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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