Books About Bleakness/Pain Are for Women

Whitney Pastorek at the Tournament of Books on why she hated Garner:

Look, I’m not afraid to admit my weakness here: I think the fact that I hated Garner means, in a lot of ways, I’m a failure as a woman. Yes, there is clearly something wrong with my chromosomes, because I couldn’t get behind this romantic celebration of bleakness and pain, not even for a page.

Granted, this is being said tongue-in-cheek, but how many manly male authors can you think of whose books celebrate bleakness/pain? Jose Saramago, Ernest Hemingway, Alberto Moravia. There's three.

I guess more to the point is the idea that certain books are "for women," or that women "get" them more because women are more in tune with certian things. I suppose I'd buy that for a book about menopause, but so long as we're talking about things like pain and sensitivity, it's really an amazing cop-out to say you didn't like a book because it's not right for your gender type. People of both genders, with a little exertion, can understand these concepts just fine.

In fact, I'd say that if you're a reader and you're not willing to extend yourself a little bit to understand the emotions being brought to bear in a work of literature (especially because you're just not the right gender for that kind of stuff), then you're missing out.

But, Pastorek does have three "non-gendered" reasons for prefering Saturday to Garner. They are:

1) I wasn’t bored out of my skull, 2) I didn’t want to punch any/all of the main characters in the mouth, and 3) It manages to be both escapist and necessary, both personally familiar and yet completely foreign, both deeply emotional and yet almost surgically clean.

So, ignoring 1) and 2), which don't really explain anything other than that Postorek couldn't think up three reasons, let's look to 3).

Escapist and necessary. I'd submit that a book about the plight of women in a turn-of-the-century Quaker village is quite escapist. Garner's setting/characters certainly took me out of my own life. Reading it, for me, was very much an escape from my reality. And necessary? Certainly, seeing as it dissects gender roles and preconceptions that continue to this day (see above, under "Pastorek").

Familiar and foreign. Again, I can't see how Garner isn't both of these. As Pastorek pointed out, it's all about feelings, which makes it quite familiar. (Assuming most of us are familiar with feelings. I am.) As for foreignness, see the above, especially the part about the turn-of-the-century Quaker village.

Deeply emotional/surgically clean. Emotions have already been spoken for. As for the surgical cleanliness, yes, I'd say that Garner fits that bill. In fact, I'd say that the prose is a cut, cubed, polished slab of granite. I can see no seams in it, not one place where I could cut or insert a word. Try as I might, I couldn't pry it open with a crowbar. Garner is certainly one of the most surgically precise books I've read in the past six months. So clean and free from debris, in fact, that I'd feel better eating off it than off my kitchen table.

Comments

[Richard]

I'm more interested in how Saturday managed to satisfy those three criteria for her... talk about tedious.