But regardless of the subject, her works have been treated more as messages in a bottle-passed from one woman to another with an insistent “You’ve got to read this”-than as major cultural occasions. My two favorite works of hers are The Wife (2003), a portrayal of a uniquely stifling marriage that doubles as a send-up of the late-20th-century literary scene, and The Ten-Year Nap (2008), a psychologically complex examination of the gains and the sacrifices involved in caring for children. Her best-known book is probably The Interestings(2013), which follows a group of summer-camp friends into middle age. For more than 30 years she’s been writing brilliant, incisive, often hilarious novels that focus largely, though not exclusively, on the inner lives of women. Though it wasn’t framed as such, Wolitzer’s essay could have been a referendum on her own career.
Parents and children”-suggested that she talk instead to his wife, who read “that kind of book.” In the essay, Wolitzer recounted a bitterly amusing anecdote in which a man she met at a party, after hearing her describe her novels-“Sometimes they’re about marriage. It’s packaged respectfully, reviewed widely, and marketed to people of all genders.īut books by Franzen’s and Eugenides’s female colleagues tend to be relegated to what Wolitzer called the “lower shelf.” Their covers suggest domesticity, their spines are slimmer, and their contents are dismissed by some male readers as “one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.” The distinction is significant in many ways, but particularly for sales: Both men and women read books by men, but books by women are far more likely to be read by women than by men. When a well-regarded male novelist such as Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides publishes a new novel-even one preoccupied with relationships, like Freedom or The Marriage Plot-publishers and readers automatically take the book seriously, Wolitzer argued.
This couldn’t have been lost on Wolitzer, who published an essay in The New York Times Book Review in 2012 lamenting that literary fiction by men tends to be received differently from literary fiction by women. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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