As the local hater of the literary canon ’round here I tend to only cover book essays I read that I hate, but I wanted to share with you one I just read that is spot-on:
I got a glimmer of an answer last year as I sat in a board room hashing out the winners for one of the awards for which I am a judge. Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam –” what’s the word? “– bititous.”
I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “ambitious,” what I think is “Nice try. Better luck next time. Keep shooting for the stars!” I think many things, but never among them is the word Congratulations.
But, incredulous, again and again, I watched as we pushed aside works that everyone acknowledged were more finely wrought, were, in fact, competently wrought, for books that had shot high but fallen short. And every time the book that won was a man’s.
“I just want to say,” I said as the meeting closed, “that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it’s disgusting.” (I wasn’t built for the board room.) “But we can’t be doing it because we’re sexist,” an estimable colleague replied huffily. “After all, we’re both men and women here.”
But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.
Yes yes yes. Down with this stupid watchword of “ambition” as a gauge of quality in literature.
For me And Then we Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is the poster-book for this phenomenon. Oooh, he used the first-person plural! Sure, the book has no real point and falls completely flat at the end, but it’s the MUST READ BOOK OF 2008!!!!!! Every review essentially said, “This book doesn’t accomplish what it sets out to, but what a new voice! Woo hoo!”
I’ll second your nomination. And did someone really say “we can’t be sexist because we’re both men and women here?” SRSLY?? Because the mere presence of vaginas in a room automatically cancels out sexism?
@yvanehtnioj: Totally agree. That book was deeply underwhelming and about 200 pages too long. But critics just couldn’t resist anointing Ferris as the next Clever Young Man.
And her comments about why her book- her book which she wrote about what she likes and thinks some people, mainly women, want to read about- doesn’t doesn’t OMG focus on boys! are spectacular…
“I am quietly outraged at how apparently it is against the law to not talk specifically about boys and what they might need/enjoy/prosper from for five seconds.
Because I would like to point out – pointing! Pointing! — that the YA and midlist markets are dominated by women because that is, in the main, where the publishing industry has slotted women. ”
http://www.lizzieskurnick.com/2009/08/14/the-wonderful-preface-to-henry-sugar-one-more/
…this is how I feel about most of the long form stuff by James Joyce. If no one can understand Finnegans Wake, maybe that’s because it sucks, not because it’s genius.
Also The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen is an alum of my school and when I was in freshman year, the theater dept. put on a production of Spring Awakening (the play that the musical was based on) using the translation that he did as his German thesis. SO boring, SO pretentious. Most of the people I know who went couldn’t sit through it. He gave a talk after one of the shows and from what I heard it was all about how awesome he was.
Personally I love “small” books. I love books that are tightly focused and examine individuals rather than ideas. And I find myself vastly, vastly preferring books by women. There are a few individual male authors I enjoy — Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon (whose latest she mentions and I am reading and enjoying a lot) — but in general whenever I go to a bookstore, it’s works by women that I seek out.
I don’t know that I can get with you on Joyce – I do think Finnegan’s Wake is good myself, for reasons other than “ambition,” though.
But Franzen, yes, is a prime example. The Corrections is as narrowly-framed and self-involved as any dysfunctional family chamber piece I’ve ever read, and yet it too gets called “ambitious.” I don’t even know what that means, in context.
I mean, I have an idea about why this is that ties back to a thing I’ve been thinking about children’s literature and how it frames creativity in children but that’s a longer essay I may never write.
I only read contemporary fiction referred to me by those I consider reliable sources. No one has ever recommended Franzen. Although, baraqiel, I would love to skim his adaptation of Frühlings Erwachen. With a bowl of popcorn at my side.
From my little corner in academia, I think there is a lot of truth in what she says. I also wonder if the interest in works that shoot for the stars but fall short results from the fact that they give you a lot to talk about. Studying for my exams, reading books like _Last of the Mohicans_ and _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ irritated me endlessly, but damn did they offer a lot to talk about, and during my exams, I ended up coming back to both of them a lot more than books I found to be spectacularly tight and well-executed (for example, _My Antonia_ and _Revolutionary Road_)
@PhD – I can get a copy for you if you want, I’m pretty sure — he was in the honors program and I think all honors theses are kept on public record.
I agree, a lot of the most ‘ambitious’ books I’ve read are the ones I find lacking in literary quality (*cough* nouveau roman *cough*).
Although as a resident Germanist I’d like to jump in to say that the original Spring Awakening is indeed pretty great, and if the translation was bad, that was entirely Franzen’s fault.
And I do hate when people assume women can’t be misogynistic. I find that many are worse than men because they seem to think themselves exempt…
Wait, but since when do men write books that try for something and fall short, and women write focused books that do what they set out to do?
That seems like a seriously weird assertion to me.
May, you seemed to have missed the point. It’s not that women write focused books that do what they set out to do and men write books that try for something and fall short. It’s that when judging books for this award, when presented with books written by women that were focused and well-crafted the judges dismissed them as domestic or small and when presented with sloppy, less competent books written by men the judges praised them as ambitious and rewarded them.
This in no way presupposes that there were no sloppily written books by women, just says that those books were not rewarded. It doesn’t say that there were no well-written, tightly focused books by men, but those books were not written off as “small”.
[...] knowing all that, I couldn’t help but be a little jealous, from an aesthetic standpoint. Lizzie Skurnick is right, of course, when she says that “ambitious” is an empty term, usually used to justify [...]