The shortlist for the Charles Taylor Prize was released yesterday, and it consists of four books:
- The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown
- Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000 by John English
- René Lévesque by Daniel Poliquin
- The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Life of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte
Now, if you’re like me, the first thing you’ll notice about this list is that all four books are written by men. Not only that: all four books are written by men writing about men. The authors are all white, all of a certain age, and in all but one case (Brown’s) the books’ subjects are dead white guys.
This is particularly noticeable coming so soon after Publishers Weekly released its list of the ten best books of 2009, not one of which was written by a woman. Much was made of the longlist for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which contained 12 names, only two of which were men. Both made it onto the shortlist, and one of them (Linden MacIntyre) went on to win the award. Indeed, in Giller’s 16-year history, the prize has gone to a woman only five times, and there have been only four female honourees (Alice Munro won twice). In a December 30 op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Julianna Baggott points out that there were only two women in Amazon’s top ten for 2009, and four in the top 20.
The raw numbers seem to point to an ingrained institutional sexism, which is odd for an industry supported by women (who statistically consume more books than men) and powered by women (who make up the vast majority of influential acquisitions editors in Canada – think Louise Dennys, Ellen Seligman, Iris Tupholme, Nicole Winstanley, Alana Wilcox, Lynn Henry, Anne Collins, etc.). Baggott does not limit her analysis to a recapitulation of the numbers; instead, she attempts to settle on an explanation as to why books by men get trumpeted more often and more loudly than books by women:
I often hear people exclaiming that they’re astonished that a particular book was written by a man. They seem stunned by the notion that a man could write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties.
Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be experts on emotion. I’ve never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman.
So men get points for simply showing up on the page with a literary effort.
What’s interesting, however, in the Publishers Weekly list is that the books are not only written by men but also have male themes, overwhelmingly. In fact, the list flashes like a slide show of the terrain I was trying to cover in my graduate thesis, when I wrote all things manly – war, boyhood, adventure.
The idea that “men get points for simply showing up on the page” is fatuous, especially given that many novelists, such as Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Marcel Proust, who historically trafficked in books of deep – not to say extreme – psychological depth, were possessed of a Y chromosome. I hardly think that James, Dostoevsky, or Proust are given points “for simply showing up on the page.” In a similar vein (since we’re speaking anecdotally), I’ve never heard anyone say of Kazuo Ishiguro’s extraordinary 2005 novel Never Let Me Go (a mainstay of the ubiquitous “Best of the Decade” lists that have been cropping up in the last few months), “That’s a terrific novel. I can’t believe it was written by a man.” Most people I’m aware of (both male and female) would stop after the first of those two utterances.
What’s more interesting is Baggott’s theory that women get passed over because they don’t write about masculine themes – war, boyhood, and adventure. One 2009 novel written by a woman – Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean – features all three, and was nominated for the Giller, the Governor General’s Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award (it won the last of these). By contrast, Bonnie Burnard’s highly anticipated second novel, Suddenly, also published in 2009, is about three women whose lifelong friendship is changed when one of them is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It wasn’t nominated for any major awards. Does this have to do with the respective themes these two authors chose?
It’s tempting to say yes, until you realize that one of the four female Giller Prize recipients is Bonnie Burnard, who took the award in 1999 for her debut novel, A Good House. Set in the aftermath of World War II, that novel is about three generations of an ordinary family. In other words, Burnard’s first novel contains none of the themes Baggott specified, yet it went on to win this country’s richest prize for English-language fiction. Is it possible, then, that her follow-up was passed over for award consideration not because of its subject matter, the gender of its author, or an institutionalized sexism, but because it simply wasn’t as good as other novels from the past year?
Perhaps. Of course, one book is too small a sample size to be statistically significant. So we can look at the five books by females out of 16 Giller Prize winners since 1994, as well as the number of women over the same period who have won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language Fiction (five), the Man Booker Prize (six), the Pulitzer Prize (six), and the National Book Award (six). The largest of these numbers – six – accounts for 37.5% of the total winners of any given prize for the period.
If the numbers don’t lie, and if Baggott’s explanations are unsatisfactory to explain them, where do we go from here? Writing in the Norfolk Books Examiner, Lydia Netzer engages with Baggott’s analysis and comes up with three possibilities to explain the exclusion of women from the Publishers Weekly list:
1. The list is sexist, purposefully oppressing women. The solution in this case would be, I guess, to burn down the list. Make a new list. Get those bastards. This seems kind of weak and paranoid.
2. The list is false, reflecting a lame and lingering cultural bias that is on its way out. The solution is to wait. After all, we didn’t count the black writers, or the South American writers. It will all come around, given more time. I guess this is what I would like to believe.
The third possibility is more alarming than the others, because it is the simplest explanation, and therefore the most viable:
3. The list is right. The things that women write about are neither culturally nor historically significant, and the books that women write are not the best books.
It is this last hypothesis that Netzer ends up endorsing: “The lesson of the [PW] list is that nobody’s going to do us any favors. We’re not going to get prizes just for showing up and writing our little books.” If women want to get their books on the major prize lists and roundups of the year’s best, they need to “address the important stuff, the big stuff: death, war, sex, adventure, as it pertains to women and men.” Which brings us full circle to Baggott’s idea of “masculine” themes – i.e., the big stuff, the earth-shattering warp and woof of history.
Except that one of the women writers Netzer mentions as being historically relevant is Virginia Woolf, who didn’t exactly write about “adventure.” On the contrary, Mrs. Dalloway is the prototypical domestic novel, focusing on the title character’s preparations for a dinner party. (Yes, this is the crassest of oversimplifications, but I’m attempting to make a point.) The novel is resolutely interior, yet it has been heralded as a modernist classic. Another classic from the early 20th century, this one written by a man, takes up similar quotidian themes. James Joyce’s Ulysses is not about war or adventure, it’s about two gents who wander around Dublin while one of them gets cuckolded. It would appear the whole focus on “masculine” subject matter is a bit of a non-starter, then as now.
While I’d like to believe that Netzer’s second hypothesis is the correct one, my suspicion is that the truth is closer to her first suggestion. It’s probably the case that there is an unconscious sexism afoot in our literary culture, which props up the work of men at the expense of equally worthy books by their female counterparts. There are female writers working today – Mary Gaitskill, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Alice Munro, A.L. Kennedy, Barbara Gowdy, Monica Ali, A.M. Homes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Lynn Coady spring immediately to mind, all of them writing about different subjects and in wildly different styles – whose work is easily as good as that of their male contemporaries; they deserve greater recognition than they have historically received.
From We So Seldom Look on Love.
In Canadian literature there are those writers who focus on the quotidian and the ordinary: Carol Shields springs immediately to mind, as do Bonnie Burnard, Alice Munro, and Elizabeth Hay. Mary Swan and Margaret Atwood both employ Gothic elements in their writing, pushing the envelope in various directions. But Barbara Gowdy is a rarity in CanLit: not just a practitioner of Southern Ontario Gothic, but a writer who lives on the extremes of experience and subject matter. Gowdy’s fiction is populated by grotesques and eccentrics, and the stories in her collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, resemble a carnival of circus freaks: a two-headed man; a female necrophile; and an exhibitionist who persistently masturbates for a stranger who watches her from the window of an apartment opposite hers.
The last of these, Ali, the protagonist of “Ninety-three Million Miles Away,” is an empty vessel looking to be filled up. Her only problem is that she doesn’t know what will fill her. Ali doesn’t worry about money; her husband, Claude, is a cosmetic surgeon who provides her with a generous allowance. Yet, “aside from trying on clothes in expensive stores,” Ali is at a loss to settle on anything that might potentially fulfill the void she feels in her core, or, to invoke a more explicitly religious term, her soul. As Philip Marchand has written of Gowdy’s characters:
[Their] prayers are never answered except in darkly ironic ways, [and they] behave as if they are, in fact, damned. Something in the desperate way they cling to their distractions, whether knitting or woodwork or compulsive sex, is suggestive of people who know that they are missing the answer to an overwhelmingly important question in their lives.
Ali attempts to find her answer first in music, then in learning: “she began a regimen of reading and studying, five days a week, five to six hours a day. She read novels, plays, biographies, essays, magazine articles, almanacs, the New Testament, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Harper Anthology of Poetry.” None of this works to fill the chasm she feels inside her, and she decides to take up art, specifically self-portraiture. Responding to the signs she sees in a dream, she paints in the nude, and eventually notices a man observing her from the window of the apartment across from her. She begins to perform for this man, engaging more and more what she sees as her exhibitionist nature.
The sexual acts that Ali performs under her observer’s watchful gaze are initially exciting for her, but Ali’s excitement increasingly becomes confused with her idea of self-abnegation at the stranger’s hands. She becomes “so devoted to his appreciation that her pleasure seemed like a siphoning of his, an early, childish indulgence that she would never return to.” Her episodes at the window “were completely display, wholehearted surrender to what felt like the most inaugural and genuine of all desires, which was not sex but which happened to be expressed through a sexual act.”
And, importantly, Ali is only comfortable with her performance so long as the man in the window remains anonymous to her. When she finally meets him, she is repulsed by “his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile.” In order to provide her with heat and light, he must remain like the sun, ninety-three million miles away.
This is not really surprising, given the ways in which Ali – significantly the wife of a cosmetic surgeon, who earns his not inconsiderable salary by providing women with the artificial veneer of beauty – obsesses over her own appearance. The voyeur’s appreciation of her nakedness stands in stark contrast to the way she sees herself, as “a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.” She paints herself with “flat eyes and crude, wild proportions,” and when her husband tells her that she is lovely, she thinks that perhaps he means “lovely when [she's] in the next building.”
In the story’s final stages, Ali sits on the sofa with her husband watching TV, and she prays, “Let this be enough.” But, like so many lost and dissatisfied souls, she realizes that the possibility of finding succor, of grasping anything that will ever be “enough,” is most likely an illusion:
As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.
Even for Nobel Prize-winning novelists. Word has it that José Saramago’s new novel will feature elephants, not people, as characters. (Given the Portuguese writer’s assessment of humanity in books like Blindness and The Double, this is perhaps unsurprising.)
From the National Post‘s Afterword blog:
On Monday, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced it had acquired Saramago’s new book The Elephant’s Journey, which is “based on the real-life epic journey of an Indian elephant from Lisbon to Vienna in the 16th century.” The novel, which will be published fall 2010, will be translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull.
An elephant as the lead character, embarking on an epic journey? Where have I heard that one before?