Laura Lippman's Hardly Knew Her: A Review

Female writers are often terrified of their own literary talent. They take refuge in writing mystery novels where they can vent their artistic frustrations through describing fictional mutilations, torture and dismemberments they inflict on their female characters. The most violent, gruesome descriptions of torture inflicted on women and children can be found exclusively in mysteries written by women. Tess Gerritsen and Lisa Gardner, for example, specialize in scenes of female torture and debasement that are almost too painful to read.

Many people have tried to figure out why this happens. Elizabeth George, for instance, recently wrote an article on the subject suggesting that this occurs simply because readers don't care enough about male victims. Describe the murder of a man in your novel, she says, and it is guaranteed not to sell. I feel, however, that female writers create mystery novels that are so much angrier than male mysteries because they experience a degree of frustration in their daily lives and creative endeavors that is unknown to their male colleagues.

Not all female mystery writers cultivate the excessively gruesome variation of the genre. The amazingly talented Tana French and Laura Lippman write really great fiction that masquerades as mystery through a half-hearted addition of a couple of dead bodies here and there. While Tana French seems to be moving to a stage in her writing where dead bodies become more perfunctory than ever with every new novel, Laura Lippman still isn't ready to quit pretending she is a lot less talented than she is. Hardly Knew Her is a collection of Laura Lippman's short stories that are so good they could almost be compared to Joyce Carol Oates's. There is some sort of a crime in each of them but this collection is so much more than that.

Lippman's stories explore various ways in which women sell sex for money. The stories are very different, they are narrated in very distinctive voices and are set in extremely different social surroundings. Still, each of them addresses the relationship between sex and money in a way that is always insightful and fresh. Cheap didacticism is alien to Lippman. Among her female characters who sell their bodies in a variety of inventive ways, the only one who has character and integrity is a career prostitute. She is, of course, despised by housewives who believe that selling themselves just to one man is somehow better. Lippman makes it very clear that her sympathies lie with the honest, resourceful prostitute and not with the spoiled housewives who go to great lengths to convince themselves of their non-existent superiority:

“Is there anyone who works harder than a stay-at-home mom?” Ditchdiggers, she thought. Janitresses and custodians. Gardeners. Meter readers. The girl who stands on her feet all day next to a fryer, all for the glory of minimum wage. Day laborers, men who line up on street corners and take whatever is offered. Hundreds of people you stare past every day, barely recognizing them as human. Prostitutes.

This kind of honesty is not easy to find in a genre that is addressed to an overwhelmingly female audience. The desire to keep the housewives happy and cater to their tastes has been the downfall of many an entertainer. Thankfully, Lippman is not one of them.

Laura Lippman lives in Baltimore, and most of her stories are set in this city. The few times that she ventures to other settings, her stories lose in quality. The only part of Hardly Knew Her: Stories that I didn't enjoy too much was a story set in New Orleans. On home turf, however, Lippman is brilliant. Her love of Baltimore and her profound understanding of its history make her stories fascinating to those of us who have an emotional attachment to this beautiful city.

The Meaning of the Twilight Craze

Stephenie Meyer's The Twilight Saga has become a significant cultural phenomenon. Teenage girls go crazy over these poorly written books*. They write an incredible number of reviews for these books on Amazon. They create fan-sites and write fan-fiction. They make movies based on the series an instant hit. They go crazy over this - I'm sorry, I have to be blunt - rubbish. So why do so many young girls become fans of The Twilight Saga? Why all the Twilight craze?

For me, this is a particularly interesting question because The Twilight Saga is a female Bildungsroman**, which has been my main research interest for a while. A Bildungsroman is a story of growth and development of a young character, a story of coming into one's own, becoming an adult. Dickens's David Copperfield is a Bildungsroman. So are Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Bronte's Jane Eyre, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and many others.

When female Bildungsroman came into existence and began to flourish in the XIXth century, it concentrated on exploring how the patriarchal society forced women to stunt their growth, to grow "down" instead of growing up (to use the apt terminology introduced by Annis Pratt.) In order to be accepted by their societies, women were forced to infantilize themselves, to resign themselves to never becoming fully mature. The entire history of this genre is the story of women struggling against the society's attempts to infantilize them and, for the most part, failing.

In the 1970ies, when women's rights movements achieved so much, critics and readers of female Bildungsromane expected that now, finally, novels of female development will talk of actual growth, of women exploring their newly found options, making their own choices, and enjoying the same wide range of growth-related experiences as the protagonists of male Bildungsromane.

Contrary to these expectations, a massive appearance of these female Bildungsromane that would celebrate women's choices, growth and development never came about. In reality, the exact opposite took place. The genre began producing an ever-growing number of novels that concentrate on women refusing to grow up, infantilizing themselves of their own free will (and not because of any societal expectations or demands) and asserting their right not to grow, not to become adults, not to make their own choices. Often, these female Bildungsromane experiment with the Gothic genre. This happens because the theme of fear (fear of the world of adults, of a complex reality awaiting them when they grow up) can be explored very productively within the Gothic genre. So it is not surprising that Stephenie Meyer decided to bring vampires into the mix. The constant sense of dread, of danger that Bella Swan experiences is symbolic of the terror that she feels at the unwelcome prospect of coming into her own. Like so many of the heroines of these new Bildungsromane, she delegates all responsibility for her life to a man.

At the dawn of this genre, female characters were often forced into marriage and childbirth at an early age. They realized how limited their life choices were and struggled to find some opportunities for growth, to escape their stultifying environment. Not so the contemporary heroine Bella Swan. Unlike - to give just one example - Jane Eyre who longs to "reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen", Bella has every opportunity to carve out a life of her own filled with personal achievements of pretty much any kind. But she chooses not to. She elects the very lifestyle that her predecessors of 150 years ago struggled to avoid. At a very young age, she gives herself over to a man so that he can possess her, impregnate her, and integrate her into his clan. As if that were not enough, she makes sure that her daughter is integrated into this very patriarchal existence from an early age of six.

Today's female Bildungsroman is very often a story of women choosing never to grow up and defending passionately (and often violently) their right to eternal immaturity. The enormous popularity of The Twilight Saga shows that this narrative of voluntary female self-infantilization resonates with many young women. In my book (which is now under review at a publishing house), I analyze this phenomenon as it takes place in the contemporary Spanish literature. The Twilight craze demonstrates that it is not limited to Europe. Now we have a very similar development here in the US.

* This is probably the only positive consequence of the Twilight craze. Hey, at least these kids will find out that reading exists and that it's supposed to be an enjoyable activity. Of course, the question immediately arises whether it is better to read rubbish than to read nothing at all.

** When I speak of female Bildungsromane, I mean novels written by women about women.

Students and Sexism

I've been grading student reader responses to some Latin American poetry we have read in class and the degree of sexism - that the students don't even notice - is nothing short of shocking. The two poets of the early XXth century we were reading are called Alfonsina Storni and Gabriela Mistral. Got it? Alfonsina and Gabriela.

Their lyrical and feminist poetry is addressed to men. In one poem, Storni addresses "a little, little man" who has imprisoned her and wouldn't let her be free. In another poem, Mistral says that "to see him again" is all she wants because she is dreaming of "winding my hands around his bloody neck." And so on.

In their responses, the absolute majority of students refered to both poets as "he." As a result they produced things like: "In this poem, the poet talks about his lover and wants to kill him."

Apparently, it's easier for them to imagine that poets in the early 20th century Latin America wrote openly gay poetry than to realize that those poets - called Gabriela and Alfonsina, in case you have forgotten, - were women.

I have read about these tests where college students are asked to draw a human being and they end up drawing - almost exclusively - male figures. Encountering within my own class this incapacity to equate an artist and a woman in spite of the obvious evidence is truly shocking.

Paula Varsavsky's Visit

Paula Varsavsky is a very good Argentinean writer. I invited her to speak to my students this coming February, and the whole Department was very eager to see her here. I included her short story as required reading in my courses. The plan was to have the students read the text and then give them a chance to meet the author and speak to her. Paula is a very good speaker, and I know they would have loved listening to her. Everybody was really looking forward to this.

Today, however, I had to disappoint my students. I told them that the writer's visit to our university has been cancelled bacause of the budget freeze. The budget for Paula Varsavsky's visit was actually very very modest. The writer offered to limit the budget even more, but all to no avail. We are not allowed to spend even a dollar on such an important cultural activity.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrating this is. The students would have benefited from this in a variety of important ways. When I heard the President say in his yesterday's State of the Union address that universities need to start cutting spending, I thought how sad it is that we have to give up on such important cultural activities - which also cost next to nothing - while there is always money to send more troops all over the world and the Pentagon does not see even a tiny little cut in its spending.

They call it a "freeze" and a "cash flow problem." I know from sad experience, however, that when an institution gets into the practice of cutting funding for cultural and educational events, it's very hard to get it back on track. The efforts to kill the Humanities have been going on for a while. They started long before anybody even heard of the current economic crisis. I feel that this particular crisis is just an excuse that is being used to continue the assault on Humanities.

And more than anything in the world I hate having to deprive my students of the educational experiences they deserve.

Tana French's The Likeness: A Review

I just fnished reading . What an absolutely delightful book, my friends! I enjoyed every one of its 480 pages profoundly. Tana French is a young Irish writer. The Likeness is one of those really good books that its female author tries to masquerade as a mystery novel. The mystery itself is not bad, especially if you manage to get over a few of the initial premises that border on the fantastic.

Cassie Maddox, a young Irish policewoman, goes undercover among a group of PhD students who live in an old house they are attempting to restore. This premise is, of course, highly unrealistic. Graduate students in literature have a certain way of talking and acting that cannot be faked. In reality, un undercover police officer would have blown her cover during the very first discussion on why Lacan is wrong about everything and Eagleton's new-found essentialism is annoying. Nobody can fake writing a doctoral dissertation convincingly. You have either lived through that process or not.

Having said that, however, I have to confess that French's writing is so good that soon enough you forget about these inconsistencies and even forget to care about the identity of the killer. The Likeness is a beautifully written story about today's Ireland. It offers incisive criticism of modern consumer society without falling into the trap of bemoaning the good old days:

Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on.

What makes this novel so enjoyable is that, in places, it reaches the level of insightfulness that is normally completely our of reach for the mystery genre writers. In The Likeness, the main conflict arises - and eventually leads to murder - because of a profound dissatisfaction that the characters of the novel feel with the very structure of society:

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.

Just this one paragraph makes the novel absolutely worth reading for me.

The Likeness is only Tana French's second novel and an obvious improvement on her first one, In the Woods. I can't wait to see how far this growing author will go. Her talent is undeniable and her command of the language is unique. Maybe one day she will feel strong enough to stop hiding behind the protective screen of the mystery genre and will write actual literature. I have no doubt that French has enough talent to achieve that.

The Horrors of Motherhood: Sophie Hannah's The Wrong Mother, A Review

The semester is over, the final grades are in, so now I can continue on my search for a relaxing reading list for the holiday season. Mystery novels are my favorite genre of mindless fun reading. I am always on a search for promising female writers, and for some reason, British female mystery writers (or even the writers who, like the talented Elizabeth George, pretend to be British) are always a lot better than female detective novel writers from anywhere else in the world.

My latest discovery is . As a mystery novel, Sophie Hannah's The Wrong Mother: A Novel is almost as good as it gets. (And don't worry there are absolutely NO SPOILERS in this review.) It is a breathtaking, fast-paced police procedural, which thankfully does not overdo the details of police procedure. This novel does exactly what a good detective novel is supposed to do and keeps you guessing until the very last pages. At the same time, it is not one of those annoying mysteries where the readers could not have possibly guessed at the identity of the killer/s simply because the  author did not provide them with some crucial information. Hannah provides enough clues for her readers to solve the riddle for themselves. Another thing that endeared Hannah to me is that she does not revel in gruesome details and does not scatter body parts over each page of the book.  There is also no arcane knowledge of crime scene analysis that is the hallmark of many boring mystery novels.

At the same time, Hannah has a lot to say about womanhood and motherhood, and this made her novel especially fun to read. The following statement, for example, echoes one of my recent posts:

[Women] shoulder burdens rather than dellegate them to their husbands or partners. Often they assume a man wouldn't be able to cope in the way that they can. Plus, they want to make everyone happy, even if it's at their own expense - you know, the martyr mentality. The 'have-the-men-had-enough?' mentality.

Hannah portrays convincingly the painful lot of women who have chosen to parent both their children and their husband, reduced to the role of an eternal teenager in need of mommy's constant mothering.

Hannah's vision of motherhood, which is the central topic of this novel, is beyond bleak. Many of the book's characters are women who used to be extremely happy as single women or in childless marriages. The moment they had children, however, their lives became profoundly and utterly miserable. I have no way

of judging whether Sophie Hannah's portrayal of motherhood is correct, but I have to say that it is extremely powerful.

There is a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth, 

says one of the novel's characters. Hannah sets out to break this conspiracy of silence and tell her readers what motherhood is really like. The world of being a mother is not what cheesy Hallmark cards tell us, she says. It is constant, undiluted misery, capable of breaking even the strongest and most determined woman. Of course, Hannah recognizes that there are many women who truly enjoy motherhood. The only women who feel like this, however, are the ones who are only good at motherhood and completely incapable of achieving anything else in life. They excel at being mothers because they can't excel at any other pursuit. The following passage is powerful and hilarious and offers a perfect example of both Hannah's writing style and her ideology:

The mothers who immerse themselves in . . . 'the whole mummy thing', the ones who are only so good at mothering because they have to be, because they are afraid of setting foot outside their own front doors and they need the perfect excuse. Can't hack it in the real world? Have a baby, then, and let everyone praise you  for your commitment and devotion to your child above all else. Stand at the school gate twittering, 'All I ever wanted is to be a mum.' People without children can't get away with making an equivalent statement, can they? 'Excuse me, madam, but why do you sit at home all day doing sod all?' 'Oh, well, it's because I want to devote myself to being a niece. I've got an aunt, you see. That's why I've decided not to achieve anything ever. I really want to pour all my time and energy into my niecehood.'

This paragraph is definitely one of the funniest, most beautifully sarcastic things I have read in a while. It also demonstrates why the US mystery writers cannot possibly compete with writers from Great Britain. In order to sell your book as an American author, you have to engage in the Jodi Picoult type of lachrimose, stereotype-laden, Oprahesque writing that offers nothing but the most washed out trivialities.

Zoe Heller's The Believers: A Review

Zoe Heller keeps producing books that could have been great if she had only managed to stick to her original purpose without getting distracted. Her novel What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel was not bad at all, and if you think otherwise, it is probably because you were put off by the pretty weak film version . I have just finished Heller's new novel  and at first I really liked it. The beginning of The Believers is simply hilarious, and it's no wonder that the book made the Best Books of 2009 list by Publishers Weekly. Heller ridicules - often in a pretty vicious way - a certain type of self-righteous leftists whose holier-than-thou attitude sometimes conceals pettiness and unenviable nastiness. You can get a pretty good idea about the first part of the novel from the following quote: "Karla always spoke of Mike's job as a union organizer with the reverence of a missionary wife describing her husband's evangelical work in Borneo."

Unfortunately, somewhere after the first third of the novel, Heller decided to abandon this line of her story and turned to creating a trite, boring, and repetitive melodrama. The children of the above-mentioned self-righteous leftists are understandably disillusioned by their parents' political agenda and start looking for the meaning of life in drugs, affairs and Orthodox Judaism. Among these three solutions as they are described by Heller, the drug addiction is presented as pretty much the most innocuous one.

In one of my previous reviews, I wrote about the lamentable tendency of female writers to feel scared of writing an actual work of literature. These talented authors escape from the task of writing good novels by turning to secondary genres. Gillian Flynn retreats into the realm of the mystery genre, while Heller falls into the cheap tear-jerking melodrama. The same as with Flynn, we see in The Believers a gifted writer who is somehow too afraid of her own gift to let it flourish. In our patriarchal society, even very talented women obviously have a very hard time believing that they can dedicate their lives to anything other than trivialities. Trivial literature, trivial lives, trivial occupations; women still often see themselves as secondary human beings, secondary writers, and secondary artists.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn: A Review

A patriarchal system invests men with the duty to talk and think about serious issues, while women are expected to dedicate their lives to trivialities. We can still see this set of expectations at work on a daily basis. During parties, men talk about politics, philosophy, and the meaning of life, while women are huddled together on the other side of the room, swapping muffin recipes. In class, female students rarely dare to offer their opinions on big-picture questions. They leave such questions to men and dedicate themselves to answering questions  that are detail-oriented. I always know that when I ask "Is Hugo Chavez good for Venezuela?", I will get no female responses. But if I ask "When did Chavez come to power?", many female students will offer an answer. This doesn't happen because women are less capable of or less interested in analyzing serious issues. For the longest time, any woman who attempted to leave the realm of muffin-baking and affirm herself in the public sphere was castigated. This is why it is still difficult for women to believe that the sphere of great endeavors and important issues is just as much theirs as men's.

The saddest thing to observe is when this happens in the realm of creative activities. Often, incredibly talented women seem not to dare to enter the world of art and assert themselves there. They prefer to limit themselves to secondary genres and pretty much waste their creative gift on producing works of art that manage to entertain but are never taken seriously.

Gillian Flynn is a perfect example of such a female writer. From the first paragraphs of her novel , it is obvious that she is an extremely talented author. Flynn writes with incredible poignancy about life on a small Kansas farm nearing bankruptcy, about the tragedy of being a teenager in rural America, about the horrible burden of childhood trauma, about the damage caused by the purity movement. Her mastery of the English language is breathtaking. Dark Places: A Novel could be a great work of literature but for one thing.

As many other female writers, Flynn unfortunately shies away from creating art. She follows in the footsteps of such talented writers as Ruth Rendell and PD James and confines herself to the realm of mystery novel. She takes what could have been a great novel and adds some mystery genre devices that are boring, conventional, and that feel completely alien to the main body of  Dark Places: A Novel. She still doesn't manage to kill the novel completely. Everything but the last couple of chapters is truly fantastic. I would even recommend stopping reading the book 20-25 pages before it ends to avoid spoiling your experience of the novel.

Flynn is a great writer in the making. I truly hope that she will lose her fear of competing in the big leagues and will allow her creative gift to unfold without being fettered by these conventional limitations that plague so meny female writers.

Sarah Langan's The Keeper: A Female Horror Novel

The Kindle store of Amazon has become my favorite online place after my own blog. They often offer books absolutely for free so that people can get acquainted with new authors. This is how I came across The Keeper, a debut horror novel by Sarah Langan. The genre of the horror novel has always been very productive for female writers. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charlotte Bronte's profoundly feminist Jane Eyre set a very high standard for the writers who want to create a work belonging to this genre.

Initially, a was a bit leery of this novel. I was afraid that this debut work would be a disappointment and a waste of time. I have to read a lot as part of my job, so taking on a new novel by a writer I know nothing about means taking time away from more pressing readings that need to be done. However, I am definitely not sorry that I read this book.

Langan is great at descriptions of everyday life in a small town in Maine. A disillusioned, washed-out teacher who is drinking himself into an early grave, a high-school girl trying to come to terms with abuse within her own family, a mother trying to avoid the knowledge that her husband abused his own daughter, the slow disintegration of life in the town that inhabitants of Bedford attribute to its being haunted: this is all narrated with a great economy of artistic means and produces a very powerful impression.

Where Langan fails, however, is in the creation of horror scenes. She is a powerful realist writer but for some reason Langan must believe that adding horror scenes will make her book more powerful. That doesn't happen. I almost abandoned the book at the very beginning when I encountered a very sloppy and overdone horror scene. It seems like the author watched many bad Hollywood movies and is guided by the imagery they suggested to her. Often, you can practically see the writer attempting to create a text that could be turned into a movie. This, of course, doesn't make for good writing. Everything is exaggerated, to the point of becoming obnoxious. These insistent and extremely ornate horror passages come into a sharp contrast with the beautifully simple prose of the rest of the novel. Stranngely, Langan understands the power of understatement everywhere except in the horror scenes. If she had paid closer attention to her famous predecessors in the genre, she would have noticed that the atmosphere of horror is best created not through detailed descriptions of blood and gore but by a mere suggestion of something scary lurking in the background.

Another problem I had with the book were the chapter titles that reminded me of the way TV show episodes sometimes are named: "The Husband of the Woman Who Jumped Out the Window (Fall from Grace)", "Guy Walks into a Bar", "Excruciatingly Tight Acid-Washed Jeans." This seemed completely out of place in a novel like The Keeper. I am happy that I didn't see the table of contents before I started reading the book (thanks to the Kindle it's possible to skip the table of contents), or I wouldn't have even begun the novel.

I'm not sorry I read , but unless Langan decides to turn to what she does best - a straightforward realist narrative - I don't think I'll read another novel by this author.