Last month, the third annual VIDA count of how often majo...

Last month, the third annual VIDA count of how often major publications review work by women or publish reviews by women came out.

The results were predictably dismal. With a few exceptions, not only have things not gotten significantly better since Vida started counting, they’ve actually gotten worse. Which begs the question – when “raising awareness” (or “public shaming”) aren’t getting the job done, when the editors who once responded to the tallies with concern now greet the count with silence, and the male writers who continue to be well-served by the status quo come back with charges that best-selling women aren't allowed to point out that there's a problem, or the bizarre insistence that they're the ones with the real complaints, what can readers and writers do to urge their favorite publications to do better?

It's an especially timely question, given the past few days' events.

Just yesterday,
That's big news in the book world. Having a woman in charge doesn't guarantee great treatment for the ladies -- Harper's, one of the magazines that's actually gone backwards in the VIDA count, is helmed by a woman -- but there's some suggestion that Paul might see the literary world differently than the man who hired her.

For one thing, if you write about children's books,it suggests that you have a more encompassing view of the kind of books that deserve attention in the Times' pages than your boss. Paul's description of "barreling through" the third book in THE HUNGER GAMES while in the hospital after giving birth to your third should thrill of anyone who loves YA or sci-fi. The "By the Book" feature which she launched has been wonderfully inclusive. Besides the usual suspects, representatives from television (Lena Dunham, Chris Colfer) and popular fiction (Mary Higgins Clark) and Jackie Collins have appeared in the paper's pages to talk about their reading and writing lives.

If Paul's appointment was exciting news, Deborah Copaken Kagen's essay in The Nation, published today, reminds us how far women writers still have to go.

The essay, "My So-Called Feminist Life in Arts and Letters" describes the memoirist and novelist's battles over titles and covers ("The cover that the publisher designs (for her first book, a memoir of her work as a war-zone photographer, SHUTTERBABE) has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it's usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover"). It describes her struggle to get booked on "Fresh Air" (Terry Gross liked the "shutter" part of her first book's title, but not the "babe"), the way she's described as a "stay-at-home mom" by reporters who interview her after SHUTTERBABE is published (and after she's left her television producing job to write the book), the writer who called her "Battlefield Barbie," her failure to interest the New York Times Book Review in her books, and the impact that lack of attention has had on her career: on a trip to sign stock in local stores, "Was it reviewed in the Times?" one bookseller asks me, searching his computer for any sign of the novel, which he was unable to locate on the shelves. I tell him no. "Then we probably don't stock it." I hear the same story from three more booksellers before heading home with my pristine Sharpie."

Can a woman write a big book -- a book that gets the kind of breathless attention and guaranteed saturation-level coverage from the Times that's typically given to the Franzens and Eugenides of the world, a book where the publishers would never dream of putting "babe" in the title or pastel hues on the cover?

Novelist Wolitzer asked the question in “The Second Shelf,” a 2012 essay in the New York Times Book Review, and came to the conclusion that it’s still very, very hard for a woman to be seen as writing big, or to nab the “genius” label. "The truth is, women who write literary fiction frequently find themselves in an unjust world," Wolitzer wrote.

Too often, her book will arrive with a soft-focus cover, with pastel shades or images of "laundry hanging on a line.. (a) little girl in a field of wildflowers...(a) pair of shoes on a beach:" in other words, covers that say, explicitly, “book clubs welcome; men, not so much.” Her book will be called “spare” if it’s short, "self-indulgent" and "undisciplined" if it's long, and dismissed as “domestic fiction” if it deals with marriage and motherhood, or is set in the suburbs. The title of Great American novel, and the attention that goes with it, still largely belongs to men.

This month, Wolitzer and three other women have written books that could all be called big. Wolitzer and her editor have taken pains to position her latest, THE INTERESTINGS, as a contender for the big book title. The book follows a half-dozen summer-camp friends through forty years and over 468 pages, examining what the real world and the passage of time do to ambition, creativity and relationships.

It comes with a blurb from Eugenides, a cover hand-crafted to not scream “ladies only,” and strong early reviews. NPR calls it "an epic exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success," while Entertainment Weekly flat out says that the book “secure(s) Wolitzer’s place among the best novelists of her generation.”

It also comes, I'm sorry to say, with its author taking pains to position her work as capital-L literature and distance it from commercial fiction by women. Writing in Salon, Wolitzer complains about the "kind of disturbing trend is fiction about and by women who the reader is meant to feel “comfortable” around – what I call slumber party fiction – as though the characters are stand-ins for your best friends.­" (She's also down on "‘dreamy’ covers – "many with women in water, floating or swimming, as though what’s contained within is a kind of dreamy inessential thing." I have no idea whose books she could be talking about.)

Wolitzer is, of course, free to like and dislike whatever books she pleases -- just like Lena Dunham, who trashed "airport chick-lit" in her Times interview -- but it's disappointing that a serious woman writer's efforts to be taken seriously seem to inevitably have her turning up her nose at other women's work. It's especially sad in Wolitzer's case because it's almost a guarantee that, when paperback publication comes around and the focus is less on getting reviews and attention than on getting readers, THE INTERESTINGS will be repackaged with the kind of soft-focus, "book clubs welcome" cover that those slumber-party books she disdains wear with pride.

It's also worth noting that many of those slumber-party authors go out of their way to champion women's literary fiction, with the hopes that our tweets and blurbs and praise might make up for the lack of Franzen/Eugenides/Nicholson Baker/Charles Bock coverage literary ladies might have received if they'd been born Mark or David instead of Meg and Deborah.

Next on the Big Book roster: Kate Atkinson’s LIFE AFTER LIFE. Its premise sounds like science fiction: a woman is born, and dies before she draws her first breath. A few pages later, she’s born again….only this time, she lives. Over and over, through two world wars, Ursula Todd lives and dies – of a fall, of the flu, by her own hand, at the hands of an abusive spouse – with Atkinson holding out the tantalizing hope that she will learn from her mistakes and not only survive, but alter history profoundly. Janet Maslin called LIFE AFTER LIFE “a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author’s fully untethered imagination.”

Elizabeth Strout's THE BURGESS BOYS is her first book since her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kittredge. It's about a family full of lawyers, a shocking crime, and the way it echoes through the generations. In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote "the broad social and political range of The Burgess Boys shows just how impressively this extraordinary writer continues to develop.”

Finally, there's Claire Messud’s THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS, which sounds a little like Zoe Heller’s WHAT WAS SHE THINKING, another tale of toxic friendship with an untrustworthy narrator at its center. Single schoolteacher Nora Eldridge has shelved her artistic ambitions and leads a quiet, constrained life, until her world becomes intimately entwined with a family of glamorous immigrants and their bullied child. In a starred review, Kirkus wrote that “Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul…brilliant and terrifying,” while Daphne Merkin said that Messud’s got the stuff “to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times.”

We know what kind of treatment Big Books get from the New York Times. Two reviews and a profile is the minimum. Beyond that, the author will be quoted approvingly whenever the subject of literature comes up. The paper will
Are any of these ambitious books getting the Big Book treatment?

So far, none of them have managed the two-reviews-and-a-profile trifecta. LIFE AFTER LIFE received a daily review, and Atkinson got a (rare for a lady writer) Sunday Magazine profile…but, so far, no Sunday book review. (Updated: a Twitter friend says that the Atkinson Sunday review has been assigned, but not published. Which is great. Not as great for building awareness and sales as a pre-publication rave might have been, but I'll take it).

Wolitzer’s THE INTERESTINGS has also been reviewed once in the daily paper. No profile, no Sunday review. Same with Strout, whose first post-Pulitzer book has gotten just one review so far.

Messud, whose book comes out on April 30, might stand the best chance of being treated like the big boys. Unlike Atkinson, who writes mysteries, critics can’t dismiss her as less than serious for slumming in the land of genre. Unlike Wolitzer, who publishes a book every year or two, she’s not handicapped by being prolific: THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS will be her fourth novel, and her first since 2006's THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN. That’s not quite the book-every-decade pace that seems to signify genius to the Times, she’s no Joyce Carol Oates.

None of the books’ covers read as particularly female (although Atkinson’s does feature a rose, and Wolitzer might be handicapped by a cover so carefully crafted to appeal to everyone that it ends up appealing to no one).

But the biggest obstacles are not the book’s covers, or the author’s pace, or her dalliances in lesser genres – it’s the female trouble that's still pervasive at the Times, the double standards that seem to make it impossible for the paper to conceive that a little lady might have written a big book.

You don't have to look hard to find evidence of institutional sexism at the Times. It shows up when the lede of an obituary for a female rocket scientist mentions her beef stroganoff before her groundbreaking scientific work.

It’s there when a critic suggests that a biography of the Obamas – one written by one of the Times’ staff writers – be characterized as “chick non-fic.”

Or when a reporter, on the subject of an eleven-year-old girl’s rape, writes about how some residents claimed “she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at the playground, some said,” and quotes residents fretting over how the accused boys’ lives had been ruined.

Three years of Vida have shown that simply pointing out how publications continue to give women’s work short shrift isn’t enough to make them change. Essays like Kogan's vividly demonstrate the impact that sexism has on a woman's career: no Times review, and readers might not even get a chance to buy your book, because their local store won't carry it.

We can continue to count; to praise the publications that are doing well and tell the ones that aren't that we expect better.

We can get specific, publishing lists of women whose work should be in places like Harper's and The Atlantic.

We can even cancel our subscriptions.

Or, while we're waiting for Pamela Paul to take charge, we can use these specific examples to put the New York Times on notice, saying that these are big, important, ambitious books, and that attention must be paid. Treat Atkinson and Wolitzer and Strout and Messud the same way you treat Franzen and Eugenides and Shteyngart and Perrotta. Review them. Profile them. Quote them. Publish their essays and op-eds and book reviews. Mention their books wherever you can. Ask for their Oscar picks and their playlists. Take them bird-watching, and write about what they eat for breakfast. Publish "random" tweets about how great their books are, which turn out to have been written by their editors. Okay,
Tell your readers that big books are big news, no matter who writes them.