On Reading More Male Writers Again

I just realized that the last three novels I read were all by male authors. That realization made me reflect on how I have fluctuated over the years regarding the gender of novelists whose works I have read. Like everyone else of my age (Baby Boomer), in school and in college days I read mainly male authors, with a few notable exceptions (Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, Cather, and a few more recent female novelists); they were the ones considered the “best”; they formed the “canon.” Not only were most of the novelists male, but most of their main characters were male as well. I, like most female readers then, had to do what some feminist literary critics later described as suspending reality in order to identify with the mostly male main characters of most novels. But along with the women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a glorious increase in novels (and short stories and poetry and plays) by women writers being published. For the avid reader I was, this development was manna from heaven. For many years afterward, I read mostly works by women, with women as the main characters. Now that there are as many women writers being published as there are men (although there is still the issue of how seriously women writers and “women’s topics” are taken; see my posts of 8/26/10, 9/4/10, and 9/15/10), I have gradually, in the past few years, begun reading more novels by male writers again. This has not been a conscious decision, as much as a natural evening-out process. Also, I give much credit to the women’s movement, not only for the increased number of novels by women being published, but for the fact that the worlds of women and men are now less separate than they were, and therefore the subject matters and styles of novels by males and females are less different, more overlapping than they were. I still read many more women writers than men, but the proportions are less starkly different than they were for a long time.

"The Rain Before It Falls"

I just finished listening to “The Rain Before It Falls” on CD (BBC Audiobooks, 2008), by Jonathan Coe (one of “The Jonathans” that I posted about on 11/2/10). It is a family saga, about a dysfunctional but -- mainly, although at times tortuously -- loving family over many years and many (mostly sad) events. The conceit of the novel is that the elderly Rosamund, who is dying, dictates her own life's story and the family story, and the ways in which they intersected, onto cassettes for Imogen, the long-lost but much-loved granddaughter of her cousin and best friend. Beatrix. She organizes her memories by choosing and describing 20 photographs taken at various times in her and the family's lives. Her taped narration is framed by the narration and stories of her niece and grandnieces, who when they cannot find Imogen after Rosamund's death, listen to the tapes themselves and add their own stories, thus creating a story-within-a-story effect. Consequently, the novel is somewhat schematic, but the structure mainly works. Rosamund’s voice, and some of her digressions, sometimes grow a little wearying, yet most of the time the story is compelling. Rosamund is and always has been neurotic and needy, but is nevertheless a sympathetic character. Overall, I enjoyed the book, not surprisingly, since this kind of character-driven, relationship-enmeshed, psychologically intriguing story is exactly the kind that I most like to read. Added attractions are the English setting, and -- for those listening on CD as I did -- the lovely English accent of the reader, actress Jenny Agutter.

Finally (Foolishly?) Finished Franzen's "Freedom"

I did it! I finished Jonathan Franzen's 562-page novel, "Freedom." If you read my interim reports on 11/8/10 and 11/11/10, you know that I was not enjoying, and was not impressed by, this novel, but because of all the critical attention it was getting, and at a certain point because of all the time I had already invested in it, I felt compelled to continue to the end. So I won! I wrestled the novel to the ground! I was able to leave Walter, Patty, Richard, Joey (although I kind of liked Joey), Jessica, Carol, Connie, and Lalitha behind with relief and no regrets! Hurray! On the other hand, I spent many, many hours on a novel that was pretty unsatisfying and that I had to struggle through, so maybe I actually lost? In any case, maybe I have saved some of you from spending time on this vaunted but disappointing novel.

Still Wrestling with Franzen's "Freedom"

I posted 11/8/10 about trying to get into Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Freedom," but having mixed success. However, I have persisted, and am now up to page 400 (162 to go...). My interest continues to be intermittent. The big chunks of prose about Walter's genuine struggle to do good, and the terrible compromises he is making, are of interest but somehow undigested and trying-too-hard-to-be-great-moral-struggles-of-our-time. I have the feeling that Franzen tried to write a great sprawling novel of ideas and full of interesting characters, like the wonderful nineteenth century novels of Eliot, Dickens, etc., but somehow just doesn't engage our interest on either level -- characters or issues -- as those novels do. As B. R. Myers writes in the October 2010 Atlantic, Franzen's characters are mediocre and uninteresting, and he seems to believe that "The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book's covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be." Myers concludes that "the novel is a...monument to insignificance." Now that I have invested this much time and energy in the novel, I will strive to finish it. It is, after all, the "big" novel of the year, both critically and saleswise, and has engendered widespread talk about Franzen's possibly being the greatest writer of the new generation; thus, I feel I should at least finish it before passing judgment. But it is not looking good....

Novels with LGBT Themes

Some good novels with LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) themes:

Alther, Lisa. Other Women. Kinflicks.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
Colette. Claudine.
Donoghue, Emma. Landing. (which I posted about on 7/31/10)
Forster, E. M. Maurice.
Grumbach, Doris. Chamber Music.
Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness.
Holleran, Andrew. Dancer from the Dance.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty.
Lorde, Audre. Zami.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice.
Maupin, Armistead. Tales of the City.
Miller, Isabel. Patience and Sarah.
Millett, Kate. Sita.
Monette, Paul. Halfway Home.
Renault, Mary. The Persian Boy.
Richardson, Dorothy. Pilgrimage.
Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited.
White, Edmund. A Boy's Own Story. The Beautiful Room is Empty.
Winterson, Jeannette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando.

"Madame Bovary" Re-translated

I studied Flaubert's work in graduate school and was always gripped and impressed by his portrayal of Emma Bovary. A couple of years ago I tried to re-read "Madame Bovary" and found myself put off by Flaubert's realistic but in some ways misogynist view of Emma. It's true that he famously said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" so any negative portrayal of her was, in a sense, a purposeful revealing of his own weaknesses as well.
Nevertheless, reading the novel many years later, although I still understood her yearning for romance and for "something more," I found myself impatient with Emma and with the novel. Now there is a new translation into English, by the well-respected author of unusual, very short stories and a translator of Proust's "Swann's Way," Lydia Davis. Davis feels that earlier translations strayed too far from the original, and lost the sense of Flaubert's style. According to a very informative New York magazine article by Sam Anderson (10/11/10), Davis "spent more than two years trying to create the closest possible replica of 'Madame Bovary' that would still make sense to an English reader." Anderson adds that "Flaubert's novel demonstrates the kind of perfect control seen more often in poetry...craftmanship so advanced that the craftmanship disappears....Davis admits that this is the one aspect of Bovary that will never survive translation: an almost superhuman cohesion." I think I will look for this new translation.

"Freedom": A Progress Report

I normally don't write about a book until after I have read it, or in a few cases, have decided not to continue reading it. But the novel I am posting about today is so long (562 pages) that I think it justifies an interim "progress report." Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) is both a bestseller and (mostly) a big critical hit. As I said in my 11/2/10 post about "the Jonathans," I very much liked Franzen's earlier well-received novel, "The Corrections," and eagerly waited to get a copy of "Freedom" from my local library. Only slightly daunted by its length, I dived in. At first, the novel just wasn't grabbing my attention. Maybe I had read too many reviews ahead of time, so it all seemed a bit too familiar already. Maybe the characters just weren't that interesting. And then I read a very negative review in the Atlantic that almost discouraged me from continuing. But I pushed on nevertheless, and after about 100-plus pages, I found my interest picking up a bit. I am now -- at 295 pages -- just over halfway through the book. My interest waxes and wanes. I don't particularly like any of the characters, but I find them realistic, at times interesting, and occasionally sympathetic. I am a bit bored with the rather didactic parts about the environment and about one of the main characters' (Walter's) social conscience and the compromises he makes. In any case, now that I have gotten this far, I predict I will keep reading to the end. If/when I do finish it, I may post again about it, and about how I feel about the novel by then. If any of you have read it, or started to read it, or decided against reading it, please do let me know what you think about it, either by commenting here or by emailing me (vandricks@usfca.edu).