V. S. Naipaul’s comments to the Royal Geographic Society in late May reignited the flame wars over “women’s writing.” “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not,” the Nobel Prize-winning novelist said. Women writers are inevitably sentimental, they have a “narrow view of the world,” because none of them is “a complete master of a house.” The most hilarious of Naipaul’s self-parodic remarks was that no English novelist who also happened to be a woman — not even Jane Austen, to whom my teacher J. V. Cunningham once said it would be indecorous to ascribe a fault — is “the equal to me.”
The best reply to Naipaul would have been silence, with mockery as a second best. (Naipaul goes to a restaurant. His meal is brought to the table. “I think it is unequal to me,” he says.) But what was surprising — or, come to think of it, not so surprising — was that his scornful and angry critics agreed entirely with Naipaul about one thing. Women writers are to be treated as a caste apart, who share a mutual understanding — not because they are writers, but because they are women. The complaint (repeated in Harper’s by Francine Prose) that women are published less often and reviewed less widely than men, the call (made by the Australian novelist Sophie Cunningham) to set up A Prize of Their Own, saluted Naipaul’s ideas by suggesting that women do indeed require a compensatory boost.
The notion, as Prose said, “apparently won’t go away.” Neither, apparently, will the bankrupt notion of what she herself calls “women’s writing.” When I praised her last year in COMMENTARY, I ignored her gender and placed her in a different literary tradition altogether: “[I]t was not until she began to find inspiration in the English tradition,” I said, that she began to be a really good novelist — “very different from most American novelists now writing, and in a manner that elevates her far above them.” Would she like me to go back and rewrite my conclusion?
One of Prose’s best novels is Hunters and Gatherers (1995), a novel (as I described it) that takes her feminist heroines and “plops them down in an exotic, hostile landscape where their civilized habits and spiritual airs prove inadequate to the test of interpersonal savagery.” The tradition to which the novel belongs includes Gulliver’s Travels, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of the Flies. As it happens, Ann Patchett has just published a novel that mines the same tradition — State of Wonder (Harper, 368 pp., $26.99). Patchett’s novel is nowhere near as good as Prose’s, but not because of a “sentimentality” or “narrow view of the world” that distinguishes “women’s writing.” The reasons for its mediocrity, though, aren’t far removed from that sort of thinking.
Patchett won the Orange Prize a decade ago for Bel Canto, a novel celebrating the possibility of love and friendship between terrorists and hostages. Despite being published just three months before 9/11, no one seemed particularly upset by her theme — perhaps because her terrorists were Peruvian Communists, not Arab Islamists. In State of Wonder, her sixth novel, she returns to South America. Marina Singh (“a doctor who worked in statin development”) travels to Brazil to track down the elusive Annick Swenson, who is up river somewhere in the Amazonian interior, cooking up a new fertility drug for a big pharmaceutical company. Thus Patchett sets out to rewrite Heart of Darkness with women in the roles of Marlow and Kurtz. She takes about three-and-a-half times Conrad’s length to reach the opposite conclusion. Instead of a primal savagery, Patchett’s heroine finds more human civilization — a different civilization, but a densely complicated civilization nevertheless — deep in the jungle.
Here is Marina’s arrival among a tribe of cannibals, to whom she has journeyed in search of her colleague Anders Eckman, who had been reported dead:
The arrows had fallen at least three feet away from them and Marina was willing to take this as a good sign. It wouldn’t have been so difficult to hit the target had they meant to. . . . Minutes passed. She called out to the jungle again, a sentence without meaning, and it echoed through the trees until the birds called back to her. She saw a movement in the leaves and then, slipping out from between the branches, a single man came forth, and then another. They were created wholly from the foliage, one and then one more stepping forward to watch her until a group of thirty or more were assembled on the bank of the river, loincloths and arrows, their foreheads as yellow as canaries. The women came behind the men, holding children, their faces unpainted. . . . [T]hough she waited for her own fear it did not come. She was finally here. This was the place she had been trying to get to from the very beginning and her she would wait for the rest of her life.
The cannibals accept her gifts of oranges and peanut butter, and then they take the young boy she has brought along in exchange for Anders. But it turns out that he is a prince of the tribe, who had never been returned to them after Dr. Swenson treated him for fever several years before. Who, then, is the real cannibal?
State of Wonder is a dreadful novel, but not because it was written by a woman. Its sentimentality is merely the syrupy emotion behind the multiculturalism that Ann Patchett requires nearly 400 pages to affirm. And if the novel has a narrow view of the world, the reason is that its view of the world is wholly determined by the dominant and unquestioned ideology of the current literary moment.
Envoi
Today marks the 103rd birthday of William Maxwell, novelist (They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf) and fiction editor of the New Yorker for forty years, along with the 91st birthday of the American poet Charles Bukowski (“as the poems go into the thousands/ you realize that you’ve created very/ little”).
Today also marks the debut of Literary Commentary, the magazine’s new book blog. The coincidence may be fitting, since this blog — its interests and loyalties, its voice and point of view — will probably be found somewhere between Maxwell’s graceful kindly wisdom and Bukowski’s rough self-pitying intimacy.
To those who are already familiar with it, my nearly three-years-old Commonplace Blog is relocating here, with a new focus on the current literary scene to go along with its new venue and affiliation. To those who will be reading it for the first time, I should explain that, while this blog will be a source for book reviews and reconsiderations, Literary Commentary is intended to be something more. It represents the literary side of what John Podhoretz, its fourth editor, defined as COMMENTARY’s mission.
Literary Commentary too is an “act of faith — faith in the power of ideas, in tradition and the value of defending tradition, and faith in America and the West.” It too is an “expression of faith in the act of reading itself, in its unparalleled capacity to enlarge the perspective and knowledge of those for whom reading is an activity as central to their lives as the drawing of breath.” In particular, it places faith in the reading of literature and the power of literature, not merely to kill the time softly, but to instruct and move, to frighten and uplift, to change forever the way men and women think.
At the risk of ingratitude, in fact, I’d say that John’s faith in reading is misplaced if reading is not critical, feisty, dubious, prepared to take issue and answer back. “I think of reading as the ‘gateway drug’ to learning,” Bethanne Patrick tweeted last week, defending the Twitter event known as #FridayReads, when thousands of twitterers eagerly cough up the book they will be sitting down with that weekend. But reading is not that—not necessarily. Reading can be an undiscriminating waste of time, an enthusiastic hobby like model railroading or royal commemorative collecting that leads only to more and more of itself, unless it is accompanied by reasons and argument.
In an age of the reader review, when critical judgment is measured by a rating of stars (one to five), Literary Commentary aims to return to an older conception of reading, one that is founded upon the unfashionable belief that (as Hugh Kenner once put it) there are some books that “every civilized American should be familiar with.” But along with this belief goes the confidence that some of those books are being written even today; or at least they were written five or six minutes ago. To quote John again, COMMENTARY exists “to take inventory in and increase the storehouse of the best that has been thought and said.” Starting today, Literary Commentary joins in the magazine’s work.