Best of 2009 list excludes women writers

Publishers Weekly, that venerable (and some say dated) institution, has compiled its best books of 2009 list, and the top ten authors are all men. Interesting, given that the Booker and the Pulitzer (fiction) prizes both went to women this year. 

The list has resulted in predictably divided responses, with one camp arguing that perhaps no women-authored books were worthy of inclusion this year (justice is blind!), and the other asserting that this lineup is but the latest manifestation of the (often unconscious) gender bias in the literary world (you suck, PW).

Register your approval/howl of outrage at the WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) website.  You can also add your picks to their list of favorite books by women in 2009.   

Here’s the PW list in full: 

PW Top 10

Cheever: A Life

Blake Bailey (Knopf)

Bailey, who was given access to the journals Cheever kept throughout his life, shines a new light on Cheever’s literary output, making possible a fresh reappraisal of his achievement. In addition, Bailey offers up juicy, appalling, hilarious and moving anecdotes with verve, sensitivity and perfect timing.

Await Your Reply

Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

Chaon was a National Book Award finalist for Among the Missing, and this gripping account of colliding fates, the shifty nature of identity in today’s wired world and the limits of family is easily as good, if not better. It’s a literary page-turner, a cunningly plotted and utterly unputdownable novel.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

Neil Sheehan (Random House)

The development of the ICBM as a key part of the cold war arsenal wasn’t inevitable. In a splendidly reported and narrated account, Sheehan credits Air Force Gen. Bernard Schriever with the foresight and shrewdness to triumph over powerful Pentagon opponents and develop the crucial and terrifying weapon.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

An NBA finalist (we found him first), Mueenuddin delivers Pakistan through the stories of its people: yearning, struggling, plotting, in a heartbreaking story collection that is specific and universal all at the same time.

Big Machine

Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

LaValle’s brilliant second novel is unlike anything else out there: Ricky Rice, an ex-junkie African-American bus station porter, gets sucked into the bizarre machinations of a rural Vermont cult dedicated to studying “The Voice.” The narrator is blisteringly funny in chronicling his bizarre quest, providing both a blazing story and an astute commentary on race.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

In a thrilling narrative of scientific discovery and the spirit of an age, Holmes illustrates how the great scientists of Britain’s romantic era gripped the imaginations of their contemporaries and forever changed our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Stitches

David Small (Norton)

A graphic novel to bring us all back to comics, Small’s account of his terrifying childhood is amazing. The drawings of his parents and the small suffering boy who doesn’t quite understand until much, much later will pull you along panel by panel and tear your heart out.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford makes a brilliant case for the intellectual satisfactions of working with one’s hands—and why white-collar work is the assembly line of the new millennium. Crawford is catholic in his tastes (references range from Aristophanes to Dilbert), unsentimental and irresistible as he extols the virtues of “knowing how to do one thing really well.”

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Dyer creates an aging hipster grinding it out as a freelance journalist who pursues the girl instead of the story: covering the Biennale. Then, depending on your point of view, he either loses or finds himself when he’s sent to Varanasi. Dyer has many books to recommend him, but all you need is angst-ridden Jeff: funny, frank and utterly charming, and if you haven’t walked in his shoes, you’ll wish you had.

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

David Grann (Doubleday)

In this classic adventure tale, New Yorker writer Grann—who gets winded climbing the stairs of his New York City walkup—follows in the footsteps of early–20th-century Amazon jungle explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared along with his son on a 1925 expedition. Grann expertly and energetically weaves the story of Fawcett’s explorations with that of his own.

And for further reading, here’s a link to a NYT article about gender bias in the (American) theater world.

The resentful mother: Kate Pullinger’s A Little Stranger

In A Little Stranger, Kate Pullinger has our noses pressed against the window of a home where a young mother abandons her toddler son and husband for a one-way trip to Vegas.

On the face of it, there seems little redemption for Fran. She’s young, good-looking, and in possession of all her limbs and faculties. She lives in London, in her own flat. Her son Louis is a miracle when he’s well-behaved and an advertisement for contraception when throwing a tantrum—i.e., a normal toddler. Fran’s husband Nick is supportive and understanding despite his demanding job as a restaurant manager.

Fran loves her child, but finds she’s teetering between anger and resentment every moment when Louis isn’t asleep. She was once valued in her workplace and had taken pride in her career; motherhood, with its leaden heft of thanklessness and isolation, has led to a profound erosion of self-esteem. Fran feels she has lost herself to “nappies and boredom and rage and somedays it’s all [she] can do to walk down the street, to smile at Louis, to get up, get dressed, to breathe.”

Fran starts with small abandonments. She leaves Louis in at a grocery shop, and almost takes a bus home before turning back to get her son. She leaves Louis asleep in her apartment and goes for a walk; he’s still sleeping peacefully when she returns. But things fall apart when Fran reaches Heathrow with her passport and credit card. Whether she returns home from Vegas or not provides the suspense to this story.

Is motherhood really all that grueling, ask the unbelievers. Surely it is natural and instinctive for a mother to love her child. And how hard is it to slap on a diaper? To thrust a bottle into a puling mouth?

As anyone who’s been there knows, it is incredibly hard work—especially if there is no network of family and friends to cut the mother some slack. Nick and Fran have no family help, for Fran’s people live in Canada, while Nick’s parents are dead. Their friends are either busy with their own families or “childless and uncomprehending.”

This book should be declared mandatory reading for those planning to embark on parenthood without a regiment of babyminders. For the first-time parent, the baby often arrives with the force of a bomb, turning order into chaos overnight. Suddenly, the mother must perform a series of never-ending chores just as her sleep-deprived body is recovering from the trauma of childbirth—all with little recognition or acknowledgement. Pullinger’s intimate and utterly convincing account details it all—the physical pain of labor, childbirth, and nursing followed by the “special tedium” of caring for a small child, as well as the societal expectations that cast these tasks as desirable and natural while brooking no other vision of motherhood.

While this novel clearly focuses upon the grimmer aspects of parenting, Pullinger is quick to acknowledge the joys of being a mother—and the mothers who find the experience unconditionally rewarding. The key to A Little Stranger’s excellence lies in such fine balances; it is impossible to decide if Fran is more to be pitied or blamed. In another instance of Pullinger’s meticulous even-handedness, Fran befriends Leslie, a mother who’s lost her four-year-old daughter in a horrible, senseless accident. No other plot device could have diminished Fran’s troubles as effectively; that we still want to lead Fran to the nearest day-care centre rather than prison is testament to Pullinger’s skill at character development and her sympathetic treatment of motherhood.

But Fran’s issues, we learn, are deeper than they seem. Fran’s mother Ireni is an alcoholic who abandoned her own children. Ireni has her own tragic reasons for her addiction. It’s a situation where everything is wrong and no one is to blame.

These narrative developments left me somewhat unsatisfied. Perhaps Pullinger felt Fran’s actions required a compelling backstory if the book wasn’t to alienate its readers, but now that the metaphorical scales have been tipped in Fran’s favour, the balance that informs this discussion of motherhood is lost. I felt almost as though Pullinger was ducking the real issue—that being a mother, on its own terms, is challenging enough to drive some women to recklessness and self-destruction. It’s been described as society’s last taboo: the assumption that every woman will place her baby’s unending needs ahead of her own. A Little Stranger, for all its profound insights into motherhood, leaves this taboo stirred but not shaken.

(This review appears in the current issue of Eclectica.)

Then Again by Elyse Friedman

Seldom, I believe, has a writer been as poorly served by her book covers as Elyse Friedman. Waking Beauty, a darkly thoughtful exploration of the unfair advantage beauty bestows upon the (unworthy) recipient, had a pink-and-white and-blonde-and-sparkly cover, thus dooming chick-lit fans to chagrin even as readers of literary fiction averted their eyes. 

Then Again, with a smart, punchy title that can be interpreted in at least two different ways in the context of the  plot, written with a precision that would make a watchmaker glow, features a split image of a pallid, glowering girl on its cover. Everything about it–the girl’s faintly repellent gaze, the gimmicky shot , the shiny stiff paper of the cover– begs that the book be tossed aside. Which I would have undoubtedly done had I not LOVED Waking Beauty.

Tom Robbins once famously said, “It’s never to late to have a happy childhood”.  What if someone took that to heart–a someone with the wealth and connections of a successful Hollywood screenwriter–and decided to relive his childhood for an entire weekend, literally? The reluctant participants in the scheme include the screenwriter’s sisters Michelle (the novel’s narrator), and Marla.  The trio’s parents are dead (natch), but Joel the screenwriter has arranged for a faux mom and faux dad. The Toronto house the siblings grew up in twenty years ago is recreated down to the avocado green carpet and the struggling tree out front.

What a setup. And Friedman has the prose skills and the sheer balls to carry it off.  The narrator’s voice alternates between syrupy sentimentality and hard-edged observation, and this pairing works beautifully with the theme of revisited adolesence. The novel’s pacing is impeccable, skittering between past and present till the two fuse in an explosive climax. The delight of such a book lies as much in the big idea as in the tiny details; I was reminded on more than one occasion of the film Goodbye Lenin .

I leave you with this image from the novel. “…Canadian movies, publicly funded and carefully crafted–like chilled white pie crusts, pinched and perfect…”  I’m going to tear off the miserable front cover of Then Again  and replace it with a gilded portrait of Friedman.  

This review-ish piece is my contribution to John’s Read a Canadian Book Month challenge.

The foothills of Mount TBR

Here’s some of the fiction I plan to read over the next couple of months.

The shelf happens to summarize my literary interests pretty handily. There’s South Asian/post-colonial writing–Sarif, Malladi, Danticat , Thapa, Ali  etc.  Lots of Canadians–Friedman, Gowdy, Manguel and more.  Some American heavy-hitters, including Ford and Russo. Many women writers.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter has been on my list for over a decade.  

My reviewing assignments aren’t included in this collection. Also not included: my TBR non-fiction, crime, fantasy, sci-fi, YA and kid-lit books.

Yes, I have a reading disorder, but I’m in the fine company of fellow mountaineers Rose and Batty.

Weekend roundup of literary tragedies.

The  past literary week brought nothing but misery. First: the wonderful and amazing site Readerville has ceased its existence. I am indebted to Readerville for many reasons, but most for introducing me to E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series. I’m going to write an ode to the books one of these days, but for now: Benson is to P. G. Wodehouse as wine is to Welch’s.  The raw material is the same–upper-class Britons in the 1920s and 1930s–but Benson is more subtle, more acerbic, and far more addictive. If you are an oxygen breather who speaks English, you ought not miss this series.

I was a lurker on the Readerville site for the most part, and it was a privilege to eavesdrop on a group of intelligent, articulate people all incorrigibly obsessed with books.  The site’s demise has halved my daily surfing time. 

I also finished  the new Sookie Stackhouse novel “Dead and Gone“  this weekend. The 9th book of Charlaine Harris’s vampire-meets-bonkable blonde series marks the point where I’ve officially quit the habit. Dead and Gone is not much more than a pile-up of corpses and perfunctory sex, and the prose has as much life as do Sookie’s vampire suitors. Any faith I might have had in Amazon.com’s ratings has been destroyed by the four stars readers awarded this pap.   

 

And finally, David Eddings, author of the The Belgariad and The Malloreon series, died last week. In spite of the predictable plot, the spineless female non-sorceress characters, and the not-so-hidden similarities with The Lord of Rings, these  books are beloved to me, and as much a part of my teenage years as Clearasil and Air Supply.

David Eddings. Picture Copyright: Ballantine Books

Now that Eddings has reached the great big Faldor’s Farm in the sky, I am going to re-read all ten books in memorium of a writer who never failed to entertain his readers.