There I was, working on my latest rant against the Bush administration, and trolling the Huff for inspiration, when what should I come across, but Erica Jong's complaint about the lack of respect women writers (read "novelists") are getting today, compared with the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Foer. Of course I scanned the page for my name, and didn't find it, but okay. I've seen this complaint before and wondered about it before. So I did a little investigating. Of the Pulitzers awarded since 1970 (thirty-five in all, since a Pulitzer in fiction wasn't awarded for three of those years), twelve have been won by women. Since 2000, three out of eight have been won by women. As for the National Book Award, women have also won twelve since 1970, including four women out of six since 2000 (the award for 2007 has not been made yet). Here are the names of the twenty-four female winners of either the Pulitzer or the National Book Award since 1970:
Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Alison Lurie, Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, myself, E Annie Proulx, Carol Shields, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Robinson, Geraldine Brooks, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Lee Settle, Ellen Gilchrist, Andrea Barrett, Alice McDermott, Susan Sontag, Julia Glass, Shirley Hazzard, and Lily Tuck (Alice Walker and E Annie Proulx won both awards).
A look at other awards (such as the NB award for first novel, which has only been given intermittently) and nominations (which are shown on the NBA website but not on the Pulitzer website) reveals that women are far from missing in those categories, too. But Jong mentions two of the winners (Proulx and Barrett) only to dismiss their claims to womanhood (they are writing about male subjects). However, Jean Stafford didn't write about male subjects, and neither did Eudora Welty nor Carol Shields. The Color Purple is not about a male subject, nor is Charming Billy or In America. A Thousand Acres takes a "male subject" ("King Lear"), but retells it from a female point of view.
I would suggest that many of these authors have been celebrated with the same respect as that accorded to Franzen and Foer. To pull a comparison out of my hat, let's talk about The Corrections, Franzen's novel that created a big stir in 2001. Yes, it won the Natonal Book Award. But the real reason for the big stir is that Franzen disdained, or seemed to disdain, Oprah. There were four women authors that same year who did not disdain Oprah -- they sold plenty of copies and found plenty of readers, but they were too polite to be big news.
I bring all this up not to take Erica Jong to task (well, not only to take Erica Jong to task), but because I can't let an occasion pass for pointing out that American literature, and especially the American novel, is and has been a diverse and exciting world for the past forty years. We women novelists do not need other women novelists to be looking past us at the men, and somehow forgetting what we have tried and what we have accomplished, both individually and as a group. Just about a year ago now, I blogged on the New York Times website about the results of a Times poll of literary types, asking the question "What is the greatest novel of the last 25 years?" While Beloved garnered the most votes, few other women appeared among the top twenty-five. This seemed so strange to me that I inquired about the polling method. I was told that the request for a vote went out to an equal number of male and female recipients, but not all of the ballots were returned -- 69% of the returned ballots were from men and 31% were from women. Imagine if numbers of registered Republicans and Democrats were equal, but 69% of Republicans voted and only 31% of Democrats. Talk about war without end! But it would also be the case that the Dems would have only themselves to blame for their lack of power and influence. This suggests to me that women writers, while they have been busy writing, have not been busy either filling slots on awards committees or lobbying for influence. That 69/31 split is similar to the split in the Pulitzers and the NBAs between male and female recipients.
The fact is that women form the biggest audience for serious fiction -- all Americans read fewer books than they once did, but mature men have shown the biggest decline and mature women the smallest decline. Women tend to read all kinds of books and they also tend to write all kinds of books. Alice Hoffman, to mention only one woman I've been thinking of recently, has written three children's books, six young adult novels, and nineteen adult novels, not one of which has a masculine subject. It has always been the case in American literature that women's books sold lots of copies (think of Uncle Tom's Cabin) while men's books were much esteemed (think of Moby Dick). When Edith Wharton drove over to Henry James's place to show off the car she'd bought with the proceeds of her latest novel, James responded by bringing out the wheelbarrow he earned with the proceeds of his. But who is known as "The Master"?
To base one's estimation of the health of the American novel on awards and publicity does all women novelists a disservice. Novels are sometimes acclaimed and sometimes make news, but really novels move through society like a virus -- silently passed from hand to hand, reliant upon word of mouth, proliferating by means of social gatherings (book clubs, say). Their power isn't always evident, but it is there.
I'm going to let the last bit of my reply to Jong speak for itself: Here are a few authors you might try, Erica, not in any particular order: Valerie Martin, Gish Jen, Susan Cheever, Francine Prose, Diane Johnson, Sue Miller, Linda Hogan, Louse Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Marianne Wiggins, Joy Williams, Ursula K. Leguin, Amy Tan, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Ann Beattie, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Gail Godwin, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Richards Shreve, Alice Greenway. And that's only a beginning. If you think we haven't been doing anything, you are wrong wrong wrong.
