Cosmopoetica

Amy King has another longish post on “The Weenie Roast” (aka the Publishers Weekly Top 10, which I posted about twice before). I recommend reading both of Amy’s posts and considering the issue for yourself.

In her most recent entry, Amy gets at the heart of my disagreement. Funny thing is, I essentially agree with her on the basic notion that the PW list is suspect. But I can’t agree with two important points:

1) I won’t condemn the authors on the PW list or hyper-focus on their gender because of their inclusion in the list. Victor Lavalle’s novel Big Machine is a great read, male protagonist or no. Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever is entertaining and– judging from the lack of complaints– relatively accurate… a welcome entry even if it is, as Amy King so eloquently puts it, “all about a man.”

2) I don’t believe that authors of fiction have a single, required mission/responsibility as Amy King does. She writes:

“I dare say that very few of those books on the list will bear the responsibility I see writers as having:  to be critics of the usual, old dominant ideals and to expose those ideals rather than simply transmitting them yet again.  That involves telling stories unheard and bearing witness to injustices as well as ways of being that debunk these tireless violent notions of conquering lands and peoples or just the world in our immediate vicinities.  Because frankly, those kinds of stories have been over-told and lead down a worn-out road far too often taken.”

No, the books on this list don’t bear that “responsibility” and thank God for that! There are a few straw (sorry) men in this single paragraph, the most relevant and obvious being that if a work of fiction doesn’t take on this social role, the story will be “over-told” and take a “worn-out road.” This simplistic notion is belied by examples of the books themselves, such as Lavalle’s funny, moving, sometimes surreal novel.

Incidental note: WILLA’s list isn’t much of an antidote, being as undifferentiated as it is. I can’t determine what the list is trying to accomplish, but if WILLA is really trying to make a selection of the best books of the year by women, it needs to avoid tokenism of its own, for example Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, a decidedly mediocre novel by an often outstanding author.

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Following up on my earlier post about the Publishers Weekly controversy, I thought I’d highlight two of the more interesting related items I’ve come across:

• Salon’s Laura Miller has a reasonable and—more importantly—realistic, non-abstract article about the whole kerfluffle.
• WILLA, which posted the press release I linked to before, has a wiki page where readers can contribute titles of books they think could have been on the list.

The WILLA List provides many titles that go beyond the usual suspects… which is good, because the immediate reaction to the list seemed to be to list a number of well-known authors with books out—Atwood, Dove, Kingsolver, Lorrie Moore, etc—that weren’t particularly great even if they were by famous authors with many better books to their credit.

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Amy King shares this press release condemning the Publisher’s Weekly 2009 Best Books list(s). You can read it and judge for yourself, but it is thought-provoking. I have a couple of thoughts:

1. (and Amy King took great offense to this) There’s a mathematical argument being made that is much less interesting than an argument that could be made involving actual books. Saying “there should be X out of 10” (which is wholly problematic for any method of determing “X”) is much less effective than saying “here are books that should have made the list” or “here’s an alternative list—isn’t that better?”
2. Being disproportionate relative to the population doesn’t necessarily mean being biased. We this reality in evidence all the time—look at sports, voting, what have you. That being said, having no male authors on the Top 10 list is more suspicious than having 27 on the Top 100.
3. By a quick reckoning, my reading over the past year or so has been composed of about 40% female authors (more than 1/3, not as much as 1/2). However, the proportion of female poets is much higher than female authors of fiction or non-fiction.
4. Given my experience composing my own “Fine Fifteen” lists, I simply can’t dismiss the possibility that the PW Top 10’s demographic composition isn’t simply happenstance. I don’t think I’m a sexist (but then all sexists would say that). But I’m absolutely sure that artificially balancing my lists would’ve been dishonest.
5. In the end, I don’t care about creating a mathematical balance. I care about quality. Which is why an argument about a list of books that doesn’t involve proposing alternatives ends up being as shadowy and uninteresting (relatively) as an argument about poetry is when compared to an argument about poems.

Read the press-release and consider it for yourself!

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