As 2013 draws to a close, we give you our second-annual look at the scuffles, controversies, and feisty debates that have helped keep the literary world lively over the past year. Among this year’s conflicts, presented here in rough chronological order, a few themes emerge: clashes over the function of online literary criticism, questions about gender and literature, and struggles over who controls an artist’s legacy and fortune. A few of the items show what happens when closed-mindedness leads to controversy; others stand as proof that people are still engaged and passionate about the state of literature. In several instances, Page-Turner decided to enter the fray.
Claire Messud and likeability. When Claire Messud’s book “The Woman Upstairs” came out, in the spring, Publishers Weekly asked her whether she would want to be “friends” with her novel’s protagonist, Nora, an angry and frustrated schoolteacher, whose outlook the interviewer called “grim.” “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” Messud replied. “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? … If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.” Messud’s response—she later said on a New York Times Book Review podcast that she found the question “gendered”—prompted debates about the role of likeability in fiction, and the double standard by which female protagonists’ personalities are judged. Page-Turner held a forum on the issue, gathering thoughts from Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and other writers about the relationship between likeability and literary merit. “I have no problem with liking a character,” said Donald Antrim. “But if that’s the reason I’m reading, I’ll put the book down.”
Rachel Kushner and “mansplaining.” On the heels of the likeability debate came another one concerning female writers and double standards. In Tablet’s review of Rachel Kushner’s well-received novel “The Flamethrowers,” in May, Adam Kirsch critiqued the book for being “too cool” and “too stylish,” calling it a “macho novel”—even though it’s written by, and is about, a woman. “The novel itself is, if not ‘mansplaining,’ at least always insisting on its own mystique,” wrote Kirsch, referring to the term for a man speaking down to a woman. Shortly after the review appeared, Kushner addressed Kirsch’s remarks on Facebook. “There are various things going on here,” she wrote, “one of which may be the idea that women are supposed to write ‘like women’ … and secondly, a sense of the writer as self-consciously ‘cool.’ But, Adam Kirsch, with all due respect, there is nothing ‘cool’ about writing novels.” In a response to Kirsch at Flavorwire, Emily Temple wrote that his “underlying bias is—again, again!—that you can only be a writer or a female writer, and if you are the latter kind, all sorts of special filters and considerations may be applied.”
Women writers and only children. In June, the Atlantic ran an excerpt of the book “One and Only,” by Lauren Sandler, under the prescriptive headline “The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid.” In the article, Sandler noted that many of the female writers she most admires—Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion—had only one child, and discussed the freedom from domestic concerns that writers like Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick enjoyed by limiting the size of their broods. “With one you can move,” Sandler quoted Alice Walker, another mother of one, “with more than one you’re a sitting duck.” The article spawned a lively debate about writers, women, and family size (Rebecca Mead weighed in at Page-Turner), beginning with a response by Zadie Smith in the comments section of Sandler’s piece. “I have two children,” she wrote. “Dickens had ten—I think Tolstoy did, too. Did anyone for one moment worry that those men were becoming too father-ish to be writer-esque? Does the fact that Heidi Julavitz, Nikita Lalwani, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri … have multiple children make them lesser writers? … The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.”
Jonathan Franzen vs. the modern world. In September, the Guardian ran an excerpt of Jonathan Franzen’s annotations for “The Kraus Project,” his book of translated essays by the Viennese critic Karl Kraus. The article, entitled “What’s Wrong With the Modern World,” showed Franzen in high cantankerous form, lambasting Jeff Bezos, bewailing our “media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment,” and criticizing Salman Rushdie for having “succumbed” to Twitter. Rushdie responded on Twitter (“enjoy your ivory tower”), and other critics chimed in to take issue with Franzen’s chronic issue-taking. At Page-Turner, Maria Bustillos wrote about why Franzen pushes so many buttons, and suggested a cure for his alienation from the Internet: Come join us!
The Booker Prize and American vs. British literary awards. The Man Booker Prize, which was first awarded in 1969, has, in the past, always gone to the best English-language novel of the year from the U.K., Ireland, Zimbabwe, and British Commonwealth countries. When the chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation announced, in September, that, beginning in 2014, the award would be open to English-language novels from writers across the globe, many in Britain worried that the change would allow American literature to assume a worrisome cultural dominance. “It’s rather like a British company being taken over by some worldwide conglomerate,” the British author and television host Melvyn Bragg told the Times. In an article in the Guardian, the British novelist Philip Hensher, a past Booker finalist and judge, said that American novels were likely to win a disproportionate number of future awards “simply through an economic superpower exerting its own literary tastes.” At Page-Turner, Ian Crouch chronicled the American literary scene’s transition from “overlooked backwater” to major international player, and unearthed the whiff of “Old World snobbery” among the Booker isolationists.
Harper Lee vs. the Monroe County Heritage Museum. The small museum in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama sells “To Kill a Mockingbird”-themed merchandise in its gift shop; its Web site URL is tokillamockingbird.com. This fall, Lee sued the museum, alleging that the institution has taken advantage of her legacy without offering compensation. The suit asserts that the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, which takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, was “inspired by Ms Lee’s home,” but that “the setting, plot and characters are products of Ms Lee’s imagination”; it also accuses the town of Monroeville of a “desire to capitalize” on her book’s fame (the town’s logo features a mockingbird and the cupola of the local courthouse). The museum has called the lawsuit “false” and “meritless,” saying that the gift shop generated only twenty-eight thousand dollars last year and used “every penny” of that money to further its mission of education and historical preservation.
The battle over Gore Vidal’s estate. The year before he died, in 2012, Gore Vidal altered his will and bequeathed his entire estate to Harvard University. Last month, Tim Teeman reported in the Times that several of Vidal’s relatives are now challenging that will, saying that Vidal was not mentally sound when he wrote it, and that he had promised parts of his fortune—which is estimated at thirty-seven million dollars—to them. Most surprising about the article was the fact that Vidal’s nephew, the film director and screenwriter Burr Steers, and half sister, Nina Straight, used their interview with the Times to imply that Vidal had engaged in, as Straight put it, “Jerry Sandusky acts” during his lifetime—a detail that quickly spread to other news outlets.
Buzzfeed Books and negative criticism. The recurring debate about the value of negative book reviews flared up again last month, when Buzzfeed—which launched a books section on its Web site over the summer—hired Isaac Fitzgerald, a co-owner of the Rumpus and former director of publicity at McSweeney’s, as its first books editor. In an interview with the Poynter Institute about the new position, Fitzgerald said that he planned to publish book reviews on the site, but not negative ones. “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” The comments earned Fitzgerald taunting criticism from Tom Scocca at Gawker, an anti-snobbery defense from Michelle Dean, and a pro-niceness Op-Ed by Bob Garfield in the New York Times. (Last week, Scocca followed up with a lengthy anti-niceness treatise, “On Smarm.”) At Page-Turner, Lee Siegel wrote about laying down his hatchet, and Maria Bustillos parsed the various reactions while encouraging “honest and serious engagement” with the ideas in books, niceness notwithstanding. “When real engagement is present,” she wrote, “no snark is too sneering; without it, no praise is worth a sou.”
Deborah Solomon vs. the Rockwell Family In her five-hundred page biography of Norman Rockwell, “American Mirror,” which came out last month (and was reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl on Page-Turner), Deborah Solomon—a former columnist for the New York Times Magazine and frequent contributor to the New York Times—argues for the importance of Rockwell’s work, which has often been dismissed by the art world as low-brow schmaltz. She also implies that Rockwell may have been gay, writing that the artist “demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men,” and that his marriages may have been a strategy for “controlling his homoerotic desires.” Though Solomon is careful to note that there is no evidence that Rockwell ever had sex with men, her suggestions about Rockwell’s sexuality have enraged Rockwell’s surviving family members, who released a statement denouncing Solomon’s “false and unsubstantiated” claims. In an interview with the Times, Rockwell’s granddaughter, Abigail Rockwell, said that the book’s portrait of her grandfather as a “closeted homosexual” is “dangerously becoming fact.” “She layers the whole biography with these innuendos,” Abigail said. “These things she’s writing about Norman Rockwell are simply not true.” Solomon, who devoted only a tiny portion of her book to the question of Rockwell’s sexuality, said that she’d prefer to keep the focus on his work.
Illustration by Jing Wei.
Correction: This post originally mischaracterized the origin of the word “mansplaining” and has been adjusted.
