Helen McClory, author of On the Edges of Vision, took to Twitter yesterday to challenge male book reviewers, writers, and readers to talk about contemporary women authors. The viral tweet elicited plenty of responses from male writers looking to demonstrate how in touch they are with contemporary female authors. Unfortunately, most of the responses failed at the simple task:
The responses to yesterday’s task was so fascinating – not least the sheer number of men who misread it, and tweeted lists of names instead.
Rumpus readers, you can do better. Leave a comment writing about, not listing, the works of a female author you have recently read.
4 responses
2015 has been the year of Maggie Nelson for me. Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, and The Argonauts have taken me on an emotional and intellectual journey that’s left me awe-struck and inspired. Her conversational intelligence is truly endearing. Can’t wait to see what else she has in store.
We read Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club a month and a half ago, and it’s extraordinary. She moves between love poems and these fierce, punch-you-in-the-neck poems, all while working in a landscape from California to Kentucky. It was also recently long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry, I believe.
Also, Jennifer Pashley’s The Scamp, from the Rumpus Book Club earlier this year, features a serial killer, two very messed up families, and adventures in a tiny travel trailer all in the rural south in a hell of a page-turner. I LOVED that book.
I might as well be writing a Last Book that I Loved essay about Courtney Maum’s novel I’M HAVING SO MUCH FUN HERE WITHOUT YOU. The guiding theme is observant humor with critiques of the French bourgeois, British stoicism, and of course American imperialism, both political imperialism and cultural imperialism. The cutting humor makes these critiques not only palatable but disguises this commentary as entertainment.
There is sentimentality in the novel, but it is never saccharine. The reader can empathize with Richard, which feels odd given that he is the adulterer who spends as much time pining for his former lover as he does for his wife Anne.
Maum’s choice of giving Richard the narrative voice means we see only his side of the affair. That leaves Anne seemingly cold, unemotional, and at least as much at fault for Richard’s affair as Richard. That choice feels similar to Adelle Waldman’s in THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. where the point of view is that of Nathaniel, the emotional transient who allows his heart to jump between women without consequence.
There are moments in Maum’s novel that might be just a little too satirical. Richard’s political art piece, War Wash, where he washes objects in gasoline in protest of the second Iraq war, at first feels like Chekov’s Gun ready to literally explode. He comes close, tossing some gasoline in a dryer before realizing it might blow up. But it never does, much to my own disappointment. Instead, the art world embraces the protest art, but it is unclear if Maum intends this result as a critique of the art world or a genuine success. For Richard and Anne, of course, it is a success, but by then the reader is hoping for them to see it as what it is.
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