor am I filled with a pressing need to learn elvish. Yet, credit where it's due, Susanna Clarke succeeds in crafting so richly detailed a World that halfway through this book I googled "John Uskglass" to determine if he was a real historical figure, or at least a real character in folk-legend. (Pure invention, for the record.) But that kind of total immersion in a fictional world is rare for me, and supremely satisfying.

The reality with which Clarke grounds her fantasy makes the difference; you feel as if this is almost a comedy-of-manners or an adventure novel, and the existence of magic is basically commonplace. It's ALMOST not so much a fantasy novel as it is an adventure-romance set in a world almost exactly like our own, just with that one tiny difference. Think: Bronte meets Austen, twisted through the lookingglass just slightly.

It takes a pretty masterful work to engage my fractured attention span over such a prohibitive length. Clarke fills Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with enough incident, mystery, tension, character, and humor that this is one of those rare epics that's actually FUN to read from beginning to end. (Plus, now I can cap my next three books at 300pgs, rip through them at light-speed, and not have a twinge of guilt about it!)

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The Inspiration

The second book I’m officially reading in my Year of Reading Women (YORW, cool?) is a 1000-page behemoth -- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This means I will post my next review sometime right before the YORW comes to an end, so in the meantime I thought I should offer up some of the links and thinks that inspired this project in the first place.  

The big story that got me thinking about the systemic privilege male authors seem to enjoy was the “#Franzenfreude” dustup that took place when Jonathan Franzen published his most recent novel, Freedom. For the record, Franzen (or J.Franz as I call him) is one of my absolute favorite writers, and I naturally devoured and loved Freedom.

And I admit that when I first started reading the various links -- checking out the twitteruckus and the various blarguments -- I was defensive for my main man, J.Franz, who seemed to have become the target of feminist ire for no other reason than that he was an awesome writer who wrote a great book which was also popular. That the pot was being stirred by two very popular female writers who I think of (rightly or wrongly - debate me!) as belonging to the cultural second tier made the whole thing smack of jealousy to me. But once my initial defensiveness passed, it became clear that the point wasn’t Franzen or Freedom, but rather the larger marketing machine(s) and media establishment(s), systematically promoting books by men over similar (equal?) books by women. 

Linda Holmes, the primary author of the Monkey See NPR pop-culture blog is both smart and really good at making larger, more interesting points from a mess of pop culture stupidity. Her post on the subject was ground zero for me.

In this related NPR piece, Jennifer Weiner makes an extremely compelling point:

"It's just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families," Weiner says. "And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America."

That point really resonates with me; I can see that as being a genuine unrecognized bias in myself. (But once recognized it's no longer unrecognized! Victory!) I like books about families, but books about families written by women probably tend feel like chick lit.  In this regard -- as I wrote in the first post on this blog -- I’m a sucker for marketing, and if a book has a pastel color scheme, I’m moving on. Maureen Johnson inspired a cool art experiment that underscores just how important the cover of a book is, and how easy it is to be manipulated.

And lastly, Meg Wolitzer wrote a great piece in the New York Times that says everything I’m trying to say here, only better.

At any rate, my little project obviously isn’t going to make any difference whatsoever in the larger cultural conversation about gender bias in literature, but I do think it’s important for people that care about this kind of issue (men and women alike) to take a step back and examine their biases. To think about some of the things (like the color and design of a book cover) that are seemingly innocent, but also have deeper, more insidious resonances. As Linda Holmes (generally) says, we may not have answers at this point, but the questions are fair...and important to ask.

Review: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.

-- from "Why We Should Read Literature"

This is a phenomenal description of how I felt reading Olive Kitteridge. It was immersive and slow, while being at the same time a page-turner that I never wanted to finish. I would get to the end of a chapter and simply sit and think and feel, reflect and digest. By the end of the book I DID feel like I was in some kind of relationship with Elizabeth Strout and Olive Kitteridge. It's a delicate balance to manage to be both terribly sad and somehow life-affirming at the same time, but this book walks that tightrope flawlessly.

This is a leisurely-paced novel in stories, set in a single Maine town, connected by the intriguing character of Olive Kitteridge, who knows when to take center stage and, crucially, when to step back and let other characters have their moments to shine. All the characters were finely drawn and fully human, but the direct and indirect exploration of Olive is the real draw. And even though it's generally a laid-back read, it's also full of incident and action, both external and internal.

I couldn't imagine a better way to kick off my Year of Reading Women. This was one of the most textured, nuanced, subtle, and beautiful books I've read in ages. And I don't mean those descriptors to be stereotypically "feminine" at all. This may be a "delicate" book on a "small scale," (geographically) but is also a book that encompasses vast amounts of human emotion and moved me much more than a book like Blood Meridian that may be more "sweeping" or "epic" or "muscular" (or whatever stereotypically masculine adjectives you could throw at it).

I truly enjoyed this book from beginning to end and can't recommend it enough. The Year of Reading Women begins with a (lyrical) bang!


[Have a good book- or author-recommendation for The Year of Reading Women? Leave a comment or tweet @MartinIWilson anytime.]

View all my reviews

Already on the shelves...the "To Read" list begins!

Here's the list of books by women that are already sitting on my shelf, previously collected, just waiting to be read this year:

• Once Upon a River - Bonnie Jo Campbell
• Strange Medicine - Louise Erdrich
• The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Borrower - Rebecca Makkai
• The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
• Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall
• Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
• Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith

A good range of reads, and I have a whole bunch more in mind that I'm on the lookout for; good thing this weekend is the Printers Row Lit Fest!

Any and all recommendations are appreciated... Leave a comment or tweet to @MartinIWilson

A Year of Reading Women: Introduction and Thesis

Out of the 280 books I've (perhaps generously) marked as "read" on Goodreads, 48 were written by women. (Seven were written by the same woman! (Ooh, can you guess which seven? I'll buy you a butterbeer if you get it...! hahahahahaZZZZZZZZ)) Thanks to math, I can confidently say that about 17% of the books I've read more-or-less recently have been written by women. Only 17%?? Yikes. 83% of my books were written by men? Last I checked, women were somewhere around 50% of the human population, so something seems off here.

The gender-based double standards, the marketing differences, and the systemic biases especially as they relate to "literary fiction" get discussed in my household with some frequency. And I was a little startled by that 17% number. I'm a sucker for marketing and a fool for buzz, but little did I know both were tricking me into reading only male authors thanks, it seems, to some sort of lunatic, legacy patriarchy that I didn't invent.

So as the father to an 18-month-old daughter and the husband to a crazed, Lean In-brandishing feminist, I've decided to break my chains and attempt a kind of small-scale "affirmative action" (relax, political weirdos) for female authors. For the next year I will read only books written by women to try and make up for what has obviously been many years of disproportionate neglect. This neglect is obviously due to the aforementioned systemic biases -- as I say, marketing exerts a powerful pull over me -- and not the inherent quality of the books or authors themselves. In fact, part of the point of this whole exercise is basically to prove that I will like and dislike in the same measure while reading exclusively women as I do now, reading mostly men.

Along the way, I may (or may not) update this blog with my reviews, and may (or may not) occasionally supplement those reviews with some thoughts/commentary/reactions. Hell, I may (or may not) get suckered into reading something by some hip young white guy before the year is up just because the marketing is too damn strong to resist. I will also undoubtedly stumble and carelessly say things that I will have to apologize to my wife over. We'll see. But, come what may, I'm looking forward to A Year of Reading Women.

(With apologies to my friend Arnie, from whom I've shamelessly stolen this title and concept.)