artificer
MEG WOLITZER: THE FEMALE PERSUASION Sunday, April 22, 2 p.m., free Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill www.flyleafbooks.com
Wolitzer Canon
NOVELIST MEG WOLITZER ISN’T AS GOOD AS FRANZEN AND EUGENIDES. SHE’S BETTER. IF THE LITERATURE INDUSTRY WEREN’T SEXIST, EVERYONE WOULD KNOW THAT. BY BRIAN HOWE
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n 2012, the novelist Meg Wolitzer— respected if not quite famous after three decades of publishing—wrote an essay in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Playing off Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex, the article was titled “The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women.” “If The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention?” Wolitzer began. “Or would this novel (which I loved) have been relegated to ‘Women’s Fiction,’ that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated?” The persuasive answers that follow these two questions are a no and a yes, respectively. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone in a literature industry where novels by women are often burdened with a possessive noun while novels by men are just called fiction. Wolitzer deftly dissects the overt and subtle ways that the same kind of book is presented and received differently depending on the gender of its author. On the covers of men’s novels, SUV-size sans-serif titles idle eventfully on stark backgrounds; on women’s, frilly fonts flit around watercolors of sandals in the sand. (“These covers might as well have a hex sign slapped on them, along with the words: ‘Stay away, men! Go read Cormac McCarthy instead!’” Wolitzer writes, with her usual wry humor.) Long books by men are ambitious; long books by women are unfocused. (Reviewers, Wolitzer thinks, look to women for the “painted-egg precision of short stories,” not the big zeitgeist-y novel.) The double standards roll on, powered by gender imbalances not only in who gets published, but in who gets major prizes, who gets reviewed, and who reviews them. 30 | 4.18.18 | INDYweek.com
Meg Wolitzer PHOTO BY NINA SUBIN
On the cover of her new novel, The Female Persuasion, which she brings to Flyleaf Books on Sunday afternoon, Wolitzer has gotten her “jumbo, block-lettered masculine typeface.” As a signifier of seriousness, it is deserved. The novel razors apart power and influence across age and gender almost as deeply as The Interestings, Wolitzer’s 2013 commercial breakthrough and one of the finest novels of the decade, did to talent and ambition across friendship and family, charting the fortunes of a group of performingarts-camp kids across their lives . Still, the marquee font is set on a festively colored (if undeniably powerful) background of nested triangles, as if someone in marketing at Penguin Random House had begged, “Please, Meg, just a bit of color.” If the cover gives you pause, the obliviously condescending quotes about The Interestings on the back will bring you to a screeching halt. No matter how many ingenious books Wolitzer writes, reviewers continue to seem startled that she has written a proverbial “novel of ideas” rather than a cookbook or a dishy beach read. “[I]t’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas,” says The New York Times Book Review, something no one would say about a novel covering this broad a tract of modern life and recent history if it were by a man. The ideas boom from the page; the stealthy thing, apparently, is that Wolitzer snuck in man-size thoughts with the Trojan hobbyhorse of her gender. But that’s nothing compared to this howler from Entertainment Weekly: “She’s every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn’t women’s fiction. It’s everyone’s.” The Female Persuasion is the story of the complex relationship between Greer Kadetsky, an achieving but insecure millennial college student with a suppressed sense