_______________ ARE MEN BETTER WRITERS THAN WOMEN? BY LAURA MILLER (06/03/98)

I read both Francine Prose's article in this month's Harper's and Laura Miller's piece in Salon. Miller is right to continue the discussion with the old question of framing and the myth of the Great American Novel (as if there could ever be such an entity). What concerns me regarding women writers (being one myself) is that I often suspect there are women writing books with the same "scope" as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, but they may not be getting published. Publishers are as much to blame for the "narrowness" of women's subjects as are the critics who blame women writers for staying in the drawing room. Publishers seem to see America's women writers as a group that should only deliver a prescribed type of story -- a predetermined, "marketable" genre just as movie directors are expected to deliver explosions and car crashes in order to get financing and distribution. If a woman is not a Judith Krantz, an Anne Tyler (though her work is quite fine) or a Mary Higgins Clark, she need not send her manuscript to an agent or a publishing company. How can a woman writing "experimental" fiction or even "epic" novels get published? We are kept to the strictures of the kitchen, the bedroom and the child-rearing duties in print by publishing companies afraid to give the public a different viewpoint, even though we took those aprons off a long time ago. -- Jill Stephenson While I agree with much of what Miller writes in her response to the important Harper's essay by Francine Prose, it fizzles toward the end. Miller supports Virginia Woolf's plaint (which Prose cites in her essay) that men's fiction is considered more important than women's because they write about war and women write about emotions. The logic: War equals epic, feelings equal trivial stuff. Then Miller says, but let's face it, the women Prose cites in her essay as being the great women writers -- Gaitskill, Eisenburg and Munro -- hardly make one think "epochal." But isn't the whole point Woolf was trying to make that our definition of "epic" must be reexamined? Miller contradicts herself by, on the one hand, agreeing with Woolf and then, on the other, saying none of our women writers are epochal (presumably because they write about feelings). I don't follow. Then Miller says, Hey folks, the real problem is that we in America are all chasing the dream of the Great American Novel. Women, Miller seems to say, are scared off by this, so they stick to safe stuff, lurking on the peripheries of greatness, while men, bold and daring (such warriors!), try for the golden ring. I think the point Prose was trying to make is that there's no inherent difference in male and female styles. Prose brilliantly employs a gender-blind test, citing passages from well-known writers and saying, "OK, who wrote this, a boy or a girl?" Truly, it is hard to tell. It's the readers who put on the "pink or blue" glasses. And don't even get me going on Miller's simple-minded dismissal of Alice Munro, arguably the finest short story writer of our time. -- Laurie Mason Thanks for Laura Miller's excellent commentary on the recent Harper's article by Francine Prose about the neglect of women writers. I was confused, though, by the path of Miller's argument. Critics, Miller says, too often label female writers as being concerned with the "intimate and familial" while praising male writers for gravitating toward "grander, epic themes." Miller seems to agree with Virginia Woolf that a novel about people in a drawing room can be just as important as a novel about war, but then she accuses American women novelists of failing to write "big, grand books that tackle social forces, ideas and politics as well as the provinces of the heart." These American women novelists will never write the Great American Novel, Miller argues, because they have shrunken ambition; Miller urges them to write the kind of "fat, brainy, sweeping novels" she confesses to having a weakness for. At this point Miller seems to join ranks with the critics she derides at the outset. Surely Miller believes that writers who write small novels don't necessarily suffer from shrunken ambition; more likely, they're compressing large ideas onto small canvases, or cultivating small plots of ground rather than attempting to conquer vast tracts of it. The problem is that when women write small novels, critics too often assume they've done so because they're incapable of writing anything larger, whereas when a man writes a small novel the critics credit him with having done so by choice. I believe women writers do tend to write smaller books, because unlike boys -- who are raised to be self-confident and assertive, to puff themselves out, to swagger -- girls, for better or worse, are raised to be unassuming and perceptive and empathetic. As a result they make more mature, sensitive, circumspect fiction writers -- writers who don't inflict hundreds of pages of prose on a reader unless they're sure the reader will be as interested in the material as they are. In the final analysis, the problem seems to be that writers, female or male, who write short novels, or short stories, are less likely to be acclaimed as "important" in a culture that values the prodigious effort, the big production, the blockbuster -- a culture that gives the Oscars to "Titanic" rather than to, say, "Six Degrees of Separation." But this shouldn't matter. The compensation for writers of small novels is that these novels, if brilliant and penetrating enough, may one day be included in the collective tapestry of fictions that will surely comprise the Great American Novel -- for America is too vast and complex, too heterogeneous and disparate, to be comprehended and encompassed by one writer in one novel, no matter how fat, brainy and sweeping that novel is. -- Stephen Lovely Iowa City, Iowa Laura Miller might treat the search for the "Great American Novel" with something other than bemused indifference if she had more reliable maps. Authors of either gender write because they have something to say. I see no evidence that top female writers are intimidated by their male colleagues. On the other hand, there is much to suggest that, thanks to their bias in favor of near-contemporary work, most critics make do with a worm's eye view of American letters. From the modern vantage point, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison loom large, but Richard ("Risk Pool") Russo and Richard ("Red Sky at Morning") Bradford do not. Blathering about what constitutes summer reading or trying vainly to establish a relationship between a book's greatness and its heft are symptoms of a need to spend time watching cloud formations. Step back for a minute: How many junior high schools in this country are named for Mark Twain? The search for the Great American Novel is not an expedition to Atlantis, or a fruitless quest for the Holy Grail. With all due respect to Mailer, Roth, Updike and their acolytes, the GAN has already been written. It's called "Huckleberry Finn," and it's been trouncing pretenders to the throne for more than a century. Possibly only John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (another golden oldie) comes within hailing distance of that masterpiece. Something yet to be written may approach that summit, but we won't know until it stands the test of time. In any case, whether its author has a Y chromosome won't matter at all. -- Patrick O'Hannigan N E X T+P A G E+| More on men vs. women writers