The novelists who have long been dearest to me – as I seem never to tire of asserting – are Dostoyevsky and Norman Mailer. But these oft-stated preferences do lead me into trouble when it comes to debate over the influence of gender in writing (and indeed reading.) For Mailer and Dostoyevsky seem to be indelibly coded MASCULINE – the former an (in)famous proponent of machismo as a sort of spiritual force; the latter the inventor of literature’s most thoughtful axe-murderer. Moreover, and maybe not coincidentally, neither writer is rated particularly ‘good at women.’

For sure the great Russian’s most notable female creations – Nastassya in The Idiot, Lisa in The Devils, Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov – all come burning off the page; yet it’s often argued that these ‘proud women’ are highly idealised figures (for all that they were clearly modelled on Dostoyevsky’s mistress, the fiery Polina Suslova.)  As for Mailer’s gallery of ‘bitch goddesses’… well, his self-professed best try at a woman in three dimensions, Kittredge Montague of Harlot’s Ghost, was judged a success by nobody much.

I’ve long had the sense that female readers are especially alert to whether or not a male novelist has painted the interiority of his female characters with adequate colour and texture. Norman Mailer was certainly no fine portrait-artist of a woman’s sensibility, but then I trust we agree that not all fiction should aspire to mimesis. Sometimes the painter’s vision should be dynamic, phantastic, expressionistic. Mailer certainly had a desire to inhabit a woman’s head, or else he wouldn’t have written the marvellous and rather neglected Marilyn. Accused by Gore Vidal of misogyny, Mailer legendarily responded by citing his five marriages and seven children, five of them daughters. (He further pointed out Vidal’s failure to score in any of these categories.)

Here, I accept, you may be shaking your head. Are five divorces really to be worn as a badge of honour? I would offer just three remarks on the prosecution case. First, were I a woman I wouldn’t want for a champion of my sex a man as vain and haughty as Gore Vidal. Second, in the very best of male-female relations there remains something vying, combative – it shouldn’t go so low as Mailer sometimes descended, but you know what I mean. (Don’t you?) Third, the issue of parenthood feels to me essential, for the experience of raising children reminds us daily that the sexes are innately different. And yet still men and women seem generally to rub along pretty well (unlike, say, male and female spiders.)

The act of writing, though, cannot conceal that innate gender difference – prose is just too sensitive a register, the imagination from whence it arises is too intricately wired to the physiology of emotion. Thus men and women do write differently, and they read differently too.

The contents of my bookshelves are, it’s fair to say, male-dominated. My wife has pointed this out to me, I know it to be true. But I don’t believe this was ever a policy decision. And those female novelists whom I love are among my favourite novelists per se – just flicking across those alphabetised shelves I speak of Angela Carter, George Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, Sarah Hall, Patricia Highsmith, Julia Leigh, Hilary Mantel, Valerie Martin, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Shelley, Emma Tennant…
Basically I like writers whom I feel to be formidable. I like a novel to take a broad canvas and fill it. I want moral disputation and politics, even as a mere presence in proceedings. I don’t much care for books about painful middle-class manners or ‘the domestic sphere’ – I live that stuff most days of the week, and some writing by women feels to me overly focused on same. But there’s no gender bar to the sort of novel I was just extolling, or else – to speak only of the obvious – we wouldn’t have Middlemarch. Or Hilary Mantel’s magisterial Wolf Hall, for that matter.

I’m writing this piece in response to another, from the XX-chromosome perspective, posted by Molly Flatt at Bookdiva. As Molly was brave enough to go first and could doubtless have said much more I don’t wish to pick away at any of her observations, but I do think it’s worth reviewing her carefully ventured suggestion that ‘female’ books might tend to be ‘more lyrical and perhaps more opaque, with less reliance on plot, more dissection of relationships, and a tendency towards surrealism or heightened sensuality.’

All of this feels true, but maybe only half-true. Literary surrealism, for instance, I always think of as rather male (inflected by male humour in particular.) On matters of sensuality, yes, I find I only ever want to read a woman – Anais Nin, for example. (I may be running down the boys on this score, but then I was struck by Ron Rosenbaum’s recent remarks at Slate on excessive male admiration of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which Rosenbaum reads as ‘almost always a transparently sneaky attempt to promulgate the notion that [men] know what they’re talking about when it comes to women and sexuality.’) The capacity to write prose with lyrical cadence surely crosses the gender divide, just as women writers can be as blunt and terse as the best. Likewise the gift for storytelling – clearly women can do genre, crime and murder tales as well as more grandly-scaled narratives. (Recently I learned something new at the Blast website via Jess d’Arbonne’s bracing views on the female love of fantasy and sci-fi.)

I suppose what I’m saying – wishfully or not – is that what divides us is rather less notable than how we are united. Molly mentions Chick-Lit and certainly that genre might as well exist entirely in Mandarin for all my acquaintance with it. But it seems to me that male readers in great numbers also want to devour paperback novels that are wish-fulfilment versions of their humdrum daily lives. The ‘dissection of relationships’? Well, I do suspect this is an area of life where a lot of men prefer to take, shall we say, a ‘settled view’ of the matter rather than see it ‘dissected’. But no writer worth their salt, male or female, will settle for such slovenliness.

Two last matters, as raised by Molly. Unlike Tim Lott I have no problem with the Orange Prize. It is surely a waste of time to dream of some level playing-field in the market-driven taste-corralled world of prize-givings; and a lapse of taste to wish that we have many more of them. And then I must say I was intrigued and amused by Molly’s mention of those objects – animate or inanimate – on which she bestows a gender identity. At times I’m up to a bit of this too, I admit. A glass of beer or a shot of malt whisky is a bloke – a mate – for sure. Whereas in the manner of the ancient Athenian I consider the Fates to be female, and frequently I curse them – but only in good sport, you understand.

That Molly considers her laptop female put me in mind of remarks by Norman Mailer’s son John Buffalo in the book of dialogues between he and his father, The Big Empty (2006). Therein Mailer fils characterised his work computer as female and proposed that ‘she’ felt displeasure whenever he plugged an Ethernet jack into ‘her’ for the purpose of internet access – ‘Hey, I just want yours, what is this?’ That is a quite ludicrous thing to think, never mind to write, and Mailer sceptics may feel that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Still, I like to take this touchingly daft imagining as further evidence that a great deal of gender difference is merely in the mind.

Richard T Kelly’s new novel The Possessions of Doctor Forrest is published on June 2 2011.

1. Molly Says:
   May 5th, 2011 at 10:47 am

   Richard – a gorgeous ‘riposte’ thank you and glad to see that your reading habits and ideas around gendered writing are as idiosyncratic as my own. I am a Dostoevsky devotee and agree with his habit of female idealisation, although I must admit I have never touched a Mailer. I am now going to head out and investigate, to form my own opinion of his uselessness with women (or not).

   Healthy rebuttals to my (yes, rather top-line) thoughts although I must reiterate that when talking about those female qualities in a novel I was gendering the qualities, not the person who wrote them. As you say, women and men can write all sorts of styles and genres. For me, the ‘femininity’ of a book tends to emerge regardless of whether the author comes from Venus or Mars.

   Anyway, I’d love to see what some other Bookhuggers and Bookdivas think…(hint) And with that I head back to my undeniably orifice filled yet defiantly male laptop…

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