Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

I think you are over/mis-stating her point

I dont think she's saying that the unliterary choose a book because of its prose (good bad or indifferent)

they choose a story and expect from the prose only that it not challenge them or make them work

and Im not at all sure that 'peer pressure' is any better an explanation of the mass popularity of some books

still not sure how Miller is wrong Keith

dude....

bad form

so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in actuality a woman?

I like Mo's reasoning, it does seem like male subject matter and I think the OP is being tricksie so Im guessing female

ker splash!

Patty wrote: "So why is Franzen such a big deal? Is it because he writes bathetic domestic novels and also happens to be male?"

blame Oprah? good chance he's still laboring away in respected semi-anonymity if it werent for her

and this merits posting:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/18276...


Victoria Patterson’s work has often been compared, for good reason, to Edith Wharton’s. This Vacant Paradise, Patterson’s first novel, is a contemporary retelling, quite consciously and intelligently, of The House of Mirth, transferred 100-plus years and 3000 miles from Wharton’s Old New York to Patterson’s Newport Beach. For all the cultural and historical distance, the two write of emotionally identical, muscular family struggles involving inheritance and strategic marriage; they chart matching dramas of cash-nexus beauty, analyze the power of sex and their characters’ debilitating combination of over-consciousness and under-consciousness of that power; and they pay the same attention to the way people find themselves, no matter their intentions or ethics, divided almost randomly into the blithe, oblivious, cruel winners and the flotsam- and jetsam-like losers strewn about as wealth patrols its waters. When Jonathan Franzen wrote about Wharton’s 150th birthday in The New Yorker (“A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” February 13, 2012), he harped on her looks and read the biographical record in ways that prompted Patterson to respond.

— Tom Lutz


VICTORIA PATTERSON
Not Pretty


After reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay in the New Yorker about Edith Wharton, I couldn’t sleep. I admire Franzen’s work and usually appreciate his commentary about social media, eBooks, etc., but his depiction of Edith Wharton was so mean-spirited and off-key that I tossed and turned. Why would he link her husband’s mental illness with her success? Why claim that she was only interested in male friendships? And worst of all: Why would he focus on her physical appearance, claiming that she was unattractive? He’d taken a literary hero and written about her as if ranking a Maxim photo spread.

I reread the piece the following morning. Franzen’s essay is a tribute to Wharton and her work. Yet there’s a strange negative slanting of Wharton’s biography and a peculiarly misplaced concentration on her physical appearance. There are other problems with his essay as well: It is either disingenuous, or uninformed, for instance, for Franzen to reflect on Wharton’s disagreeable politics without also noting that throughout the war, she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees (mainly women and children) and, in 1916, that she received the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. But it is her facial features that structure Franzen’s response, and it is his constant return to them that bothers me the most.

Of Wharton’s mentally ill husband Teddy Wharton, or “cerebrally compromised Teddy,” as Henry James famously called him in private, Franzen writes: “That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance…” It’s good to know that she wasn’t too ugly for sex, but does Teddy have no responsibility in the sexual knowledge department? Later, he notes that Teddy responded to her literary success by “spiraling into mental illness.” Had Wharton not been successful, would she have saved him from being mentally ill?

At 46, Wharton had a sexual relationship with Morton Fuller, and while Franzen notes that she seems to have been embarrassed by her affair, this must be a matter of interpretation. From the biographies that both Franzen and I no doubt read, my takeaway was that while, yes, there were complex emotions, the greatest was a deep gratitude for the experience of a passionate sexual awakening. She might’ve missed out!

Franzen writes of the “half-affectionate, half-terrified” nicknames that Henry James and his circle gave Wharton because of her “masculine” pursuits. Wharton and James discussed fiction extensively, and had an intense and complicated artistic friendship that Franzen barely touches on; but in repeating the nicknames, he gives them legitimacy without addressing the reasons James and his circle would feel the need to use them — including, for instance, James’s well-known envy of Wharton’s popular success. Franzen writes that Wharton was alternately or even simultaneously indifferent to and jealous of the wives of her male friends. What about Mary Berenson, or Mary Hunter, or her former sister in law, Minnie Jones, whom she supported financially until Jones’s death? She forged “close and lasting friendships” with both men and women. Her literary circle did consist of men, and she wanted, as Franzen emphasizes, “to be with men and talk about the things men talked about.” Not because Wharton didn’t like women, but because, as she herself noted with no small amount of bitterness, women were “made for pleasure and procreation.”

Franzen, though, has another point to make. “Edith Newbold Jones did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage,” he writes. “She wasn’t pretty.” And later, “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

Franzen writes of The House of Mirth, “The novel can be read … as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.” Wharton wasn’t, in fact, preoccupied with her own looks. Her looks were not the driving force behind The House of Mirth. Her appearance wasn’t problematic, even in her New York society upbringing. The “problem” (that which made her less marriageable) was that she was “too shy and intellectual.” Wharton used Lily Bart’s beauty as a fictional tool to emphasize women’s ornamental role in American society. In the end, Lily refuses to barter her diminishing beauty for status or money, or even love, and her downfall forces readers to confront the fact that her story cannot have a happy ending because, in this society, she has no other power.

I agree with Lionel Shriver when she said in an interview, “For feminists, there is no better reading than Edith Wharton.” Shriver also wrote:
I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton’s drive, independence, willfulness, and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit.
And I’d like to add: I don’t give a shit what she looks like.

Franzen being a douche is not news

also just in case any of you missed it Freedom sucked - the epistolary strategy is no excuse for poor writing and if he has nothing but disdain for his characters why the hell should I be investing 600+ pages of my attention to them?

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_...

Freedom sucked

I have this big fire hose of books aimed at my head, most of them I dont in fact buy, many of them I dont even ask for - they pile up around my desk until such a time as I reach terminal angst and claustrophobia from being surrounded by these precariously staggering towers of spines. At this point and often in indiscriminate haste I take armfuls of these books and stack them in the apartment complex lobby - where they go from there I have no idea but I do not miss them

okay I just actually read the article

my response: Jennifer Egan


good night now!

another thought

I totally dont want to sit here and go

well, Elizabeth Bishop is definitely in my top 3 poets and I have every Susan Sontag book ever published and Secret History is in my top 5 favs ever and those are all women folk and let me just sort out every book here on my book shelves and I'll stack them on a scale and we'll just see where I stand on this issue

because that seems kind of like a lot of bull shit too (some of my best friends are...)

I'm not sure how to get my head around this - maybe I should read the original link

Dan wrote: "I've mentioned previously that my reading is largely skewed towards male authors. And I can't seem to get out of that rut (at least not without a serious concentrated effort).

"de gustibus non disputandum est" - you like what you like

to me the question really drills down to 'what is reading for?'

should you read what appeals to you?

or

in your reading should you go out of your way to educate yourself and expand your horizons?

or

the question 'what is reading for?' is a bull shit nonsensical question rife with a bunch of high falutin and yet ridiculous assumptions (and also it ends with a preposition)

in the end unfortunately those remain essentially subjective questions so after all that youre still stuck with old Aristotle and his 'matters of taste'

Speaking of silly questions...

Colbert vs Sendak!

pt1
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colb...

pt2
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colb...

Bright Lights, Big City was a bit precious, which I think is the risk

not sure what is gained when you start using the second person - any immediacy gained is probably traded off for the off putting nature of the voice leaving you at best right where you started and at worst with a reader who is rolling her eyes and thinking you a git

dude just came thru our stores in Chicago - our GM escorted him through security as a favor - astonishingly the guy was a total prick, astonishingly

Mr Wood is a great guy, I'm already a donor to this very worthy organization but I'll pitch in for the team here too

Patty wrote: "Hi e! This is truly awesome. I was wondering, since you have the inside tip, if you know how the books were selected?"

yes








there is a board comprised of the buying team (5 people), the operations team (my team, 4 all told) and bookstore managers/booksellers in the field (another 15 or 20) - anyone can nominate, nominated titles are disseminated to all interested parties - mid-summer there is an initial round of voting to winnow down the title listings - we do look at late season books and guesstimate a bit if we dont have galley's yet (1q84 was in the running before anyone read it for instance but then before the final vote there were a few meh reviews from panelists)

there's a final vote in September/Early October - we tabulate and then announce