CASUAL
Nordlinger, Pia
CASUAL . . . AND LADIES OF THE CLUBS Nick Hornby stopped in Washington, D.C., a few weeks back to read from his new novel, About a Boy. The bookstore was packed with enthusiastic fans, and I...
...The best writing,” as Prose discerns, “has as little to do with gender as it does with nationality or with the circumscriptions of time...
...The 35-year-olds agreed to read About a Boy, in addition to The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa...
...In the last year, the two groups have read 15 books...
...My initiative, then, carried the day...
...No one stands up and says, “As a member of the vast rightwing conspiracy, I insist on the spy novels of William F. Buckley...
...Our new selections will give both reading lists a Viagra-like boost of manliness...
...Identity politics plays no part in our choice of books...
...Both groups read fiction...
...Women to the left of us might guess that we sit around reading gung-ho military tracts like The Hunt for Red October or Ernest Hemingway at his most misogynist...
...Most books are bought by women,” she writes, “who tend to read novels by female authors...
...Who knows...
...Hornby, you see, writes about men —male thoughts and male calculations...
...Thinking about Hornby’s reading, I realized I rarely read books by men, about men...
...Byatt, Bellwether by Connie Willis, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Valley of the Dolls by Jaqueline Susann, and Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi...
...Books that have a “man’s man” perspective—presumably loaded with profanity, sex, and sports—just don’t seem to find their way into my hands...
...Our ideology notwithstanding, we anti-gender-feminism, antiidentity- politics Hillary-bashers still tend to read books by or about women...
...By next month, we may be reading Norman Mailer...
...Likewise, no one suggests a book because she happens to be an Irish- American, a Jewish-American, or a Woman of the Indigenous Peoples...
...The disparity, though not extreme, is enough to suggest we ought to consider an affirmativeaction policy for manly books...
...The bookstore was packed with enthusiastic fans, and I myself soon fell under the sway of his marvelously funny book...
...There is no male or female language, only the truthful or fake, the precise or the vague, the inspired or the pedestrian...
...Even so, I made a gesture toward leveling the playing field by championing About a Boy at my latest book-club gatherings...
...About a Boy has two protagonists: a masculine and very cool middle-aged man and a troubled adolescent boy...
...PIA NORDLINGER...
...The other three were practically obligatory reads by male authors: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, and Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt...
...Still, I feel a little wary...
...Six of the books were written by men, but three of these are primarily about women: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, and The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks...
...Yet masculinity triumphed...
...And all the gynocentric books I’ve been reading were selected not just by me, but the women in my two book clubs...
...Yet as Hornby read, I became aware of another feeling, too—a distance from his prose, as if I were eavesdropping on an unfamiliar world...
...The 25- year-olds selected Hornby’s first novel, High Fidelity, over two ultrafeminine books, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells and Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse...
...I traced this sense of strangeness to nothing short of gender bias...
...We don’t...
...My account of the plot—independently wealthy man invents fictional child in order to meet single mothers—drew upturned noses and furrowed brows from both groups...
...It’s an impulse that doesn’t withstand scrutiny...
...One group even went so far as to ban any book selected by Oprah Winfrey’s book club, which is given to sappy gynobibliophilia...
...His books are full of professional soccer and guys who sit around making lists of the Top Five Best Movies...
...Francine Prose mentions the phenomenon in an article in Harper’s, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink...
...Politically, both clubs might as well be subsidized by Richard Mellon Scaife...
...What’s more, I know I am not alone in this unintended aversion to maleness in fiction...
...Many of the 25-year-olds work for the Heritage Foundation, and many of the 35-year-olds are proud full-time mothers...
...Females wrote nine of them: Possession by A.S...
...In the second, the average age is 35, and I am one of four who have no children...
...In the first, the average age is 25, and I am one of two married women...
...These ladies are, one and all, red-meat conservatives...
Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 44
