The Larger Canvas

But as for women writers being just as great and just as important as men, I’ll believe it when we see a woman write something on the scale of “Grapes of Wrath” or “Anna Karenina” or “Crime and Punishment” or “Metamorphosis” or “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or “The Corrections” or “Infinite Jest” or “Huckleberry Finn” or “The Tin Drum” or “Beautiful Losers” or “The Power and the Glory” or “100 Years of Solitude” or “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” or “A Passage to India” or “Heart of Darkness” or “The Heart of the Matter” or “Catcher in the Rye” or “1984” or “Ulysses” or “The Satanic Verses” or “A Bend in the River” or “The Stranger”.

No woman has written a book that is as good or important as any of them.  Not one.

One will, first of all, argue that “Sense and Sensibility” or something else by Jane Austen or George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte is just as good.  Or that something by Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrison or Doris Lessing… whatever.

Of course, one will argue that it is only recently that women have been allowed to write, and even more recently that they have been encouraged or enabled.  Well, I’m open-minded.  Maybe in a hundred years, we’ll get our first really brilliant novel from a women.  On the other hand, it really hasn’t been that difficult for women to write since the late 19th century.  Oh, but they had to clean, and cook, and look after children.  Fair enough.  Most men had to hold jobs and feed their families and pay rent.  But not all.  And not all.

The irony is that I would have thought there would be.  I always thought it was possible.  I just haven’t seen it.  Even Alice Munro, a brilliant writer, never moves along a canvas as big as “Grapes of Wrath” or “The Satanic Verses” or “The Pearl”.  Hilary Mantel is brilliant– in non-fiction (“Wolf Hall”).  But her work too is constrained by the margins of Cromwell’s personal life.  Margaret Atwood has tried, in “The Handmaid’s Tale”, but the TV series is better than her book.  Maile Meloy is terrific on a scale of miniatures, and sometimes that matters more.   Elena Ferrante?  Very, very good, but, again:  relationships.   Toni Morrison?  Vastly over-rated.  Vastly.  Alice Walker?  Dreary.  I found both of them boring.  Harper Lee?  Here’s a deep dark secret many astute people conversant with the literary arts know is true but will never say: “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not well-written.  It’s a good story, it’s very accessible, and it touches on all the liberal tropes, and it’s even important,  but it is, in fact, poorly written.  It is contrived and sometimes mawkish, (as when Boo Radley and Scout cuddle on the porch swing at the end).  Joyce Carol Oates?  Brilliant writer technically.  What a waste.  Doris Lessing?  Iris Murdoch?  Pretty good writers, but, again, no match for Greene or Hemingway or Rushdie or Franzen or Dostoevsky or Kafka.

I have considered the argument that just because women’s books are more concerned with family and relationships and feelings does not make them inferior to men’s books about wars and politics and power and relationships.   Family and relationships are just as important and just as interesting as the War of 1812.  The two realms are different but equal, it is argued.  I dispute that.  Nothing in a realm that includes politics and war and philosophy excludes relationships and family.  But a world of relationships and family that does not expand to consider political power, history, war, existence, time, and so on, is just not as interesting or important.

[whohit]The Larger Canvas[/whohit]