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| Don't patronise popular fiction by women I'm fed up with seeing some of our best novelists written off as 'chick lit' – you don't see the same belittling line taken with male writersUntil May, I had two jobs. I was a writer, with three novels out, and I was an editor at one of the biggest publishers in the UK. I was lucky enough to work with many bestselling authors, but eventually writing won out, and now I am a crazy person sitting in my pyjamas eating jaffa cakes and wondering from where the crying baby in the basement flat suddenly materialised.When I was an editor, my books were in the genre known for some reason as "commercial women's fiction". We – my colleagues and fellow publishers – loved these books and knew the truth, which is that books bought by women prop up the book trade, and that we should be proud both of the product itself and the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read. Now I've left, I'm looking at it from the other side – and what I see alarms me. I am passionate about this kind of writing, but it seems to me to come in for an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment which I rarely see applied to novels by men in the same vein. Books – both fiction and non-fiction – reflecting women's lives, whether young or old, are labelled. Hence "chick-lit": often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance.It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene. Take anything from Toby Young's How To Lose Friends and Alienate People to The Contortionist's Handbook to Toby Litt or David Nicholls's One Day, or the works of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem. Often these books are far more sensationalist than those by the authors' female counterparts: about how many women the protagonists have slept with, how many drugs they've done, what a crazy nihilistic time they're having in London / New York. I'm not saying they're bad books: Jonathan Lethem is one of my favourite writers and One Day is probably my book of the year. I'm just saying they aren't belittled and dismissed in the same way on the grounds of their subject-matter.The truth is, women happily read books (and watch films and TV) aimed primarily at men. That's because women buy more and read more, full stop. They read thrillers, travel books, biographies – and yet the majority of these books are marketed for men. Women know they'll like it and give it a go. They'll happily pick up a copy of Porno, with a plastic female sex doll on the front. But men rarely try women's fiction, because they've been conditioned to think they can't pick up a book with a pink cover.It's a real shame, because if you want to read someone who reflects women (and men's) lives with authenticity and sharp observation, someone whose books will absorb you and make you cry, there are so many options. You can do no better than Lisa Jewell or Emily Barr, or the high priestess of "commercial women's fiction", Marian Keyes. For me, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is note-perfect, one of the best books of the last 10 years. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada is like a thriller of first-job hell, it's so tautly written. And Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes) is a genius. Her books are totally gripping, beautifully written, heartbreaking and hilarious. But I have yet to see a review of her which reflects this, except in magazines like Heat, which takes its commercial fiction seriously. And don't get me started on the criminally undervalued women writers of the previous half-century: Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, even Joanna Trollope, who I think should be taught for A-level, she's so good.It amuses me when people say, "Oh, it's a bit like Jane Austen", to denote a writer of romantic novels or sharp-eyed stories about mousy young women (Barbara Pym is always being compared to Jane Austen, I guess because they both write about spinsters. She's nothing like her.) There's something a little patronising about the tone of it, whereas books by young men are compared to older male writers as if it's a coronation, a welcoming to the literary canon. And quite often I'm left wanting to go – huh? I don't get it. There's room for both. And I know which I'd prefer to read.FictionHarriet Evansguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Klein turns focus to climate change fight Naomi Klein says her next book will examine the environmental movement that has galvanized young people the same way the anti-corporate movement did 10 years ago. cbc.ca |
Manhood: the Rise and Fall of the Penis by Mels van Driel A paean to the penis offers much unintentional hilarity, says Leo BenedictusAfter more than 25 years as a consultant urologist in Holland, Mels van Driel's passion for his work remains undiminished. As does his taste for making bawdy quibbles about it. "In the last few decades," he sniggers on page one, "tens of thousands of penises and testicles have been through my hands." Which makes him just the man to write this lighthearted gambol through the uses and abuses of the penis and its unjustly overlooked companion organs.And yet, even when one has finished the task of absolving him and his translator from their many sins of style and punctuation, Van Driel's book remains, by any normal measure, a botched job. "I lay absolutely no claim to completeness or scholarly rigour," he announces at the outset, though most readers could have worked this out for themselves. Where, for instance, is the section on venereal disease? Why is there almost nothing on the penis's most frequent function, as a conduit of urine?And as for rigour, well I am no urologist, but I do doubt whether researchers really found that the "average diameter of the fully erect penis was approximately 121mm". That is nearly five inches or about the same size, in cross section, as a compact disc. A simple mistake, I'm sure, substituting diameter for circumference, but such things ought to matter in this book.As should the author's credibility. Yet Van Driel undermines himself badly by straying into the kind of breezy generalising that ought to be beneath the dignity of a scientist. "Urologists have the reputation of being the most intelligent of all surgical specialists," he tells us with a straight face. (Do they really? I hear the rest of the profession asking.) But worse than these deficiencies is the fact that Manhood has no discernible purpose, no thrust. The cover's (rather funny) promise of a tale of "Rise and Fall" is misleading; the penis, as depicted here, is quite without an arc. Every chapter seems unconnected with its neighbour, as do many of the paragraphs. In the middle of a discussion on eunuchs, say, Van Driel invariably stops to tell us something fascinating that he's just remembered – a Greek legend about castration, perhaps – and then never returns to his original point.But then what was the point? If there is no argument or story, why is all this information here? "Because it relates to testicles" is not a reason and yet "because it relates to testicles", I suspect, is the only reason that Van Driel ever needs. Instead of carrying us with him – as a cultural history, a medical primer or an extended anecdote might – his study simply reads like three books shuffled. Which is why it is actually such a marvellous read. Though Van Driel surely did not write the book as a shambolic introduction to his own obsession, read this way, it is a joy. I defy anyone, for instance, on encountering a section titled "The smell of the scrotum", "Legal action against men without balls", "Misunderstandings about the glans" not to read on.And what fun there is when we do. For all the laughs that our guide courts deliberately, it is the many more that happen accidentally that make him such good company. Such as when he remarks, with every appearance of surprise, that "relatively little attention has been paid to the glans in poetry". Or later, on "the smell and taste of sperm": "According to reliable sources, it is not unusual for young women today in a get-together in the pub to admit whether they 'swallow' or not. They're not talking about E, amphetamines or suchlike," he adds, with choice redundancy, "but whether or not they swallow sperm."I do sometimes doubt the veracity of Van Driel's facts or, at least, his assiduity in checking them. And yes, the book contains some lulls – the chapter on vasectomies and infertility, for one, felt very long indeed. But provided you have the sense to take some breaks and skips bits, Manhood is an eccentric delight. And more than that: a monument, though rickety, to science and its driving force, obsession.Health, mind and bodyLeo Benedictusguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: Late Midlife Crisis, Prompted by a Violent Encounter Over the years, in a succession of novels, Anne Tyler has created a male character instantly recognizable as a distinct species despite individual variations. feeds.nytimes.com |
Magazine Preview: James Patterson Inc. How a genre writer has transformed book publishing. feeds.nytimes.com |