- Share This Post
- 1
- Pin It
- 6
-
Sparkle (0)
While many of us seem to be getting book information and recommendations from book blogs and other new sources, traditional review outlets like The New York Times still carry influence and weight -- they still matter. To some people, including best-selling authors like Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, they seem to matter a lot.
Weiner has been vocal for years about the fact that the Times does not review her books, even though she's placed several of them on their bestseller lists -- and she became even more vocal a couple of weeks ago, when the Times published two pieces, a review and a feature, about Jonathan Franzen's upcoming novel Freedom within just a few days. Weiner was following up on Picoult's Twitter comments about the review -- and the Times' attention to "white male literary darlings" at the expense of women fiction writers -- with her own "#Franzenfreude" tweets.
Picoult and Weiner discussed their viewpoints with the Huffington Post. What's been described as the "Franzen Feud" isn't really that personal; it's more an issue of the attention given to certain types of fiction over others, particularly when produced by certain types of authors. Weiner acknowledges that she doesn't write "literary fiction," but notes that some of the elements she incorporates into her novels seem to be taken more seriously when they show up in fiction written by men:
"I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today ... I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book."
Picoult -- who has been reviewed by the Times occasionally (and not necessarily positively) -- believes that the paper's reviewers overlook general-market commercial fiction (while giving space to genre writers of both genders in addition to the aforementioned "literary darlings"), and that this is ultimately short-sighted on their part:
"(H)istorically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were writing for the masses."
Weiner mentioned some male authors who cover territory similar to that in her novels -- Jonathan Tropper and Nick Hornby were two examples -- noting that they don't seem expected to choose between commercial and critical success the way female authors are. Commercially, though, "domestic" or "relationship" fiction does seem to be more often produced by women writers, and to appeal more strongly to women readers ... and as it so often does, that brings the discussion back to "chick lit." Linda Holmes of NPR's pop-culture Monkey See blog considers that a term that's long since outlived any usefulness:
"(A)t this point, I think the only solution is to stay away from the term 'chick lit' as much as humanly possible, because it's become a term that means 'by and about women, and not something you need to take seriously, although we're not necessarily saying those things are connected, so it might be a giant coincidence' ... I don't know what 'chick lit' is anymore, except books that are understood to be aimed at women, written by women, and not important. And I can't get behind that."
Since I discovered book blogs (and started one of my own in March 2007), I've drifted away from mainstream-media book reviews. However, even before that, I noticed I was finding fewer and fewer of the books I actually wanted to read via those reviews.
I'm not much of a genre reader, although I don't seek to avoid genre elements in general fiction. Having said that, the fiction I prefer to
