Change is inevitable. So they say. At this point, near the winter solstice, on a cold, gloomy, short day, tucked under a quilt, I look over my book journal and make a discovery: I no longer care about the writer’s gender.
Gender was an important literary issue before women busted into the canon in the mid-late 20th century. In an English class, “The Image of Women in American Fiction,” we analyzed classics and pop fiction by both men and women. We discussed gender issues in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (suicide after a love affair), Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (about a man who kills his wife), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (utopian science fiction), and Mickey Spillane’s pulp mysteries.
“Read any book by Mickey Spillane. They’re all the same, ” the professor said with a twinkle in her eye.
Spillane’s detective, Mike Hammer, was obnoxiously macho, yet we were amused by him and the paint-by-number female characters. We laughed at Spillane’s sexism. We could not take it seriously. Even Edwin, the impecunious writer-hero of George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street, couldn’t have found a grubbier way to earn a living.
Fiction takes us to places we cannot travel. I am a longtime Henry James enthusiast: his enchanting novels are complicated fairy tales for Anglophiles. And he does understand women, though his heroines often make unnecessary sacrifices. But I love his charming, earnest, innocent Americans, among them Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), tricked into marriage by an impecunious Italian prince, and Milly Theale (The Wings of the Dove), a rich, terminally ill American who attracts fortune hunters. James makes us identify with the characters, even (or especially) in the 21st century. And yet do we know an Isabel Archer or a Milly Theale? Are they the least bit real? It doesn’t matter. It’s the invention, and the gorgeous prose
It has been a long, strange trip from the male canon to a more inclusive canon. And at this point, I can say that men and women are equal – on the page, not in necessarily in life.
The Strangest Book I’ve Read This Year
Perhaps the strangest novel I’ve read this year is Richard Powers’s Playground, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I am astonished Playground didn’t at least make the shortlist.
Like all of Powers’s novels, Playground is science-driven. He describes in detail the threats to our planet: the plastic trash that clogs and pollutes the ocean; the dangers of AI; and the sheer greed that drives pollution.
But Powers is not just a science guy: he creates a cast of extraordinary, connected characters.
My favorite is Evie, a Canadian oceanographer who, during decades of studies, not only documents but befriends creatures in the ocean. In one moving scene, she saves a mantee, who is tangled and wounded by a net: it approaches her for help. There are also Rafi and Todd, who bond at a Jesuit school over Chess and Go: they attend the University of Illinois together, then argue and are alienated from each other. Rafi becomes a poet and teacher; Todd a computer mogul who creates a game-cum-social-media site (I don’t know what the hell to call it) known as Playground. And Rafi’s wife, Ina, is an artist who makes a sculpture out of plastic found on the beach. Everyone comes together on a tiny island.
AI also is developed at Playground. Todd is very proud of it. But this generates new problems for humanity, and will affect the the environment (perhaps because of the power it takes for the “servers?”). But for those of us who do not keep up with science, this brilliant, sad, life-embracing novel is also a lucid source of information about the possible futures of our planet.