A bookstore recently opened near my apartment which actually sells—I am not kidding—used books by the pound.  It’s pretty fantastic.  Their selection isn’t that huge at the moment, but they have a pretty decent fiction section, and it’s so cheap and tempting that I have honest-to-god had to change my normal walking routes so as to avoid walking directly by it.  Anyway, I was in there not long after it opened and came across a short-ish book called The End of Alice by the author A.M. Homes.  I had seen the name a few times before, particularly in an interview with David Foster Wallace, and so had always been curious.  I hadn’t heard anything about this book specifically, but since it was so cheap (and light!), I decided to buy it.

Now, the description on the back had given me some clue as to the disturbing world I was about to immerse myself in, and I certainly wasn’t expecting a humorous, light-hearted walk in the park.  But holy fuck!  Holy fucking fuck.  I mean, I’ve read some crazy, fucked up shit over the years, but this might just top them all—it certainly surpasses Lolita and is right up there with something like Naked Lunch or Crash (the J.G. Ballard novel, not the crappy 2004 movie).  I finished it 24 hours ago as of this writing, and it is still lingering, and is showing a stubborn resistance to my efforts at some peace.  (I had a date last night, and was actually rather glad that nothing happened sexually, because any intimations of sex would have just gotten me thinking of this book, and that would not have been good.) [Update: it has been a bit longer now since I finished, and I think I've gotten enough distance to say with some trepidation that I think the book is also rather brilliant.]

The novel is narrated by a prisoner, a middle-aged pedophile.  A lot of the book is devoted to him describing his life in prison and his obsessions as he slowly reveals to us the details of his past, culminating in the last 100 or so pages, which are simply masterful and where we learn in great detail of the heinous crime that landed him in jail.  The other strand of the story is Chappy’s (the prisoner’s name, sort of) correspondence with a 19-year-old college girl who is home for the summer.  The girl has some sexual peculiarities of her own, and is attracted to and eventually seduces a local 12-year-old boy whom she has been giving tennis lessons to.  (In one particularly unnerving scene, she eats a scab off his knee.)  The book, as you might have guessed from my reaction, can at times be exceptionally graphic, describing prison sex, pedophilia, and violence in great detail, and all from the point of view of a seriously fucked up narrator—in this novel nothing is spared or left to the imagination, it would seem.

Consider just one example of the depravity which the reader is so frequently subjected to.  The narrator in this scene is talking about a 12-year-old girl he has tied up:

Curl my lip, roll it back, and expose my teeth; fuck you with my face, scraping the liquid of your ecstasy, scraping until your flesh is weak, until you break and begin to bleed.  And then I suck that blood, drink you down.

And saving the best for last, I pull out the most favored toy, my precious BB gun—a long-dead father’s gift to his only son.  I travel with it tucked inside my bag and rarely use it, but today is special because I’m here with you.  So I unpack the would-be rifle, pump it up three times, and put it to you.  I blast you once and you buck a bit; the second time you seem still surprised as though no one had ever thought of such a thing.  I stroke the barrel and am filled with memories; screaming squirrels, broken bottles, bull’s-eye pucks in widows’ windows.  The black paint is chipping.  Again, I pull the trigger and then withdraw, leaving you with my ball bearings in your walls.  You look so perplexed.  Oyster, don’t you get it?  In your shell I put three grains of sand.  Make me a pearl!

 

I’ll stop here, though, as this isn’t meant to be a book review or a work of criticism, per se.  But given everything I have told you thus far, are you surprised to find out that the author is in fact a woman?  (The A in A.M. stands for Amy.)  I can’t say I had this reaction, because I had heard of the author before and knew she was female.  But whenever I have talked about this book to other people, they always seemed surprised to learn of the authors sex.[i] Now, admittedly this is a relatively small sample size, and thus is nothing close to a controlled, scientific experiment, but the reaction has been consistent enough that I thought it was worth thinking about it.  And, truth be told, if I hadn’t known in advance that the author was female, I probably would have been surprised myself.

But why?  Why are people surprised to learn that the author of a sexually graphic and supremely fucked-up novel like The End of Alice is a woman?  What does this mean for women trying to make it in the world of high literary fiction?

In 1998 Francine Prose (side note: great last name, almost as funny as the local meteorologist for Fox whose name is Amy Freeze) wrote a much-discussed article for Harper’s looking at the extent to which female authors are still underrepresented in major literary prizes, and get fewer short stories published in widely-read magazines and journals.  She writes:

In fact, as so often happens, the statistics outdo one’s grisliest paranoias. In last year’s New York Review of Books, twenty-five books of fiction by men were reviewed and only ten books by women—in essays written by three times as many men as women. In 1997, The New Yorker printed thirty-seven stories by men, ten by women; Harper’s Magazine printed nine stories by men, three by women. Since 1992, the Editors’ Choice lists in The New York Times Book Review, arguably the most powerful voice in the book-review chorus, have included twenty-two books of fiction by men and eight by women. Since 1980, sixteen men and two women have won the PEN/Faulkner Award; and fourteen men and four women, the National Book Award. No works of fiction by women were included among the five finalists for the Los Angeles Times book prize last year (though the Los Angeles Times’s winner in a category for “first fiction” was a woman, the short-story writer Carolyn Ferrell, who took the prize with the appropriately named collection Don’t Erase Me). And in 1988, when none of the New York Times’s ten best books of the year was by a woman, the editors (who bypassed, for example, Mavis Gallant’s In Transit in favor of “a circus of storytelling” by Milorad Pavic) published this disclaimer: “In case anyone has failed to notice, none of the books on this year’s list is by a woman. Among more than 40 volumes originally nominated by individual editors were many, both fiction and nonfiction, by women. But none remained among the final choices after two months of weekly discussions.”

 

Given that this was written 10 years ago, it is worth looking at some more updated numbers.  One sign of progress is that over the last 30 years, the gender split in stories published in the annual Best American Short Stories series is pretty equal, coming in at 47% female and 53% male, with the most published author being Alice Munro (odd, considering she is Canadian and it is an anthology of American short stories—damn canucks!).  On the other hand, if one looks at the 312 stories published in the New Yorker between 2003 and 2008, only 38.1% were written by women.  And, more recently, we have the Publisher’s Weekly list of the 10 best books of 2009, which included no female authors at all.

What does all this have to do with people’s reaction to The End of Alice?  I think they both point to a broader problem.  Namely, that female writers still have to deal with being thought of as “female writers” and not just writers.  And part of being a “female writer” is that one is expected to write in certain styles, constrain yourself to certain subjects, etc.  So long as female writers and their work are at all thought of as “women’s literature” or “women writers” and not just Writers, there will be some marginalization when it comes to acceptance into the world of literary fiction, kind of the same way (though for obviously different reasons) that much genre fiction is.

But I don’t want to suggest that there is no value to the idea of being a “female writer,” because there was a period during which it was useful I think for women writers (or many of them, anyway) to make a point of writing seriously about subjects that were typically associated with femininity, as this allowed them to prove that these topics could be just as Important and Literary and worthy of serious artistic consideration as typically masculine topics.  As Virginia Woolf wrote famously in A Room of One’s Own:

Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing–room. A scene in a battle–field is more important than a scene in a shop…

It was thus valuable for women writers to really embrace their identities as women when they were writing, and it made sense for them to largely focus their writings on typically feminine topics, because it was a way of fighting against the masculine literary culture which prevailed.  Had they all just tried to write like men and talk about typically masculine subject matter, it would have just reinforced or confirmed for men that their values were the right ones, and it would then be easier for them (the men) to dismiss women as serious writers because, according to their perspective, why would women be able to write better about topics that they (the women) are either explicitly or implicitly agreeing are masculine just in virtue of writing about them seriously.

The problem is perhaps that this idea or conception of female authors has become too entrenched, past the point where it is still very useful.  Granted, I think there is still a bias against the kind of subject matter Woolf discusses, but it is certainly less so than it was when she writing.  (There is still an asymmetry in that a women’s writings about very “feminine” things such as fashion or shopping are still more likely to be dismissed as trivial than when a man writes about, say, sports.)  And people’s reaction on finding out that the author of The End of Alice is a woman is a perfect example.  People now have very little difficulty conceding that a woman can write great literature, but consciously or unconsciously we still have certain biases about what the subject matter of that literature will be.  So we are shocked when we come up against an author like Homes who is writing about something that very few people at all are really willing to tackle, and certainly seems the antithesis of what women should be writing about.

And so this kinda seems like the next real step for women in the literary world: to get people to fully internalize the fact that not only are typically feminine subjects worth of serious attention and capable of producing great art, but that women can write capably on just as broad of subject matter as men.  As a culture we’ve certainly made a lot of headway in this direction, but an example like the one I have discussed here still points at some of its limitations.  And because it is so depraved and disturbed and fucked up in all kinds of ways, The End of Alice is almost like a final test.  If we can reach a day when no one is surprised that a woman has written such a novel, then that’s probably a pretty good indication that we’ve gotten to the point where, as Prose puts it, the “only distinction that will matter will be between good and bad writing.”

- Torff

[i] A few interesting but somewhat unrelated questions:  Would the aesthetic experience of the book change if we thought it was written by a man?  Would we be more offended by the main female character if it hadn’t been written by a woman?