The male glance

[supergee]

Taking women’s stories seriously

Comments

[weofodthignen]

... which may be one reason the "literary novel" is a very niche taste these days. I found myself wanting to point out that I don't work hard to find artistic brilliance in a novel, no matter who wrote it. Just as I don't like Picasso, I feel quite comfortable not liking most newer novels.

What the author has left out is that many classic female writers are just as abhorrent to some of us as it is now fashionable to deplore certain male authors as being—see the list you linked to I think yesterday. I'd much rather read Hemingway than Austen, and I truly hope Flannery O'Connor is being fried on a spit in some nether world. Unless she secretly liked that kind of thing, of course. I like some Dickens, though I think I read his signals the opposite way to what he intended, and I've always meant to try Moby Dick. There's a risk in assuming everyone goes along in lockstep with these fashions in taste, whether they were inculcated in the schoolroom or in consciousness-raising sessions and the smart newspapers.

M