Revisiting Franzenfreude, and A Roundup of Female Writers

This Year Female Writers Kicked Up Literary Dust is my annual year-end literary wrap up at Women's eNews, with a twist of Franzenfreude.

"(WOMENSENEWS)--The year's biggest literary controversy was set off by two women who write "women's fiction:" Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner.

The two complained on Twitter and in a joint interview on the Huffington Post about a culture of "white male literary darlings" who mesmerize influential critics at publications such as The New York Times Book Review and leave female authors--particularly commercial ones-- out in the cold..."

read more!

And happy holidays, readers.

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Literary Linkage du jour

Stuff I've been reading...

• Wuthering Heights Stars Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley Are Engaged: SQUEEE!
• Numero Cinq is a new lit-blog from VCFA folks that is well worth blogrolling.
• Jacket Copy on Banned Books Week.
• Thomas Steinbeck on Michael Moore Winning the Steinbeck Award
• The AP Interviews 'Hunger Games' Author Suzanne Collins
• Jennifer Weiner's post-Franzenfreude manifesto
• Masterpiece returns! Jezebel on Brit period-drama adoration.

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Brooklyn Book Festival @BKBF #BKBF

Good morning! Happy holidays to all my readers who celebrate.

If any of you are New Yorkers, I'll be at the Brooklyn Book festival tomorrow from about 11 to 2--and from 11-12 working the JASNA-NY booth--#10, behind the main stage, so stop by if you're en scene. And then I shall wandering about to hear literary luminaries and soak up the bookish atmosphere. (And then, weather and so on permitting, I'm going to hop over to the rally for religious freedom.) I hope to see you there!

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Egalitarian Bookwormism: A #Franzenfreude Manifesto

"Male genius has far outnumbered female genius in the history of literature, and it shouldn't be a crime to say so. This issue will die when women produce more and more work of indisputable genius and, until then, we need to stop championing mediocre female work out of defensiveness, stop firing spitballs at male work and stop dissolving the line between high art and pop art.”
-A young female member of the literati in response to Franzenfreude.

Ugh. This kind of thing annoys me so much. Franzenfreude has gotten me thinking a lot about why I read and why in recent years I've been so angry about the hierarchy imposed by "literary fiction" on other genres, and the way it's connected to sexism. (Male genius has outnumbered female genius? REELY? Has someone not read her feminist lit-crit or a little book about how ladies kinda need rooms of their own to get scribbling?)

I started this blog a long time ago to discuss my love of literature in a snob-free context--thus its original "unpretentious lit crit" URL. I did this because I was ashamed of my own previous closed-mindedness, the way I'd wrinkled my nose as a late-adolescent when I saw movie tie-in paperbacks on people's coffee tables. But as I, needing books to read during difficult times or long trips, started reading said paperbacks more and more I realized that popular commercial fiction brings us back to reading the way we read as kids--ravenously, emotionally, viscerally. It's a beautiful thing, and it's important and great to mix that reading with the kind that elevates your mind as you parse its complex symbols and sentences. And really, who's to say what's "better"? In our tech-heavy, politically disastrous day and age, emotional engagement may be a truer antidote to what ails us.

I just snarfed my way through 'The Hunger Games" trilogy and I'd say it was probably the most profound reading experience I've had in at least a year, besides re-reading Emma and Dubliners. It was a one-note YA series that the Slate book club is currently analyzing and denigrating at the same time, but I'm unashamed to admit how much I loved it and how sophisticated I thought its treatment of its themes was.

That's why I'm so obsessed with Jennifer Weiner's crusade. The line between high art and pop art won't be dissolved, but who cares if it is? It's meaningless. Of course some writers are more clever, smart, talented, more ambitious in their stories, in their sentences than others. A canon-lover like me would never deny that one George Eliot is worth a thousand whoevers. But you know what? Sometimes "literary" writers have more exciting plots than their pop counterparts, and sometimes pop writers make you think about contemporary society more than their literary counterparts. Sometimes genre writers use the conventions of their form like a sonnet and make magic that's utterly original--while a lot of the lit-fic I review for Publishers Weekly feels like it was cranked out in a factory (not that it isn't usually good, but there's a sameness to it). It's pure insecurity on the part of the literati to police their borders so assiduously--why not just get good writing to speak for itself?

Yes, there's a good thought. Let's ask a bunch of questions beginning with "why". Why can't we admit that Bronte heroes get us hot under the collar and we enjoy the fart jokes in Joyce and Shakespeare even as we respect their genius? Why do so many adults who read Harry Potter have to qualify that love with some sort of snipe at Rowling's prose style? Why don't we celebrate writers who are keeping our dying written medium alive by connecting deeply with thousands of readers? After all, they're the ones who allow cutting-edge literary experimentation to happen by bringing in profits. And why do these discussions about high art and low art always smack of sexism? Franzen gets more respect than his literary female equivalents who write in similarly highbrow manners. For-profit churners-out like James Patterson get grudging respect and NYTimes Magazine cover stories. Would they do that for Danielle Steele? Me thinks not. And yet there's nooo connection between the two phenomena.

But all this consternation has made me glad that I found VCFA, where writers of speculative, realistic, literary genre and in-between fiction all learn to do the same thing together: engage the reader, stay in scene, write compellingly from the sentence through the plot arc. And I'm glad, although I neglect it often, that I have this blog--and I have you, dear readers, who share my taste and my opinions. So thank you!

And now I'm off to immerse myself in an epic, stream-of-consciousness novel in translation about the Holocaust, a review of which was due yesterday. Happy labor day and may the Egalitarian Bookworm spirit be with you.

A few more links worth reading:

• Is the New York Times' book section really a boys' club? (Slate crunches the #s)
  
• I write a nasty book. And they want a girly cover on it | Lionel Shriver
• Jonathan Franzen Reviewed on Video (WaPo's Ron Charles)
  
• Franzen Frenzy! (Lizzie Skurnick @ book beast )
  

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I Weigh in on #Franzenfreude

(and I got retweeted by EBC patron saint Jennifer Weiner. Yay!)

On Jonathan Franzen, the Times' Book Review, and Why Women's Fiction Gets Short Shrift:

"Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” arrives this week with considerable fanfare... But the glowing reviews and attention the book garnered also provoked a little bit of anger. It began when bestselling author Jodi Picoult criticized The New York Times Book Review for its undue attention to the aforementioned group of writers to the exclusion of more mainstream, popular titles — many of them written by women.

(read the whole thing)

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My Latest Literary Article

Hi from Vermont. My summer book round-up is up at Women's eNews. It's always good to have another photo of a lady reading stuff.

Larsson's 'Hornet Girl' Stirs Summer Book Buzz: "

(WOMENSENEWS)--Female authors this year have produced something for every type of summer reading, from light, fluffy and popular to feminist tracts and epic literary explorations.

read more

Mother's Day Weekend

Three generations of women in my family, all enthusiastic bookworm chicks.

Greetings, readers. This weekend, for some incomprehensible reason, I'm reflecting on mom characters in literature. Mother figures tend to be pretty reviled or absent in literature, but is there any literary mama more beloved than Marmee, who gave life and love to Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth? Mrs. Morland, Catherine's mom in Northanger Abbey, is another exception. Lily Potter gave up her own life for baby Harry's, (kind of like Jesus and Mary in reverse.)

But it's hard to think of too many sainted moms. The mind immediately wanders to the far more plentiful monstrous mommies who devour their young--and their close literary kin, a veritable parade of Wicked Stepmothers. We've got Mrs. Bennet, Paul's smothering mother in Sons and Lovers, and Mrs. Clenham in Little Dorrit, a perfect example of the latter. There's also the immortal Sethe in Beloved who straddles the line between good and bad mother so memorably.

Who are your favorite mother characters, good or bad, in literature? HuffPo has a slideshow of twelve of the worst, and they are baddies indeed.

Shakespeare's Birthday~!

William Shakespeare. 1564–1616

It was a Lover and his Lass (from As You Like It)

IT was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;	5
Sweet lovers love the spring.
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,	10
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower	15
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
And, therefore, take the present time
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,	20
For love is crown`d with the prime
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Oh, and here's a big article on "Shakespeare Today" in the Telegraph.

Spring musings--what are you reading?

Hi guys. I'm in the middle of a reading frenzy. I finished Angela's Ashes and am in between Persepolis I and Persepolis II, which I'm trying to read to keep up with a student. Also reading Susan J.Douglas's "Englightened Sexism" for a piece, and about to delve back into the Baby-Sitters Club for a piece. And ALSO have a new review book to read and so on and so on until breathless...whew!

how about you? What are you bringing out into the garden or park to read as the weather grows mild?


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Book Review Bingo.

Book Review Bingo. A good way to avoid clichés.

Literary Linkage du jour

Today's reading.

• The Bookworm's Hideout: Review of Jane Austen's unfinished Sanditon (Hesperus Classics)
• Jezebel's Sadie reviews:Danielle Steel's Big Girl
• The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead on Juliet Rylance and Justin Camargo, whom I just saw in "The Tempest" /"As You Like It" at BAM, and are an actual couple: Shakespearean love in real life.
  

By the way, that production of "The Tempest," which I saw on Valentine's day in previews, was really well-staged. My issues with the acting were well summed up by the Times's Charles Isherwood. Here is his review.

Literary Birthday: Toni Morrison

One of the best writers living, Morrison's work combines poetry with prose, historical testimony with the supernatural, the specifics of the African-American experience with the universality of the human experience. She's a chronicler of the most brutal of crimes and a believer in love.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. -Toni Morrison

I've read a lot of her work, but still haven't read Jazz, Tar Baby, Love or Paradise. Must rectify that.

Falling softly, softly falling

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Another snowy day on the East Coast. I've been working on novel edits all day and my eyes are getting all bleary, so time to venture out into the whirling white flakes and try to stumble to the gym and grocery stores before it gets too dark.

My favorite literary snowfalls are the obvious ones: Robert Frost and James Joyce. There's a wonderful snowy night in "Emma" in which our characters dine at the Westons and poor Mr. Elton is rejected in the carriage home. And there are dozens more. "The Giver" "To Light a Fire" "Sarah Plain and Tall"...

What, to you, are the most memorable snow scenes in literature?

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Which Austen hero, err, Literary Character Is Your Valentine?

What literary character have you fallen in love with?:
Kate Ward at EW's Shelf Life asks us to name "The characters in literature that we love.... Not just respect, or admire, but love." She begs the Edward Cullen adorers to keep from hijacking the thread (amen!) and who should show up on the first page of comments instead but a bunch of ferverent admirers of the one, the only, Captain Frederick "You pierce my soul" Wentworth. Nothing could please me more.

We've had this very same discussion here before, but why not throw the question out again? I for one am adding a new literary hero to my loong list of love-worthy fictional lads: Mr. George "my most beloved Emma" Knightley.

Who's on your list? And please, don't just go hetero here. This is a site for egalitarian bookworms, so feel free to declare your passion for any fictional character of any gender or persuasion below.

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Literary Birthdays, Redux

Here's what I wrote last year on the occasion of Charles Dickens AND Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthdays.

What a great pair of authors, both of whom wrote long, epic and much-beloved tales filling many volumes, but who, in other ways, couldn't have been more different from each other as people and writers.


What are your favorite books by these two? I'd have to go with David Copperfield and Little Town on the Prairie (where Manny courts Laura--aww)

Question of the Week: What's Your Favorite Adultery Novel?

The book blogs are full of nothing but political adultery scandals, thanks to books by Andrew Young and Jenny Sanford about sordid politicians-cheating-on their wives. Sigh. Besides being just horribly, sickeningly ashamed of my own judgment as a former John Edwards booster, I'm kind of horrified yet intrigued bythe whole messy fuss (and I really enjoy watching "The Good Wife" on TV, but that's another story).

It has made me think, though, how much "great" literature centers around adultery. For novels about female protagonists up until quite recently, of course, marriages were symbolic prisons and adultery was the only means of escape-- usually an unsatisfying, even fatal means at that. In contemporary novels, adultery can symbolize the same kind of release from entrapment, but it's a prison of boredom and bougie expectations rather than of absolute social necessity.

At a few of of my all-time beloved novels are adultery novels (or their tantalizing counterparts, the novel of pseudo-really-wanna-almost-but-just-can't-go-through-with-it-adultery). The Scarlet Letter, and Anna Karenina are my favorites in the former category, The Age of Innocence and The Mill on the Floss in the latter.

And of course there's Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley and The Awakening and Updike and Irving and dozens more. So what are your favorite tales of marital bond-breaking, readers?

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Literary Birthday: Edgar Allan Poe

Actually, his birthday was yesterday, but I would be remiss in not giving old Edgar (who moved around so frequently there are like fifteen Poe sites here in NYC) a hearty EBC shout-out.

I live near a famous church and so when its bells toll, I quite frequently hear lines of his fabulously onomatopoeic poem, "The Bells," running through my head.

Readers, what is your favorite Poe story or poem?

How Many Books Did You Read in 2009?

Here's my final tally: 57! I kicked my own ass, after being inspired by commenters last year who read way more books than I. This list includes 10 Sookie Stackhouse books, 2 Alexander McCall Smith novels, 12 PW review books, a goodly number of thick feminist books, three 19th century novels, one 18th century novel, FIVE Pulitzer winners, two obscure Edith Wharton novels, and a sprinkling of insanity!
How would you rate your year in reading, numerically or otherwise? Happy almost New Year, readers!

1. Morality for Beautiful Girls, Alexander McCall Smith
2. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Michael Chabon
   
4. The Lake Shore Limited Sue Miller 2010
5. March, Geraldine Brooks
6. Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell 2009
7. The Blythes are Quoted, L. M. Montgomery 2009
8. Lost: A Novel,Lichtenstein, Alice 2010
9. Push.,Sapphire 2000
10. Whitethorn Woods (Vintage), Binchy, Maeve 2008
11. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, Gail Collins, 2009
12. Living Room: A Novel, Rachel Sherman 2009
13. Netherland (Vintage Contemporaries), Joseph O'Neill 2009
14. The Solitude of Prime Numbers: A Novel, Paolo Giordano 2010
15. A Touch of Dead (Sookie Stackhouse: The Complete Stories), Charlaine Harris
    
16. Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse, Book 9), Charlaine HarrisHarris, Charlaine 2009
17. All Together Dead (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 7), Charlaine Harris
18. From Dead to Worse (Southern Vampire Mysteries, No. 8), Charlaine Harris
19. Dead to the World (Sookie Stackhouse, Book 4), Charlaine Harris
20. Dead as a Doornail (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 5), Charlaine Harris
21. Definitely Dead: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel (Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood) Charlaine
    
22. Club Dead, Charlaine Harris
23. Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, Stuart McLean 2009
    
24. Living Dead in Dallas, Charlaine Harris 2009
25. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, Jon Krakauer 2009
26. The Kingdom of Ohio, Matthew Flaming 2009
    
27. The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday (Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries), Alexander McCall Smith
28. Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, Lizzie Skurnick2009
    
29. The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classics), John Steinbeck
30. Jamaica Inn, Daphne Du Maurier
31. That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo 2009
    
32. Shanghai Girls: A Novel, Lisa See 2009
    
33. The Glimpses Of The Moon Edith Wharton
34. Picking Bones from Ash: A Novel, Marie Mutsuki Mockett 2009
    
35. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn 2009 (50%)
    
36. Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 1), Charlaine Harris
37. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
38. Breathing Lessons: A Novel, Anne Tyler
39. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale, Herman Melville
40. New World Monkeys: A Novel, Nancy Mauro 2009
    
41. Day After Night: A Novel, Anita Diamant 2009
    
42. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
43. Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, Samuel Richardson
44. The Broken Teaglass: A Novel, Emily Arsenault2009
    
45. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
46. The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton
47. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, Elaine Showalter (50%)
    
48. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce (50%)
    
49. The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, Michelle Goldberg (50%)
50. The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, Jessica Valenti 2009
51. I'm So Happy for You: A novel about best friends, Lucinda Rosenfeld 2009
52. Wetlands, Charlotte Roche 2009
53. Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, Leora Tanenbaum 2009
    
54. On Writing, Stephen King
55. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz2008
56. Hello Goodbye: A Novel, Emily Chenoweth 2009
    
57. Follow Me: A Novel, Joanna Scott 2009
    
58. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
    
59. On Beauty , Zadie Smith
    

Rounding up the year in women-penned books

...this piece, by yours truly, published today in Women's eNews:

Women's 2009 Books Enjoyed a Banner Year:

Female writers in all genres and at all levels--from blockbusters to thought stirrers--have won a generous portion of this year's critical acclaim, sweeping up a large percentage of the major prizes and, partially thanks to a spate of new film adaptations, spending considerable time perched atop the bestseller lists . read more.

Around the Web

• Bronte Blog has a good wrap-up on various Twilight-Bronte connection articles around the 'nets, including a piece in the Guardian on how Twilight is helping the Brontes by getting several stalled Bronte film adaptations into high gear, and a piece from a Smith college's publication asserting the opposite, for more intellectual reasons.

• Also in the Guardian, a great piece celebrating 150 years of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an EBC favorite. Here's a taste:

Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr Collins had invented – mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel "masterly", and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.

Who could ever forget Count Fosco?