...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:
The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.
The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."
See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.
I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.
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At least the good Dr B, secure within her ivied walls, has been fortunate enough to avoid exposure to the "Twilight" phenomenon - a series of books written by one Stephenie [sic] Meyer about a very glamorous vampire and his hapless, not-yet-undead girlfriend. This series (and each book is a doorstop) stretches to four books so far and has sold approximately one flobberty-jillion copies, mainly to - just guess! - women, teenagers and eternal romantics who are enchanted by the chaste vampire love between Edward and Bella. The plot twist, such as it is, is that the relationship remains unconsummated until the fourth book (maybe the third? the Threadkiller has no intention of ever getting that far) - the author, a practising Mormon, has in essence produced four doorstops (a fifth in the works) on the subject of True Love Waits, and yet the girls buy it in droves, because it's soooo romantic. But even the Threadkiller was a teenager once, and she knows that what drives this cult is not the tepid prose stylings of Stephenie Meyer, but the infinitely more creative power of the fevered teenage imagination (she has not the strength to face the prospect of the fanfic she is sure exists, but she's confident that chaste vampire love is not on the menu in many cases). It's just a shame that Stephenie Meyer is getting rich off it.
The Threadkiller is pretty sure that if you asked any of the dead-serious goth kids on Queen St how they feel about "Twilight", their answers would involve hysterical, derisive laughter and possibly a duffing up.
Dr B also forgets to mention that women will read anything shilled on Oprah. The Threadkiller knows this from her contacts in the library world, when the day after the episode ends the system will be flooded with demands for the latest title, of which the cash-strapped, out-of-the-Oprah-loop system has purchased exactly six to be distributed among ninety-eight branches.
For what it's worth, I've just read two Cdn novels back to back that involved scrappy heroines in period costume undertaking long journeys through trackless portions of the Canadian wilds. As a result the two have completely merged and I can't remember for the life of me which one was running where and why. I know the voyage through the unbounded hinterland is a time-honoured staple of CanLit (Nature's Inhumanity, etc), but I'm beginning to wonder whether a little less travel might not, in fact, be beneficial to stories in general. Look, Alice Munro's characters never feel compelled to hare all over hell's half acre snaring rabbits, it seems to me.
Perhaps we could compile some kind of hitlist of plot devices never to be used again? That wouldn't solve the turgid prose problem, though.
Spirit of the West is irredeemably middlebrow, and will attempt to rise to the challenge of defending "women's fiction". I am convinced that there are actually good authors out there who tag themselves (or are tagged) as "women's writers", and have corresponding blurbs attached to their covers, which don't quite do justice to the actual book. Off the top of my head, I can think of several, residing on my bookshelf in which female lead characters use the front parts of their brains, where actual THINGS happen, as distinct from (though not in exclusion from) emotions or relationships, and which are not necessarily life-affirming or luminous but are sometimes funny. Hmm, let me see ... The Quality of Life Report (Meghan Daum); Rise and Shine (Anna Quindlen); On the Side of the Angels (Cristina Bartolomeo - though her other stuff features fey, wistful narrators who give me hives); A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley); As the Crow Flies (Anne-Marie MacDonald - though Fall on Your Knees was laden with so much domestic tragedy that I actually started laughing after the umpteenth stillbirth and child marriage); The Post-Birthday World and We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver, who is actually a girl - the latter book gave me such creeps I literally cannot re-read it); Intuition ( Allegra Goodman); and The Office of Desire (Martha Moody).
Concerning Twilight - I am a tremendous fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see above re irredeemably middlebrow), but I will acknowledge that it has inspired some of the worst fan fiction in western history (as distinct from - oh, never mind). It looks like Stephenie Meyer has figured out a way to make megabucks from it.
(I think there's at least one cultural studies thesis asking to be written, comparing the portrayal of vampires and gay men in mainstream women's fiction of the 90s and 00s. In both cases, they're supposed to be well-dressed, urbane, debonair, decorative, and a key accoutrement of the young woman about town. I would love to read a novel featuring a vampire or gay man (or ideally, a gay vampire a la Ann Rice) who is a fat slob in saggy sweatpants parking his butt in front on Spike TV on weeknights and eating Doritos out of the bag).
Ooh, plot devices never to be used? Let me get us started:
-growing up poor in the maritimes
-geographic journeys which are also spiritual journeys
-reunions with estranged mothers
-anything which addresses the question "can you ever really go home again?"
My least favourite trope is the multiple narrative thang, where you get endless intercutting of present day heroine with parallel doomed ancestor or precursor or whatever (did A.S. Byatt kick all that off with Possession , or was it already old hat?), or short stories dressed up to 'resonate' with each other (eg The Hours). (An old-fashioned Dickensian family saga with many subplots or changes of personnel is a different beast, I quite enjoy those.) Three stories is less of a plot than one: if you can't commit to a novel-length plot, don't write a novel.
Re Twilight, if it is indeed a stealth form of abstinence education, I suspect the message may be a bit ambiguous. Are youth supposed to Just Say No to sex outside of marriage (very right-wing and repressive), or Just Say No to sex with bloodsucking undead fiends (quite reasonable life advice if you ask me)?
On the contrary, Bella is mad to do it with the bloodsucking undead, but it is the glittering Edward who refuses to give in until after they are married. (The woman is definitely the temptress in the series - check out the Twilight cover art if you if you don't believe the TK.) The Threadkiller might have to break down and look up that particular chapter, because she's really rather curious about how one accomplishes a vampire marriage, and she also isn't clear on whether Bella gets vampirized at the same time or whether they just ... do it. However she is told by reliable sources that the much-anticipated consummation (imagine wading through 900+ pages for the naughty bits) is achieved off-camera, as it were, in a swooning fade-to-black manner. (And where's the fun in that? asks the TK.) A vampire baby is conceived as a result (TK is frankly perishing to find out how this is explained - there's a research paper in there somewhere, Sexual Reproduction in the Undead) and despite the fact that it is literally devouring her from the inside, Bella struggles on with the pregnancy - which is where the series is derailed, as a draft of the fifth book was leaked to the internet and the vampire-baby plot twist is being interpreted as a thinly-veiled anti-abortion polemic. Or so the Threadkiller is told.
I cannot tell you how glad I am to have heard it here first, without first trying to read any of the Twilight series. Which I might easily have done, as a big fan of the original -- still very scary and very creepy -- Dracula. Sounds to me like that Stephanie Meyer would faint dead away if she tried reading Bram Stoker.
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