March 20, 2013
The following essay ran on 3/20/13 at The Rumpus.
On Being Part of the Problem:
A Personal Response to the VIDA Report
1. 23.5%
I’ve done the math and it turns out that I’m part of the problem. That’s an awful realization. I can’t even tell you how heartbroken I am.
Since 2009, the grassroots organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has taken on the enormous task of addressing the deep-rooted and endemic sexism in the publishing world. Its primary goal is to “explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities,” and it does great work.
VIDA is best known, I think, for its blistering annual report, called simply “the Count.” The Count looks at the gender disparities in some of our better-known periodicals, and the 2012 edition is discouraging to say the least. Instead of cherry picking some convenient statistics from the Count to cite here in support of some argument, or make myself look good, I’ll simply share the numbers for the four publications they analyze and which I currently subscribe to.
In 2012:
- Harper’s reviewed 54 books by men and 11 by women (17%)
- The New Yorker reviewed 583 by men and 218 by women (27%)
- New York Review of Books reviewed 316 by men and 89 by women (22%)
- New York Times Book Review reviewed 488 by men and 237 by women (33%)
These statistics are sobering. They’re also indictments—calls for those of us who review books to look at our own habits, biases, and presumptions. Inspired by the 2012 edition of The Count, I went back and looked at my own history as a book critic, and what I found was tremendously embarrassing. I was both surprised and mortified by what I discovered.
Since 1996, I have reviewed 280 books for various publications.[1] The complete list can be found at my web site. I’m ashamed to say that of those 280, only 66 were written or edited by women. That’s a dismal 23.5%.
And it gets worse, simply because I should know better.
Before doing this self-evaluation, I would have said that I’m a champion of and activist for literature by women. I’ve successfully pitched and written up radical books like Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism by Patricia Hill Collins. I graduated from a college that went co-ed shortly before I arrived and which maintains a proud, feminist tradition. I love the fact that my undergrad degree in philosophy and religion was so steeped in feminist thought, and I continue to reread (and, now, teach) essays like Linda Nochlin’s classic “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” I’ve written a fair amount about my own white, male privileges. My wife’s doctoral dissertation was on women composers and their lack of representation on concert programs, for crying out loud. I’m someone who gets it—or so I thought. The glaring distinction between my (deluded, as it turns out) self-image as a progressive, pro-feminist critic and the reality of my track record is extremely upsetting.
The big question I face now is: What can I do to change this? I don’t want to be part of the problem any longer.
Again, the VIDA report raises two separate concerns: (1) the number of book reviews written by women, and (2) the number of books written by women that get reviewed. In my own writing life, I plan to address both of these. Please understand that I’m not out to tell anyone else what to do. Every critic and book-review editor and publisher has to remain true to his or her own vision.[2] My concern here is the personal responsibility I feel.
2. The Number of Book Reviews Written by Women
It would appear, on the surface, that the number of book reviews written by women is beyond my immediate control. Sure, I understand that every review I write will take precious and steadily diminishing review space away from a woman who could have contributed, but I’m not going to stop reviewing books in the hope that my assigning editors will hire more women. I wish they would hire more women, of course, but I plan to keep reviewing books too. One terrific potential consequence of the VIDA report, I hope, is that it will encourage every editor who assigns review coverage to split the review assignments equally among women and men. Were that to happen, it would present me with fewer opportunities to review books in print, which on one hand would be disappointing and financially problematic, but it would also provide me with more new voices to read, and I love the sound of that. A healthier literary community is good for everybody, even if it costs critics like me a bit of work and a few bucks.
I’ve also recently accepted the position of contributing editor at the new Philadelphia Review of Books. I don’t have a firm job description or much authority or anything like that, and it’s unpaid, but I will attempt to use that platform to assign more reviews to women writers.
3. The Number of Books Written by Women that Get Reviewed
Although I don’t review nearly as many books as I used to, this is where I can make an immediate impact. My book-review assignments come two ways: either a book-review editor suggests a title, or I find a book that appeals to me and I pitch around a review.
When an editor does contact me about reviewing a book, I almost always say yes. It’s very rare that I turn down paying work.[3] Historically, I have had little say in what books my editors have asked me to review. The vast majority of the time, I’m asked to review books written by men, but I can certainly better communicate with my editors about my preferences and about my desire to review more books by women. I once did just that with a now-departed book review editor at the Believer, but even then, for some reason, it took months for the two of us to come up with a good assignment. It ended up being a review of Anne Carson’s Nox.
When I find a book that appeals to me, I like to pitch it around to a few different book-review editors. That’s precisely how I now plan to address the gender disparity in my own reviewing record. Thanks to the wake-up call of the VIDA report, I will actively look for and pitch more reviews of books by women. It is a responsibility I’m glad to take on, even if I’m doing so a bit too far along in my career.[4] I can’t guarantee that my newspaper editors will accept more pitches for reviews of books by women, but I will certainly try harder to bring worthy titles to their attention.
4. Looking Forward
One last sticking point comes to mind, and I really don’t know what to do with this. It’s fairly obvious, or it should be, that treating a person differently because of her gender is sexist and offensive. What I’m proposing to do here in attending to authors’ genders strikes me as slightly disconcerting. I don’t want to treat books by women differently than I do books by men. Maybe that’s naïve. Something has to change, right? I have to change. Is there such thing as benign sexism? I wish our society didn’t have a need for affirmative action, but it does and will continue to do so until things improve and there’s genuine equality.
What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.
***
[1] This number includes one review that has been submitted but not yet published.
[2] I’m aware that I’m oversimplifying this. In addition to their own consciences, publishers and editors are responsible to advertisers and to the reading public. If we all demand more literary fiction by women, for instance, and do so with our wallets, I’m confident that more will get published. The responsibilities of publishers and book-review editors and book critics and readers are ultimately inseparable, but change has to start somewhere.
[3] There are some exceptions. I won’t review books by people I know, obviously. And if the book ends up being terrible, I will often speak with my editor and try to bail on the assignment. At this point in my life, I’d rather give up the paycheck than spend my time and energy on a book I don’t like.
[4] Publishers large and small also bear some responsibility to usher more literature by women into the world and to properly promote it, but I’m not trying to pass that particular buck at the moment and I’m far more interested here in my own responsibilities.
My interview with the terrific Ken Kalfus is up at the Tin House blog.
Historical fiction, we’re told, always says more about the era in which it’s written than that in which it’s set. Yeah, yeah. Set in Egypt in the waning years of the nineteenth century, Ken Kalfus’s glimmering new novel Equilateral takes a different approach in that it isn’t content to only offer commentary on who we are now but, also, on who we might have been. The premise is deceptively and beautifully simple: a British astronomer named Sanford Thayer is overseeing the construction of an equilateral triangle, three hundred feet long on each side, in the Egyptian desert. His purpose—for which nine hundred thousand Arab laborers are toiling night and day in advance of a June 17, 1894 deadline—is to demonstrate human intelligence to the people of Mars and “petition for man’s membership in the fraternity of planetary civilizations.” (14) There are, as you might guess, complications.
Kalfus offers a staggeringly intelligent re-imagining of what have become out-dated scientific principles; the entire novel is steeped in an intellectual world that no longer exists. He has exhumed an entire and extinct intellectual worldview, one that arose in the early years of what has become the secular era heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. With God dead or busy or indifferent or away on business, humankind has been forced to make meaning in other ways and attempt to find connectivity to other things, even Martians.
Although things don’t go especially well for Thayer, by peeling away the twentieth century, Kalfus was able to imbue the novel with a lovely optimism missing in most contemporary fiction even though it never shies from the difficult questions about colonialism and imperialism. In addition to Equilateral, Kalfus is the author of two story collections, Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies and the novels The Commissariat of Enlightenment and the National Book Award finalist A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.
He answered a few questions via email in late February.
Andrew Ervin: Equilateral is enlivened by a lovely kind of optimism that the twentieth century may have beat out of the scientific community. Because the novel’s so rich in its understandings of geometry and symmetry and construction (among other things), my first question is about form: how did you decide on its shape? Why does it have thirty-two chapters?
Ken Kalfus: The 32 chapters don’t have any numerological significance, and I hope you didn’t spend too much time looking for one! I can see how a book like this may invite some speculative search for symmetries and hidden formal structures. While there are certain geometries to the relationships in play, in fact the story grew more or less organically, and I wrote every chapter with the desperate desire to make it work, and make the story hang together as a whole.
AE: I’m reminded of John Aubrey’s description of Thomas Hobbes’s first encounter with Euclid:
“He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ‘twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. ‘By G–,’ sayd he, (He would now and then swear, by way of emphasis) ‘By G–,’ sayd he, ‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of the trueth. This made him in love with geometry.”
Mathematics and literature often make uncomfortable bedfellows, yet Sanford Thayer fully appreciates the aesthetic beauty of geometry and sees in it a vast potential for improving the human condition. How did the idea come about? What amount of research was involved?
KK: I love the Aubrey story, dramatizing that electric moment when a geometric proof suddenly reveals itself to describe a fundamental truth about the structure of reality. Hobbes has just fallen upon the Pythogorean Theorem—a good excuse to use the word hypoteneuse and a truth about the relationship between the sides of a triangle that comes up time and again in my novel. The philospher’s delight and the work of my novel rest on the notion that this theorem is true for all men and women, whether British or Hottentot, and true from one planet to the next. Thayer is convinced that a common knowledge of mathematics will allow us to share not only ideas between planets, but feelings of beauty and love too.
I’ve always enjoyed math, which isn’t the same as being good at it. One of my many pleasures in the pursuit of this novel was relearning my high school trigonometry (SOHCAHTOA!) and then performing some basic equations, for the dimensions of the triangle, the amount of sand being excavated, the positions of the planets in 1894, etc. I bought myself a decent compass and spent a lot of time on this, hunkered at my desk, filling in pages and pages of calculations, in many of which I did something like forget to carry the 1.
AE: Why do you suppose we have such an endless fascination with Mars?
KK: Since the 19th century, we’ve thought that if there were life elsewhere in the solar system, Mars was the place for it. It has solid land and an atmosphere, its climate is almost temperate, and astronomers like Thayer thought they discerned magnificent artificial waterways crossing its surface—which recalled the great terrestrial canal projects like Suez that had seized the public imagination. This was also the century in which European explorers heroically traversed the Earth’s most forbidding deserts, making the Red Planet’s parched landscape seem more familiar and more attainable.
Mars still drives us crazy with promises—witness the strong public interest in sending astronauts there, something whose cost is not justified by the scientific benefit and which is unlikely to happen in this century. The planet is passing behind the sun this spring but will reappear in our morning sky in a few months, a steady beacon for our hopes for interplanetary companionship.
AE: That need for companionship strikes me as a natural result of the newly (or relatively newly) secularized world of the late 1800s. Many of the tensions you’ve written about here—the colonizer v. the oppressed, West v. Middle East, scientific certainty v. faith—are of course still in the news. Do you buy the argument that historical fiction speaks more about the time it’s written than the time in which it’s set?
KK: I’m not sure my novel qualifies as historical fiction, since the central event is so far removed from anything that ever happened, but these historical themes were very much on my mind as I wrote Equilateral. The epic, generations-spanning struggle between the First World and the Third is the central question of our era. Meanwhile, the real news of this century may prove to be the discovery of alien life. Both these preoccupations led me to Equilateral. I don’t think writers can ever escape the moment in which they write, or that readers would want them to.
Your comment that the secularization of society has increased the need for companionship is an interesting one. I would say the need has always been there: that’s why human beings invented religion in the first place.
AE: What’s next for you? How quickly do you transition between projects?
KK: I’m always thinking about my next project, and I’m currently finishing a new collection of short fiction that will be published next April. The book’s anchored by a novella that fictionally reconstructs the events of a catastrophic weekend in New York, during which an international finance official sexually assaults a hotel worker. The story’s title is “Coup de Foudre.”
AE: Finally, what are the 2013 books you’re most excited about?
KK: In a short story frame of mind, I’m looking forward to reading Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I have Lynn Coady’s new epistolary novel, The Antagonist, waiting on my pile—it looks very funny and very compelling. Also, I’ve gotten an early look at Allison Lynn’s novel, The Exiles, which comes out in July. The first few pages are gorgeous, and the writing is intensely felt. I hope to get to them, soon or eventually. There’s so many good books out there, I always feel I’m playing catch-up.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Steinberg about her new book Spectacle, which I absolutely adored.
The twelve stories in Susan Steinberg’s stunning third book, Spectacle, limn the desperate, neon-lit reality we’re forced to confront when we wake up from the American dream. They make me want to use an annoying word like “limn.” If these pages contained scratch-n-sniff stickers you still wouldn’t get a better sensory appreciation for the stale smoke and beer and spilled sour mash. Some of the stories are set Baltimore it feels like the best book about that city since Save Me, Joe Louis, but Spectacle also includes the most evocative description of the state of Missouri—“misery,” get it?—I’ve ever read:
“When I mention Warrensburg, Missouri, people say, Where the fuck is that.
“I tell them there are cowboys there. I tell them there are tornadoes that can blow your house across the state. There are brown recluse spiders, I tell them, in every corner of every room. It’s a shit hole, I tell them.”
Violence, abuse in particular, lurks around every corner, and that makes Spectacle a bit more like life than any of us would prefer, but I also love it when artists are brave enough not to ignore that sad reality. It’s no exaggeration to say this sentence kept me awake one night: “And the second guy called me certain names reserved for women, certain other names I’d been called before and would be called again.” Sweet jesus that line hurts. The first-person voice (or is it voices?) expresses itself or themselves in punchy, often one-sentence paragraphs that taken together make up terrifying lists. Seemingly simple sentences stack on each other like wobbly chairs and threaten at every moment to topple over and crush someone. It sounds like sacrilege, I know, but I have no problem with mentioning Spectacle in the same sentence as Jesus’ Son. There—I just did.
Having read a few of these stories in Conjunctions, I’ve been really looking forward to this books for some time. When the advance uncorrected proofs arrived I put it aside until I could give it my complete attention. Now that I’ve done so, I want more people to read it, so I emailed Steinberg’s publicist at Graywolf Press, who put us in touch via email in January.
You do opening lines as well as anyone I can think of. It’s so impressive. Do you write those first? How do your stories develop? Do they take you long to write?
Thanks a lot for saying this. I guess some of the first lines are kind of close to what they were originally, but others aren’t at all. I revise a lot and can’t always remember how things started. I always write super ugly first drafts, which I don’t call drafts. A draft, to me, implies it’s reached the end, but I never get there. I usually just write for a few pages, or a few paragraphs, then go back to the beginning and fill things out, and repeat this several thousand times. I also read aloud a lot. And this often tells me what the first line should be. And all of my stories take me forever to write. Months and months.
What advice do you give young writers? What’s the advice you wish you had heard when you started writing stories?
Try to put your ambition, hunger, longing, and desire into the writing itself, not into the publishing of it. This isn’t to say don’t publish. It’s just to say, the writing is the project.
And you don’t have to write a novel.
What makes Spectacle not a novel?
I guess to answer this question, I’d need to have a better understanding of what makes a novel a novel. And if I had that understanding, perhaps I’d be more drawn to claiming that form as a possibility. But most likely, I’d just resist it. It’s not that I don’t like novels, though I admit I gravitate toward shorter forms. It’s just that my work is often re-categorized. The stories in Spectacle have been called poetry. They’ve been called essays. And I’m totally fine with readers defining the genre for themselves. But I wrote the book as a collection of short stories. And I guess I want to defend the form, as it is, as of now, the one I work in. I actually abandoned a writing project, possibly a novel, to write these stories, and it felt amazing to leave that mess. I felt like I had control again. Even over my life. It’s hard to explain, but there’s something about shaping these smaller pieces. Something about attempting to make a complete statement with each. And though you know you’re never going to get it exactly right, you also know you get to try it again with the next piece.
I was a painter before I was a writer, and my process, then, was the same. I worked in a series and created echoes from piece to piece. But the paintings lined up on the wall, while part of the larger collection, were individual, stand-alone pieces, each with its own story. So perhaps I’m saying the categorization of my work is more connected to the process than to the product.
The other answer is this. I was taking a contemporary poetry class when I was a grad student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. We were discussing a collection of narrative poems, and the professor read one of the poems to the class. It was a pretty dull poem, as I recall, just a long, overly accessible narrative with really predictable line breaks. After the professor read it, we all sort of sat there, until one of the students raised her hand and asked the professor why the piece wasn’t called a short story. The professor (who I’ll leave unnamed) put down his book, stared at the student for about thirty seconds, during which I thought I was going to cry, and said, “Because it’s a poem.” So there’s that.
The timeline here zigzags in ways that make the themes—love, heartbreak, loneliness, being broke—shine in fascinating ways. Can you say a bit about the order in which there written or organized?
I wrote the stories “Signified” and “Universe” a while back, not thinking they’d be part of a collection. I think I wrote “Cowboys” next. Then “Superstar.” But it’s hard to say, as I work on several stories at once. At some point, I started seeing thematic and formal connections between the stories and then tried to come up with even more direct or aggressive ways in which to link them—like retelling stories, pairing titles, and repeating forms and lines. I didn’t start to think about the structure of the whole collection until all of the stories were written. It was like working on a puzzle. Each possible order prioritized different content or a different form and therefore sent—perhaps just to me—a different message. It took me a while to realize that “Superstar” was the place to begin. But I guess I always knew that “Universal,” which was the last story I wrote, would be the last one in the collection. And there is a timeline, in a sense, which is as connected to the emotional states of the narrators as it is to the events.
Genre is the least interesting way to describe a book. Can you cite a few texts that helped you write this, or that made writing it more difficult?
I guess I’m going with written texts. I worked on a lot of these stories while I was on a year-long academic sabbatical. I spent the year at different artist residencies and was able to write most days. I don’t usually read a lot when I’m writing, but that year, a friend and I decided to read a book together every week. I guess part of this was about reading the books, but part was about wanting to have this one thing I had to do every week in a year when little else was required of me. And almost every week, no matter where I was, or where he was, we’d find the time to discuss the book. We read Nabokov, Plath, Stevens, Foucault, Butler, Woolf, Celine, Montale, Artaud, everything. So while I can’t say that any one whole text helped me to write my book, I can say that parts of what we read, a line here or there on punishment or performance or desire, inspired me. And the process, too, was inspiring. I have this vivid memory of sitting late at night in an artist colony phone booth. Those weeks we talked about Woolf and Stevens and I think Charles Wright. But I mostly remember the graffiti on the wall. And this violent thunderstorm that came through. And thinking then that someday I would write about it.
Did you leave any graffiti of your own?
Do you think I did?
I can only hope so. What’s the best graffiti you’ve ever seen?
There’s a lot of graffiti I like, but this is my most recent favorite. A few weeks ago, I had parked my bike outside a bookstore, and walking toward it, I saw that someone had painted in black “I Like You” on the sidewalk in front of it. It was just so average and understated and casual. Something about its lack of enthusiasm appealed to me. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t spray painted across a wall in red. But, still, it wasn’t passionless.
March 13, 2013
The Moby Lives blog over at Melville House published an excellent summary of my AWP panel “What a Novella Is.” They quoted me as saying:
“We’re starting to see resistance to novellas being chipped away by small presses, which is great to see. When we write novellas now, we’re writing something that will not be embraced commercially. But the trend toward novella publishing has revolutionary potential.”
And:
“We don’t know what a novella is—you need to decide. Don’t let us or publishers tell you what to do.”
That does sound like something I would say. It was a terrific event.
January 15, 2013
My review of Ten of December ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 13, 2013.
It’s tough to think of a living short-story writer – or even a dead one – who garners as much peer approval as George Saunders. Alice Munro, maybe, but that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong: There are plenty of amazing short-story writers working today, maybe more at one time than ever before. I’d pit Lorrie Moore’s “Self-Help” or Gloria Naylor’s “Women of Brewster Place” against “Dubliners” in a steel-cage match any day of the week.
Recent collections by Brian Evenson and Steven Millhauser and Jim Shepard and Mary Caponegro provide ample evidence that the story form is enjoying a golden age, but it’s Saunders whose name is both whispered in reverent tones and shouted from the rooftops by other authors. His sparkling new story collection “Tenth of December” demonstrates why.
The best stories here – and they’re all good, mind you – put the technique of free indirect speech to tremendous use. “Victory Lap” and “Puppy,” for example, are told in multiple third-person voices, but those voices are both so tied to the specific characters’ inner workings that third person and first person become almost indistinguishable.
We experience the events of “Al Roosten” from inside the main character’s head, but we also have an external view from which to understand the poor guy in ways he doesn’t understand himself. Al is a sad man who has lived in the same small town his whole life and hasn’t amounted to much. He is prone to excessive daydreaming and has started to resent the occasional sympathy and pity he earns from those around him. One target of his growing anger is the homeless population sleeping near his failing shop. The obliviousness is both heartbreaking and frightening.
“He believed they preferred to be called ‘homeless.’ Hadn’t he read that? ‘Hobo’ being derogatory? Jesus, that took nerve. Guy never works a day in his life, just goes around stealing pies off windowsills, then starts yelping about his rights? He’d like to walk right up to a homeless and call him a hobo. He’d do it too, he would, he’d grab that damn hobo by the collar and go, Hey, hobo, you’re ruining my business. I’ve missed my rent two months in a row.”
In “Puppy,” another personal favorite, a woman named Marie drives her children to a stranger’s home to buy a dog. Her own early traumas find expression in the jealousy she feels – even if she doesn’t realize it – of her own son and daughter: “These were not spoiled kids. These were well-loved kids. At least she’d never left one of them standing in a blizzard for two hours after a junior-high dance. At least she’d never drunkenly snapped at one of them, ‘I hardly consider you college material.’ At least she’d never locked one of them in a closet (a closet!) while entertaining a literal ditchdigger in the parlor.”
Marie is obviously well off, and she feels superior to the “white-trash” dog seller, who keeps her own troubled child out back on a leash, but she’s oblivious to the fact that her kids are out of control, too, albeit in a different way. No one makes better use of subtext than George Saunders.
A few themes wind their ways through the collection. There are any number of struggling parents, many of whom are becoming aware that they haven’t fulfilled the dreams they had as kids, that they’re never going to live in mansions with servants and swimming pools. There’s nothing more tragic than the resignation that goes along with lowering one’s expectations, and the best these people can do is shield their own children from that sorrow as long as possible.
Now, I have a confession to make. Despite all the hyperbole, or maybe because of it, I haven’t always been so enamored of all of Saunders’ fiction. I feel that he has from time to time stretched the absurd elements of his fiction a bit too far in the name of humor. Yes, we’re living in the Age of Irony, I get that, but humor works best when it elucidates the sincerity and emotional connections, as it does here in “Escape From Spiderhead” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Sticks.”
Throughout this collection, Saunders uses humor to amplify tension rather than avoid it, and the results are superb. Many of the 10 stories in “Tenth of December” are comfortable with making us uncomfortable. They go for the jugular instead of the funny bone, and they’re capable of astounding, unnerving and delighting all at once. The prose is so smartly crafted throughout that it makes me want to go back and re-evaluate all of Saunders’ previous books. But first I plan to re-reread this new collection one more time.