Avant Canada by Gregory Betts & Christian Bök

Author:Gregory Betts & Christian Bök [Betts, Gregory & Bök, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771123525
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

II

By contrast with the formal and thematic experimentation of How Should a Person Be?, the critical discourse surrounding the novel has rehearsed “decades old claims that women writing about their private lives are narcissistic, solipsistic, vain.”106 Initially rejected by both Heti’s American publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as by a number of other American and Canadian publishers, the book began to gain critical attention only when two excerpts were published in Mark Greif’s tastemaking, online literary magazine n+1, one of which was graphically sexual. In an interview with the New York Observer, Greif attributed the reticence to a “male-dominated culture of literature.”107 Art critic Dave Hickey is also quoted in that article as stating, “Jonathan Franzen can get away with things because he’s a boy. Getting a blow job is different from giving one.” With that “helpful prod from the avant garde” (notably comprised only of men), Heti was suddenly inundated with calls from interested publishers, including Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan, which ultimately published the novel in the United States.108 This trajectory rehearses two arguments repeatedly made by feminist critics: that women’s confessional writing is endorsed only when it is overtly sexual, and that, often, female voices are heard only once they have been “appropriated, tamed, and recolonized” under the name of a patriarchal “author/ity.”109

Some have accused the novel’s critics of the same literary sexism that almost impeded its publication, citing, for example, James Wood, the reviewer from the New Yorker, who, on the one hand, offers rhapsodic praise for Ben Lerner’s “subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel,” Leaving the Atocha Station, but on the other hand offers a tepid assessment of How Should a Person Be?110 Although Wood opens the two reviews with the requisite references to the literary masters of yore (Dostoyevsky makes an appearance in both), Lerner’s protagonist is inducted into the lineage of “those frustrated Russian antiheroes” and is described as “a convincing representative of twenty-first-century American homo literatus,” while Heti’s novel is a “collection box for gathering the stray donations and aperçus and complaints of her generation.” Although Wood does at times recognize the merits of Heti’s book, he describes her prose as “what one might charitably call basic”; “If I wanted to hear that,” he writes of a particular passage, “I could settle in at Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock.” Perhaps most notably, Wood neglects even to mention the pronounced autobiographical elements of Lerner’s novel111 while making much of them in Heti’s case—a difference that reveals the tendency to overemphasize the confessional elements of women’s writing while downplaying similar qualities in writing by men.

For critics such as Michelle Dean, Wood’s tonal discrepancy is indicative of a gender bias in literary reviewing: “influential, ‘serious’ men,” she argues, are put off by novels that “focus on the intellectual effects of female friendships.”112 Anna North agrees that “[s]tories by and about young women—about ‘girls’ and ‘girly’ concerns—are increasingly capturing our attention, and they may force a still male-dominated cultural establishment to reconsider what it considers ‘serious’.

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