It’s disorienting, to say the least, to start reading a book expecting to like it, maybe even love it, and to find yourself irritated at each successive turn of the page. It feels like the dissolution of some unspoken pact with the writer—this was supposed to be the best part of my day and now I find myself avoiding it.
I was on a train back from Philadelphia with a hard-won advanced copy of Joshua Ferris’s new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which I’d practically begged from the publisher at the library conference I’d been attending. They were all out of them, they’d said—but wait! Here’s the last copy, hiding in a box under the table. I’d giddily taken it, and instead of shipping it home with the rest of the books I’d collected, I stuck it in my bag knowing I’d need something to keep me busy on the train home.
But there I was, passing through Trenton, New York, Stamford, growing increasingly annoyed. It’s not that the book wasn’t good. In all of his novels, Ferris has shown a knack for witty dialogue and for pacing that in any other book might seem circular, but in his novels is incredibly compelling. (Of course Then We Came to the End feels circuitous; it’s about, among other things, the banality of office relationships.)
It was the narrator, Paul O’Rourke, that was driving me nuts. Paul is a dentist, which, okay, not a good start for me, because while I’m sure dentists are generally perfectly fine, nice people, I can’t claim that they’re my favorite people to go see. But more importantly, he’s self-isolating: he spends each night watching Red Sox games or his tapes of past Red Sox games, because on the weekends New York is too full of tourists, and he definitely doesn’t want to spend his time hanging out with “a bunch of dweeby dentists.” He irritates those around him in order to alleviate his boredom: after three days in Europe with his then-girlfriend, touring churches and cathedrals and suggesting that they party in those churches and then, when that doesn’t go over well, raising the possibility of church-side blow-jobs, he starts to make and repeat a joke that only he finds funny: “I started calling it ‘Eurpoe’ and didn’t stop until we touched down in Newark.” Unsurprisingly, not long after that, he and Connie break up. And he’s obsessive: he claims to abhor the internet but every month he Googles himself and when the same (sole) bad review of his dental practice comes up, he’d “curse out loud and feel the victim of injustice.”
But okay, at the same time, I admit to laughing at a lot of this. It’s all funny in an absurd way, the way off-the-cuff cultural commentary often is. But the layer of unreliability overlaying it all was what did me in. The best way I can describe it is this: several times throughout the novel, entire conversations, usually with his dental hygienist, Mrs. Convoy, are reported as one-sided. The first iteration comes after Paul has sneaked a smoke outside the office:
She’d sniff at me like a bloodhound and then she’d say, “What exactly have you been doing?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Scrutiny does not kill people. Smoking kills people. What kind of example do you think you’re setting for your patients by sneaking off to smoke cigarettes? I’d tell her, she’d say, “They do not need a reminder of ‘the futility of it all’ from their dental professional. When did you take up smoking again?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Then why did you tell everyone that you had quit?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not see how the occasional show of concern is ’utterly strangulating.’ I would like to see you live up to your potential, that is all. Don’t you wish you had more self control?”
And on and on for a couple of pages. Funny, yes, and brilliant from a technical standpoint. But even though Paul’s side of the conversation is fairly self-evident, this dialogue structure also removes all possibility of scrutinizing his replies. There’s no way to say just how blithe or even hurtful he’s being in the face of Mrs. Convoy’s concerns, and there’s no way to say just how much he’s misreading her.
It’s not that I need, or even want, my first-person narrators to be good, or kind, or particularly enjoyable to be around. A story with a flawless narrator or protagonist is not a story, or at least not a particularly interesting one. I cheered last year when Claire Messud criticized her interviewer at Publishers Weekly when the interviewer said that she wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, the narrator of Messud’s most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs. When I read the novel several months later—intrigued, more than anything else, by that interview—Nora’s anger made me, at times, want to put the novel down and get some space from it. But it also drew me into the narrative. Nora’s anger, her very unlikeability, is what makes The Woman Upstairs compelling: it’s what makes Nora feel real, and it clarifies just how wounded she is by the events of the novel.
No—it’s a certain combination of unreliability and unlikeability that drives me up the wall, paired with a certain humor and a relentlessness. Maybe this says more about me than it does about the kind of self-indulgent, unreliable narrator that propels Ferris’s novel. The stories with this sort of narrator tend to go down the same road: a cycle of intense and persistent self-sabotage leads in some way to the narrator’s downfall, and though there’s always the possibility for redemption, it’s usually passed over in favor of a slightly different form of self-sabotage. That storyline makes my skin crawl: I see the downfall coming a mile away, know that if the narrator would just listen to the people around him he’d be able to avoid it. I want to save the narrator from himself, and ultimately, I can’t.
I use the male pronoun purposefully, and perhaps that’s just it: this narrator is, more often than not, male. And he pops up all over the place in contemporary fiction. He shows up in George Saunders’s stories, like the narrator of “Adams,” who relies on the term “wonk”—as in, “So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes”—to downplay, and make humorous, the fact that he’s actually beating the crap out of his neighbor, and later his neighbor’s wife, and oh, also his neighbor’s kids. And he’s common in Jim Shepard’s stories, too.
In “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” an engineer works to protect Rotterdam from climate-change-caused floods while consistently failing to tell his wife about his newly-discovered inheritance that could enable them to send their son to safety. When they first begin dating, his future wife complains, “I ask a question and you ask another one…If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone’s old girlfriend is like.” Their exchanges and the narrator’s descriptions are consistently and darkly funny, but also heartbreaking, because the narrator continually deflects all responsibility until everything comes crashing down. Similarly, in the opening of “Boys Town,” the narrator’s mother exclaims that “The story of your life is that you’re not to blame for anything,” to which the narrator responds, “It is always somebody else’s fault,” entirely overlooking any source of his mother’s criticism (154). That’s not to say that this kind of narrator is always male—the female narrator from Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! comes to mind—but overwhelmingly it seems to be.
The female unreliable and unlikeable narrators I’ve come across always seem to function a bit differently. Take Messud’s Nora, for example. She is unlikeable, yes, and she is, to a certain extent, unreliable: she is telling her story from a place of anger, and of pain, so of course she isn’t telling it entirely straight. But her pain and the actions that result from it arise from empathy, from years of caring from others and then having an intense, caring friendship pulled out from under her, not from the absence of caring for others or the failure to communicate concern and support. The Woman Upstairs has funny parts, but they’re funny because of the circumstances, not because Nora can’t relate to those around her.
And take another female writer whose—typically female—narrators are notoriously unreliable. In Amy Hempel’s stories, it’s the narrators’ very unreliability that draws me to them, because there is a compassion underlying the cruelty of their actions; the avoidances in the narration suggest the flaws the narrators cannot bear to face head-on. In “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” each excuse and cry of grief covers up a palpable sense of shame that the narrator failed to be there for her dying friend. And in “The Afterlife,” the omissions show the narrator’s isolation: it’s not until her father’s new girlfriend says “Take up space!” while she’s out with them that it becomes clear just how alone, and stuck, the narrator is. There is constant self-sabotage in these stories, but rarely do I get the sense that the narrator is interested in playing it for laughs.
There’s a long history of unreliable narrators in fiction, and for good reason: human beings don’t just lie to other people when necessary; we often lie to ourselves, too. Unreliable narrators allow writers to get at that simple truth, to investigate the ways in which we construct certain ideas of our essential selves, even as our actions seem to undermine those ideas. They allow a story to not just be about what happened—will the friend in “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” die?—but about how the person telling the story dealt with that moment of drama, or rather, didn’t deal with it.
But the gender differences in unreliability I’ve described seem to point to something bigger. I’m a firm believer that although most fiction isn’t autobiographical in the sense that the events of a story actually happened to the writer, writers tend to write about what they find psychologically compelling, and they tend to write about what they, on some level, know. Which means a proliferation of characters, particularly male characters, who lack empathy probably points to a proliferation of people, particularly men, who lack empathy. And I certainly don’t think every man on the face of the earth currently lacks empathy—I don’t meet a guy and think, huh, probably you don’t have an empathetic bone in your body since you’re male. But I do know that women are, overwhelmingly, taught to be caretakers, to be watchful, to adapt their sense of self and the stories they tell themselves to what looks “right.” Whereas men, on the whole, have a certain privilege to just live their lives. Culturally speaking, especially in the middle-class, white worlds of these particular novels and stories, women are trained to be empathetic, whereas men are trained to act.
Which is just the way it is, and I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to write polemics about how the world “should” be—that tends to dip quickly into work that is more propaganda than art. But it also strikes me that a cavalcade of fiction in which a lack of male empathy is played for laughs suggests a failure: a failure to do more than just reflect.
Because ultimately, it’s the accumulation of narrators that fit this specific unreliable mold that gets me. Narrators like Paul O’Rourke aren’t just telling some lies to make themselves look better; they’re also completely failing to understand how their lies and misreadings are hurting other people. And these moments of hurting other people are played for laughs. Taken en mass, these narrators feel like a glorification of a certain sort of clueless male who is allowed to fail in his dealings with others—who is allowed, even encouraged, to fail at empathy.
Given a choice, then, I’ll usually read a book with a different sort of narrator. But I also recognize that trends in fiction arise because there’s something essential being reflected in them; my avoiding these books won’t make them go away.
Maybe it’s actually important that we, and male writers in particular, write narrators like Paul over and over and over again. Maybe the proliferation of Paul O’Rourkes will start to feel tired and overused to a broader range of readers. Maybe then, in narrative and in life, we can move away from this and can stop celebrating and finding funny the persistent failure to empathize.
As To Rise Again at a Decent Hour progresses—as the book spirals deeper and deeper into its central mystery—Paul does seem to start to realize what some of his issues are. The book doesn’t end entirely on a redemptive note, but nor did I get the feeling in the book’s final pages that he was going to keep doing what he was doing, that he was going to keep shitting on those around him. So maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope.
Tags: books, elizabeth weinberg, joshua ferris, men who will not be spared, narrators
I have my advance copy sitting by my bed to read next. This review is basically why I can’t read Franzen.
For me it’s Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Chabon. Of course, my dislike for JSF may be more dislike for a particularly pretentious woman who was a few years behind me in grad school and talked about nothing but his books. (And herself.)
I loved TREASURE ISLAND!!! so much I bought the T-shirt. (Really, it has a parrot on the front and says “Steer the boat, girlfriend!”) But you’re right–it would have been wearying with a male narrator. Her oblivious, blithe lack of empathy delighted me so much because women aren’t supposed to act like that.
YUP! Totally agree — I find her both infuriating and delightful. Insouciant, maybe?
I’m skipping book club tonight because I got about 40 pages into the Luminaries and was like “good looking young man goes to new world to find himself, knows he’s good looking? NOPE.”
You definitely dodged a whole bunch of other bullets by not reading it, thought that particular problem peters out almost immediately. I finished it last night (after skipping through it LIBERALLY) and I might have thrown it at the wall if it wasn’t on my Kindle.
True enough! Though I actually really liked the Luminaries (well, the last 150 pages or so get kinda weird, but that’s a relatively insignificant proportion of the book). But I think it’s because the aforementioned good looking young man gets mostly swept aside in favor of a bunch of other voices/characters, so it’s not just 800+ pages of an irritating dandy.
Luminaries book club/open thread please! I also enjoyed it–it’s very rich in historical detail and I love a mystery–but I really can’t say why it was awarded a prize. I suspect that the prize committee couldn’t make sense of the astrological apparatus and mistook their perplexity for awe.
SO GLAD that I am not the only person who could not get into that book!
The narrative really doesn’t stay with him, so I would encourage you to give The Luminaries another shot if you have the time. I really liked it overall, mostly because I thought the storytelling structure was interestingly done.
(You may be infuriated by an entire New Zealand mining town’s attempts to alternately have sex with and SAVE the local prostitute, though.)
I could be! I could be!
I just want Sheila Heti to write another novel. Is that so much to ask?
I haven’t read her last book yet, so I still have that to look forward to.
Have you read The Flamethrowers? I just started it and hope that it is great.
A prostitute who does not show up conscious until like 300 pages in (at which point she is still the only female character with any page time. None of the 2.5 female characters who eventually appear ever gets to be a viewpoint character, or is ever treated like a person with interiority and agency by the narrator.)
I mean, I liked Luminaries, and I sort of respected Catton’s decision to go all out with the 19th century (European male) narrative voice. But why did she have to replicate 19th century gender roles as part of that, without any interrogation? What is really served by writing a modern novel in that mindset?
Good to know! My book club has floated that title the past couple of months – maybe it’s a good thing we’ve always chosen something else so far.
Maybe books like these are a cry for help on the authors’ part. Maybe they write them in the hope that one day, a brilliant reader will ask them, “Why didn’t the main character just do _____, which would have cured him of being such a self-centered, narrow, empathy-challenged person?” and then the author can just do that, and everything will be OK.
I started “And Then We Came To the End” and I just couldn’t get into it. It’s one of probably 3-4 novels I’ve ever just put down and given up on. I can’t even really articulate why; I didn’t even get that far. I suppose because something in it just didn’t speak to me, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not going to read a book that doesn’t reach me at all (I finished Infinite Jest back in college, and I think that was the last literary penance I’m ever going to pay. I put it down and decided, “never again.”).
Finally surrenduring to the idea that I didn’t need to finish a book if I hated it or it made me uncomfortable has been SO GREAT.
I know I probably shouldn’t, but I still feel bad when I request a book from the library and I get a little ways into it and decide it’s Really Not For Me… like I wasted some library employee’s time. 🙁 But yeah, some books just aren’t worth spending your energy on!
Alternate interpretation: You’re creating library jobs! Good work!
I rarely give up on books, so I get it. But as a librarian, it’s not a waste of our time. You tried it, didn’t like it, and that’s fine.
Forget hating it or it making me feel uncomfortable, I’ve finally given myself permission to quit reading if I just wasn’t that into it. A number of books have gone back to my local library, unread but for chapters 1 and 2.
I have no compunctions about quitting either. In fact, I’ll sometimes even give up on a book three quarters of the way through if I’m not feeling it.
I used to wonder if this was the moral equivalent of throwing away my meal at a buffet and picking something else to eat (which I’ve done on several occasions and felt guilty about every time). But I’ve decided it’s not the same thing at all, and now I toss books aside without remorse.
oh, would be interesting to know a couple of titles you’ve treated this way!
Me, I *still* usually never, but I signed up for the Emily Books subscription, which is interesting but unrelenting lately in its embrace of raw, “confessional,” “shocking” books by women, and was finally pushed to give up on Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge, after realizing I had been speed-skimming 2/3 of it out of duty and it was just not a pleasant experience. I’m a little bummed. But look at the hours of life saved for other purposes!
Reading this site sometimes feels like living in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A AND I LOVE IT.
I liked that video a lot – they even got the cadence of street harassment right! But man, the yelling woman on the street corner and the rapists are all coded non-white.
I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t notice that when I watched it, but yeah, you are totally right. That is… disappointing.
I feel like “You’re not supposed to like the main character!” is often used as a cop-out for poor characterization. Like, shit, even Rabbit Angstrom has some moments of clarity that make him almost empathetic, even if he ignores them.
Can we complain about Nathaniel P? Because oh my goodness, he was awful. And then he found happiness at the end because he was finally found a woman he was “just that into,” and it solved all of his problems.
Haha yes. Yes we can. I mean, he was supposed to be awful, and I found that book totally mesmerizing, but it was SO WEIRD.
Can we in general complain about women writing from a male perspective? Or I guess just all people writing from a male perspective. I just want some decent contemporary fiction from a woman’s perspective goddamnit.
Yes, that’s why I’ve never finished any novel I’ve started working on! Not because I’m a terrible procrastinator who never finishes what he starts, but because I’m a good Male Feminist Literary Ally! None of my male ego literary hogwash clogging up the pipes!
The Flamethrowers! By Rachel Kushner. Awesome awesome awesome awesome! Read it nowwwwwwwwwwww
There’s lots of good fiction from a woman’s perspective. I find myself mostly reading books by female authors, unintentionally, and most of them usually do write from a female perspective. But why would you complain about women writing from a male perspective? A good writer should be able to inhabit the minds of characters unlike herself. If it’s shitty when men act as though it’s impossible for them to write three-dimensional female characters, why isn’t it a corrective to show that it’s possible to relate to someone of another gender?
I liked Nathaniel P because I interpreted it more as the author mocking these types of books as well as the people who write them. Definitely see where you’re coming from, though.
I totally agree, I just finished it this week and thought that the author was completely mocking both Nate and the whole world that gives us these kind of books (I mean, his description of his own book was hilarrible, on purpose, right?!) I liked this interview with Waldman, which gets into a bit more of her thought process on writing the book: http://gawker.com/nate-was-vindication-of-everyth… )
I don’t think he was happy in the end. I think he got what he thought he wanted, but it wasn’t as satisfying as he wanted it to be. How did it solve his problems?
Love. Thanks.
this was supposed to be the best part of my day and now I find myself avoiding it.
Ugh, that experience while re-reading Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is what finally woke me up to my exhaustion with a different kind of male narrator: the white-boy-coming-of-age who views the world around him – and all the people in it– as a training ground or an exhibit for his education and amusement. He gets to stretch and develop his muscles and hone his observations about how harrrrrrrd it is to be a white boy without really grappling with the difficulties of other people.
Thanks for calling out some female writers in this piece; I’ll check them out.
The Toast seems like a place to ask: hey, everyone, who are your favorite authors who aren’t white men? I’ve been broadening my reading habits a bit but I’d love new names to check out.
Margaret Atwood is an easy one. If you’re into history, Barbara Tuchmann is excellent and has written on a wide variety of topics.
Was just going to pop in and copy/paste “ATWOOD” until I reached the character limit.
Another good history one – I’m reading “Sister Queens” by Julia Fox at the moment. It’s about Katherine of Aragon’s relationship with her sister Juana. The takeaway (which I already know from the way that history is in general) is that dudes are always trying to make the ladies look “crazy” and it’s INFURIATING. For them, for us. Anyway, aside from one passage where Ms. Fox takes like a zillion years to describe the celebrations at Katherine and Arthur’s wedding, I’m really digging it!
Also I just looked at my Amazon wishlist and probably 75% of the authors on it are white men, dangit.
Also, also, I was going to reccommend “Beautiful Ruins” and come to find out JESS WALTER IS A DUDE. 🙁
Thanks for the heads up – that book was on my to-read list mainly because I thought it was written by a woman, sad to see it’s a dude 🙁
WHAT NOOOOOO
He is a dude. But it’s a lovely book with well-drawn characters. RECOMMEND.
Yes, I still definitely recommend it – just not on your “books by people who are not white men” list.
This isn’t really ‘deep cuts’ or anything, but I just read Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros and I really enjoyed it!
House on Mango Street (also by Sandra Cisneros I believe) is also pretty great!
Niiiiiice. Don’t worry whether the authors are [obscure enough/too obscure/my cup of tea/anything, really]. I figure by not specifying, I get a wider range of responses, and for every author whose complete works I’ve already read, I’ll get 2 or 3 I’ve been meaning to try and 2 or 3 I’ve never heard of.
Don’t overlook Toni Morrison for being obvious, esp. Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy!
Aphra Behn. Nella Larsen (great queer Harlem Renaissance writer), Dorothy Baker. Mina Loy, Freya Stark and Mary Kingsley (good travel writing), Unica Zürn, Leonora Carrington, Rosmarie Waldrop, Flannery O’Connor…
Two GREAT contemporary writers: Elena Ferrante, Paula Fox.
I LOVE that book. Also I saw her at the National Book Festival and she was just this goofy upbeat older lady with a great reading voice. SANDRA <3
So, I read mostly YA, which might not be what you’re into but I really like Libba Bray (she did the Gemma Doyle trilogy which is awesome and has a creepy boarding school and also witches and a coven and other realms but is also great for people who don’t like fantasy because it’s not that kind of fantasy it’s just lots of powerful women sitting in semi circles), I also like Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents). I can post more when I get home and can see my bookshelf, I think most of the authors I read are women.
have you (or anyone else) read the Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily danforth? One of the best queer YA novels I’ve read (I’ve read far too many).
Another excellent queer YA novel is “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz. I actually liked it more than the Miseducation of Cameron Post, though I liked that a lot.
Also, anything by Malinda Lo (who has written for the Toast!) is great.
I love Malinda Lo! I’ll look up the Saenz, thanks!!
Any other rec’s for YA novels? This teen librarian is always on the lookout.
I really liked Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, by Emma Straub, who I think has another book out now too?
Anything by Rainbow Rowell, but especially the fanfiction one.
Stephanie Perkins is also amazing.
THE MOCKINGBIRDS!!!!! Incredible depiction of SV and just really well written and though provoking
The disreputable history of Frankie Landau Banks
Tamora Pierce everything
I’ve read everything Tamora Pierce has written, I think.
Eleanor and Park was high on my list of books to read, but the fanfiction one was also up there. I do not know the others, so those will be going on my tbr list.
Thanks!
Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (an obvious choice, but SO WONDERFUL) and second to Rainbow Rowell, though I prefer E&P to fangirl.
Love Malinda Lo.
I also hugely enjoy Rae Carson’s Girl of Fire and Thrones series and Patricia Wrede’s newer Frontier Magic series. I was surprised to really like Marie Lu’s Legend series, based on the cover — I thought there was some really interesting stuff in there.
I’ll go for some NZ writers, as you may not have heard of them and they ought to be better known!
Margaret Mahy – The Tricksters, and The Centre of the Universe. She’s mainly known for her AWESOME kids books, but her YA books are really good at as well.
Elisabeth Knox has some really good YA books – she’s also got some adult ones, so double check before you pick one. I like Dreamhunter and Dreamquake.
Anything by Tessa Duder. The Alex series (teenage girl who’s a competitive swimmer!) The Tiggie Thompson series (fat girl is bullied, starts acting, remains fat, is awesome)
Oh, and for a non-NZer that I discovered recently, Cecelia Funke’s Inkheart Trilogy, soooo good.
I have not! I am behind on recent (like last 6 years) YA because that’s around the time I started reading new things wayyy less and just rereading more, for a variety of reasons. I’m really getting back into new books again though and I will add that to the top of my list!!
Yes yes yes Gemma Doyle!
I love the Gemma Doyle books. I give them to people who say they liked Twilight but hate themselves for it. It’s like counter-programing for the “passive girl caught in the magical romance” strain that goes through YA stuff.
Oh, so, so many! I sometimes feel guilty that I read mostly women authors. Elizabeth Berg, Anita Shreve, Alice Hoffman, Liane Moriarty. Poetry by Kim Addonizio. Some individual books you might like: Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros. My Education by Susan Choi; Me Before You by JoJo Moyes; Blue Angel by Francine Prose. I just started I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Althea Black and it’s great so far.
Seriously, I could talk about this all day.
I could talk about this all day.
For realsies, please do. Don’t try to calculate whether I’m likely to have read ’em or liked ’em or anything; I just want a list as long as my arm that I can return to every time I hit the library for the next year. Fiction, non-fiction, any genre, any format.
Ooh, thanks for the great list! I’ll admit that I finished Me Before You and actually threw it across the room, but it was probably not a great read for me last fall, just after my father passed away.
OLIVE KITTERIDGE is fabulous, book not author. Second Liane Moriarty as light and fun.
Do you like graphic novels? Alison Bechdel’s memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” are sooooo good.
Graphic novels by women that I liked (in addition to Alison Bechdel):
Marzi: A memoir by Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia
Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale by Belle Yang
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley (but only if you do not mind the fact that it ends with lots of loose strings)
I am sure there are more; that is just what I can think of off the top of my head.
Lucy Knisley’s Relish is a really good graphic novel/memoir also.
Lorrie Moore forever and ever.
So many recs! On the fiction end, Andrea Barrett, Jesmyn Ward, and Edwidge Danticat (especially The Dew Breaker) are some of my favorites. And Eula Biss writes absolutely phenomenal essays.
I’d be interested in some additional history/biography recommendations. I read a lot of history and sadly most of it is written by white dudes…
COSIGN.
I loved Manning Marable’s biography of Macolm X.
I admit I get most of my history/biography through fiction rather than nonfiction, but Hilary Mantel writes some pretty amazing historical fiction. Also, Vela put together this list of nonfiction written by women, which I plan on (slowly but surely) making my way through: http://velamag.com/blog/the-unlisted-list/
I love Vela!
Was just about to screech on how much I love Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” as historical/biographical fiction, as well as just plain literature. I felt like a kid again reading those books – that what was going on within the pages was so much more engaging and important and consuming than any other part of my life – and as such stayed up waaaay too late several nights, but I can’t recommend them enough. Excited for the last book in the trilogy.
Although Thomas Cromwell is still a white dude. Can’t have everything.
Yes, I have Wolf Hall and really like it – I had to take a break from it though as I’ve also started watching The Tudors and the cognitive dissonance is just too much.
HILARY 4EVAAAAA
Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa?
Technically it’s a memoir, but she was a Victorian explorer so she’s writing about new encounters with people, flora, fauna, landscape, cultures. It’s well written.
Jesmyn Ward on the nonfiction end too!
Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie is worth checking out. It’s really good.
Also, Kat Chow (NPR’s Code Switch writer/ reporter) started a crowd sourced list of books by/about people of color, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DY6ZpEUO14ytl…
Americanah is fantastic, and Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus as well!
YOU GUYS a dude on OKC just recently messaged and mansplained to me that Americanah is not a real novel but a collection of essays and its acceptance signals the downfall of literary criticism specifically and, I guess, literacy in general.
I forgot about life outside The Toast. It’s ridiculous out there.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!
Cheezus what is wrong with people? I devoured Americanah and then I almost cried because it was the most perfect thing I’d read all year (and the closest I’d come to identifying with a narrator) and it was over.
As a dude this makes me :/. Also, reminds me why I have been avoiding trying to use OKC. I mean, not liking Americanah is ok, that’s just… ridiculous as you said.
He might have been saying words about Americanah not being a real novel, but what he was really saying was “I am a giant bag of dicks” over and over, in different ways.
FUCK THAT GUY
Just finished Americanah and loooooooved it.
me, too! (inhaled it in a day and a half- it was so nice to get completely absorbed by a novel again)
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles is really, really great. Paul Yoon, Julie Otsuka, Willa Cather are all amazing. And Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is like the direct opposite of the Ferris style of writing in a lot of ways.
Isabel Allende, Jhumpa Lahiri and Geraldine Brooks! Also James McBride and Sherman Alexie
ISABEL ALLENDE!
Paul Beatty! White Boy Shuffle, contrary to what the title may seem, is NOT about a white boy, and it’s a really fascinating/crazy/weird/heartbreaking/awesome novel.
Melina Marchetta has written a handful of children’s books and a few that are ostensibly “young adult” but two are my favorite books in the world and also I love YA so – Saving Francesca and The Piper’s Son. Francesca has a younger narrator and then actually, Piper’s Son is the same characters several years later. It has a bit of a gloomier/older feel, and narration is split between a young-20s dude and his middle aged aunt. She also wrote On the Jellicoe Road which is great and sort of confusing, I highly recommend it.
Several months ago I started trying to exclusively pick female authored books at the library. My library strategy is pretty much “grab at random” anyway, so now I just double check the author first. Unfortunately I can’t remember any names (I’m a terrible bookworm) but I highly recommend this strategy!
That’s my strategy too – I pretty much pick up one dude book for every 3 or 4 lady book.
Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets is amazing awesome stuff. (Graphic novels but unbelievably amazing stuff.)
The Toast seems like a place to ask: hey, everyone, who are your favorite authors who aren’t white men? I’ve been broadening my reading habits a bit but I’d love new names to check out.
I try to curb my insatiable desire to self-link but since you asked for recommendations:
A list of non-white authors I love, most of them women
My ladywriter shelf on Booklikes
I love, love, love Rebecca Solnit – she’s done sociology, history, and memoir and her memoirs include looong tangents on sciencey stuff, history, fables, etc etc. I also read Julie Ostuka and loved her books, although definitely read with a tissue nearby.
I just finished Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and I really really liked it, and it requires 0 interest in hocket/professional sports. Louise Erdrich is great, too.
All of Liane Moriarty’s novels are gripping, with excellently written female protagonists. I’d also recommend Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussman.
An oldie-but-goody for me was/is Mary McCarthy. Her protagonists aren’t always the most sympathetic either, but they are relentless, and I love it.
Check out @readwomen2014
I really a TON of food books for comfort so Ruth Reichl’s memoirs, Blood Bones and Butter, Julia Child’s autobiography.
The Phryne Fisher mysteries.
I’m enjoying everyone’s suggestions. Here are mine:
– Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet, and her mystery trilogy that starts with Case Histories
– Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness In The Belly
– Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake
– Carol Shield – just about anything and everything she has written
Everything by Marilynne Robinson. Also, Lorrie Moore. Margaret Atwood, love. I like Alice Munro in small doses – I can’t read a ton of her at a time, but she’s a quietly gorgeous writer. I also enjoy Alice Hoffman’s mysticism – Blackbird House was good.
Jhumpa Lahiri is my hero.
Not just books by people who aren’t white men, but GIRL CANON consists of book recommendations/lists by women. Certainly a large number of the authors are men, but it’s cool to see what books have been important for different women (and, presumably/hopefully, are not entirely full of shitty male narrators).
I was reading this thread just so I could see what other people didn’t mention (I recently read Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy Snow Bird and liked it well enough, also just read some short stories by Saladin Ahmed which were good fantasy so I look forward to reading more by him) but now I see that this entire thread is going to jack up my to-read list by a lot. THANKS (no really! thank you)
Mine are mostly from the sci-fi/fantasy side: NK Jemisin, Rae Carson, Elizabeth Moon, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, Lois McMaster Bujold, Robin McKinley, Naomi Novik.
Very slightly less genre: Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife.
Just read Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, which I liked a lot, but not as much as Commencement, and also loved Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland.
Laurie Garrett, Elizabeth Pisani, and Maryn McKenna have some fun nonfiction around public health disasters, if you like that kind of thing — I do!
I just reread Emily M. Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post because it so gets into my brain. So so good. I think that’s her only book so far, more’s the pity. Other writers I’ve read and enjoyed recently:
Nalo Hopkinson
G. Willow Wilson
Jo Walton
Susanna Clarke (of course)
Justine Larbalestier
Anne Pachett. Bel Canto and State of Wonder are my tops.
Just starting All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld and it’s hard because it’s already crazy bleak but so vivid and gorgeous.
The Dud Avocado- Elaine Dundy- this is giddy girl Hemmingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, and i like those boys, so it’s not a dis. But this is a fizzy romp wrapped around a disillusioned center.
Arcadia- Lauren Groff.
Blood Bones and Butter- Chef memoir
Maggie Shipstead- Seating Arrangements
Ursula K. LeGuin (like her sci fi more than her fantasy).
Read Pym by Matt Johnson- Black arctic explorers, yetis, a faux Thomas Kinkade, and Edgar Allen Poe. Super excellent romp.
Thanks for this! This is exactly how I felt about Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. I hadn’t known how to explain why I disliked the story so much, which is well-written in several ways. I really hated it. One male storyteller I think really gets this right is Vince Gilligan with Breaking Bad; Walter White lacks empathy big-time, but doesn’t get away with it. Thank god we’re talking about this.
I gave up on Wonder Boys in a big way. I am running out of patience for books like that. “Oh man, my wife left me, I’ll console myself by motorboating our young lodger.”
And maybe it’s because I’m such a clean-teen who isn’t a teen anymore but the casual drug use just irked. It just comes off as yuppie Fear and Loathing.
Ugh. This is how I felt about Jonathan Tropper’s “This Is Where I Leave You.” Just so much banal drivel coming from that narrator’s mouth. (I secretly call him Jonathan Plopper in my head because I am a mature adult.)
I’ve often tried to articulate why I’ve begun to avoid (some) male authors. Lack of empathy sums it up so well! Thanks for writing this.
Just burn all the books by men.
Just burn all the men.
Keep the books to explain to our daughters [made with science!] why it had to be done.
I’m not giving up The Lord of the Rings, and you can’t make me. 🙂
This is reminding me of throwing London Fields across the room, shouting “Why aren’t you dead yet?” That was twenty years ago, I have not yet picked it back up.
So good.
Why don’t more people understand that London Fields is one of the worst books ever written?! It was so terrible I’ve never been able to bring myself to read anything else by Martin Amis
This is maybe only tangentially related, but here’s a Salon piece by a woman who went to Irvine with Ferris and writes about him being something of a nemesis: http://www.salon.com/2012/07/26/et_tu_nemesis_sal…
There are absolutely ways to explore the same space while also being self-aware and not coming across as a jackass. Trouble On Triton has aged very well for a science fiction novel almost entirely because the entire book serves as a critique of this particular type of unreliability. Instead of jumping straight to the unreliable portion, Delany shows the same event multiple times as the unreliable narrator reinterprets it to better fit his mental image of himself.
I had this problem with a novel by Evan Mandery that was, irritatingly, titled Q: A Novel. The narrator is so terrible–and not even deliciously terrible, just plain old garden-variety boring, entitled, and judgmental with no charm–that I could not get invested enough in the story to care about his supposed great tragedy. What’s worse is that the novel involves some time travel, so you have not one but two smug narrators in one place at one time. Worst.
I don’t need my male narrators to be likeable, I just need them to not be utter shits who I want to punch in the throat, you know? Looking at you, Portnoy.
Ohhhh man can I bring up Christos Tsolkias? Australian writer much beloved of book clubs and such such inability to write about almost any other kind of character – exacerbated by the fact that his most well-known book (The Slap) had 8 different viewpoint characters, all with the same internal tone and voice.
Yes! I tried to read The Slap, and it was just so samey and kinda boring? I didn’t get the hype at all.
Seriously – every character in the book referred to female genitalia as ‘cunts’ – like, the middle age misogynist thug and the 17-year-old female virgin alike
I couldn’t STAND The Marriage Plot. The entire thing felt creepy and voyeuristic and judgmental. Didn’t make it past page 150.
I LOVE talking about how terrible The Marriage Plot is. But I must link you to this piece if you have not seen it: Anna Breslaw excoriates it on The Hairpin, and ends with a quiz where you guess whether a limp, flat line of prose came from The Marriage Plot or Twilight.
One of life’s biggest disappoints, that’s what THE MARRIAGE PLOT is for me. Stupid getting my hopes up with other great books then writing crap…
“Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South” is a nonfiction book that I thought was very worthwhile (but I read it in college, so it’s been a while). The Toast should have an amazing books by amazing female writers series. Other nonwhite/nonmale amazing writers: Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid; Mary Gaitskill; Taiye Selasi; pre-When Harry Met Sally Nora Ephron; Joan Didion; Janet Malcolm; Julie Hecht; Jane Bowles Antonya Nelson; Jean Rhys; Rohinton Mistry; Lydia Davis; Deborah Eisenberg; Jorge Luis Borges; Roberto Bolano; Teju Cole; Gayl Jones
Yes, I have Wolf Hall and really like it – I had to take a break from it though as I've also started watching The Tudors and the cognitive dissonance is just too much.
Seriously – every character in the book referred to female genitalia as 'cunts' – like, the middle age misogynist thug and the 17-year-old female virgin alike
For me it's Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Chabon. Of course, my dislike for JSF may be more dislike for a particularly pretentious woman who was a few years behind me in grad school and talked about nothing but his books. (And herself.)
I confess that I haven’t read any of the books discussed, so I’m going to offer my opinion in complete ignorance. 🙂
I don’t think it’s just that men are taught to act so much as they’re taught to not care. Boys don’t cry, men should be strong, etc – to the point where empathy is a fault and sociopathy is celebrated. Men frequently shame each other for being too caring, as if caring is a sign of weakness. It’s sad, really.
Do you suppose the book would be more compelling if these kind of narrators weren’t played for laughs? ‘Cause it’s not funny in the first place (at least, not to me), so it might be refreshing to deconstruct the whole idea, to show how pathetic, and sad, and limiting, that kind of life really is.
(If it were me, I’d have the limited first person narrator, and then a second, omniscient third person perspective, but then, I’m not a proper writer. A proper writer could probably figure out how to work the objective version of events into the first person narrative without making it awkward.)