ELLEN SAYS:
What would Philip Roth do?
This question, Ann Patchett said
this week, is the running joke between her and her agent, as the writer
sorts through the fluff of requests she receives now that she's a sought-after
celebrity author. Roth, it was implied, is too big and fine to suffer
fools or silly solicitations gladly. So he offers a measuring stick for
Patchett, whose fame has leaped precipitously since the release of her
prize-winning novel "Bel Canto" in 2001.
Yet,
oddly enough, Patchett didn't catch the irony of this observation as
she shared the stage with fellow writer Elizabeth Gilbert at the
Portland (OR) Arts & Lectures series. Here were she and Gilbert,
two writers I've long admired, chatting in front of hundreds of people like two girls at a slumber
party. Longtime correspondents by mail, they owned up to their real
reason for coming to Portland, which was so the two of them could spend
time
together. They went to yoga! They had lunch! They shopped! After
offering this glimpse of their day, Britney and JLo -- I mean, Ann and
Liz -- proceeded to talk about their lives with the once-over-lightly
gloss that affected parts of Gilbert's phenomenal
bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love." Their verbal badminton was big on
self-deprecation, but that hardly obscured the smugness in the air.
What would Philip Roth do, indeed. For
women writers who think they still aren't taken as seriously as the men
in
their field, here was Exhibit A for why that might occur: a coupla
chicks
sitting around talking while an audience pays $26.50 a seat to hear
them indulge in a bout of self- and mutual admiration. For all the
chat-festiness of "Oprah," it's hard to envision the TV super-goddess
engaging her old bud Toni
Morrison like this. Morrison would flick off such public
familiarity as easily as she would a bad sentence.
Maybe
the Gilbert-Patchett patter was especially galling because the status
of women writers has been in my mind lately. I had breakfast in New
York last month with one of my favorite novelists, Jayne Anne Phillips,
then met in February with a promising new writer, Lauren Groff.
Phillips lamented
that, between raising two sons and running the writing program at
Rutgers, her five novels ("Lark & Termite" is the latest) have been spaced wide -- too wide to
suit the avaricious machinery of publishing. As for Groff, her
husband and new baby Beckett were in tow when she hit Portland as part
of a West Coast promotional
tour for her new short story collection "Delicate Edible Birds."
"Two
books and a baby in one year!" she said. "I'm tired."
When
I noted that Groff's first novel, "The Monsters of Templeton," was a
finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers, she pointed out that the
Orange Prize is specifically for women, and that sent us off on a
riff about the gender gap in literature. Typically, she observed with a
certain poetic license, awards go to fiction that is written from the
point of view of a man, concerns war and has very short sentences --
Hemingwayesque, as it were. In Groff's view, this means women will
automatically get the short stick in terms of their literary stature.
Stature is a hard thing to measure, of course. But consider John Updike
and the
prominence of his obituary in print and on television when he died.
Clearly, Updike was a big gun
of the written word to anyone who was halfway paying attention. Would
any woman wordsmith (Morrison? Didion?) merit equal media firepower?
This seems a given:
The bass voice still has more resonance than the soprano,
metaphorically speaking. It's our conditioning, stupid, to borrow a
phrase -- which doesn't mean this shouldn't change, only that it is
ridiculous not to acknowledge our own internally wired biases even
while trying to overcome them. But there are other reasons, too, and
Groff's mention of subject matter may have something to do with it:
Fiction that deals
with the big topics of the day, not the domestic sphere, is more
readily imbued with the gravitas of great literature -- pace "War
and Peace," not to mention Don DeLillo. Sometimes the formula works,
just not always.
Another factor working against women writers
is the distractions. If you don't believe the surveys, trust your lying
eyes: Women still handle the bulk of the job of raising children, not
to mention caring for spouses, parents and friends. They do more
housework. The mundane (in other words, all the daily stuff that makes
the world go 'round) is their metier, which is probably why they write
about it so well -- and fail to produce not only the kind of writing
but also the volume that might transform them from wordsmith into
literary lion. (Notice the male form.)
Joyce Carol Oates is,
was and shall always be the notable exception to this rule, but that's
the point -- what a marvel she is, and how her example supports another
critical leg of the stool -- the dignity that props up a writer's (or
anyone's) stature. I'm reminded of Oates' appearance more than a decade
ago at Portland Arts & Lectures. Like the professor she is (in
the time she creates from thin air, apparently), Oates gave a
prepared talk on the state of contemporary writing. Unlike Patchett and
Gilbert, who sat with feet tucked underneath them in two oversized
upholstered chairs, she stood at a lectern. In short, she exuded
competence and demanded respect. She served herself and the cause of
literature.
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