Why Hemingway Is Chick-Lit

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• Reader Comments (58)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  Hemingway would be pleased.  Although he was incredibly chauvinistic,he wrote for women.  Bill Keller is wrong, in my opinion, non-fiction is useful and sometimes informative, but real ideas, and inspiration leap from good works of fiction.  Fiction enlivens the mind and the spirit.  Most non-fiction puts them to sleep.

  One wonders if President Bush’s reading of Camus’ novel, “The Stranger”, will inspire useful change.  Perhaps, but alas he is not a woman.

  Posted by rvrman on Aug 16, 2006 at 7:38 PM

  The novel, for men, is dying because of internet porn.  The novel is dying in general because of television.  It’s time to give up, as a serious writer, when you see that the DaVinci Code and Harry Potter will dominate the lowbrow literary commentary regarding the work of this decade.  And that crappy book about the kid who found his father’s key after nine eleven is considered high art by the high artists.  Sexism in literature, and the evils afforded, pale in comparison with these terrible truths.

  Amen.

  Posted by kibitzer on Aug 16, 2006 at 8:41 PM

  As a teacher of literature, I am forced to tach contemporary novels, and go home to read Dickens, Trollope, Burroughs or anyone who keeps clear of empathy with another mind. Lot of this stuff, like Regency Novels at the beginning of the form, is just plain crap to feed emotional vampirism. A single sentence from a novel recommended on Oprah makes me choke. There is a real world out there, and the sooner writers return to it, the better.

  Here is my belief. It’s not that women read more novels; it is that a certain type of woman established its favourite genre, the Harlequin Romance, as our dominant mode. And for the record, kerouac never ruled the literry world, and died making $10,000 dollars a year. How quickly good male writers are forgotten for the trash ramed down students’ throats

  Posted by gooddoctor on Aug 17, 2006 at 3:51 PM

  Hmmm, interesting comments, “gooddoctor”,but a good read to me is a book that ignites something, brain, heart, soul, etc.  Rarely do mediocre works ignite much of anything.  Yes, Kerouac was boring because he could not see beyond the cult.  Hemingway is never boring because you are always a party to the plot. Dickens captures all of you including ones indignation. Mark Twain, liberates one’s humanity and Kurt Vonnegut twists our minds and consciences.

  Posted by rvrman on Aug 17, 2006 at 4:21 PM

  I tend to think the problem is the media, the industry. As a struggeling writer - and this may sound a bit arrogant - I do not understand why it’s so hard for a “writer” to get published. I know there’s a lot of krapp out there that lands on publishers desks. I also know that a lot of that krapp a lot of people would read. As an aspiring writer with four unpublished - and, of course, badly written - novels, the greatest challenge I face is not finding readers but getting publishers to talk with me. On top of that so-called lit-agents have become deciders of destiny (for writers). I also believe there is too little originality and depth in what’s being published today. Just read Da Vinci Snot or any other high-selling thriller. Almost all of it has no literary value and practically competes with the TV format.
  Whoopee.
  In case anyone is interested here’s some bad writing for free:
  http://worstwriter.wordpress.com/tag/frictions/chad-the-novel/

  -tgs-

  Posted by Tommi on Aug 17, 2006 at 4:53 PM

  Hey Tommi, first, keep the faith.  The longest road to getting published is the easiest for the writer but the roughest path to print.  That way is by writing from the heart to the heart, regardless of subject. The thoughts, the words, the connectivity fly out of you.  Throw plot strategies and marketing manners aside and just write.  You will know when it is working.

  As for those publishers and agents, profit rules, but they all know a story that has come from the heart, and they also know that those books always sell.  Yes, selling not art is their concern.  The art is yours and your readers appreciation of it.  Take a break, look around, find or think about something that moves you, and then tell about it to everyone else - from the heart.

  Cheers.

  Posted by rvrman on Aug 17, 2006 at 7:07 PM

  I read a lot of non-fiction as part of my work, so I read fiction as often as possible when I have the time or leisure to do so. I do notice, riding on the metro in the mornings and evenings, that young men and young women are more likely to be sending SMS or listening to ipods than reading, but at the same time I am always seeing young men and women reading, and often reading novels, and often reading very good novels. As for me, I would not have qualified for the £1000 not only because I’m a couple of decades past 25, but also because the last Penguin edition I was reading on the train was Pride and Prejudice. Sorry, gooddoctor, much as I admire Burrough’s experiments in tearing apart the language to expose the mind-control mechanisms, I also care about beautiful prose and characters capable of complex emotional development. Does that make me a vampire? Well, I also loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer…

  I think that Lakshmi Chaudhry’s point that we don’t really know much about historical trends in the sociology of reading is pretty important and that the key to the topic is the way that de-contextualized marketing statistics can be used by certain public intellectuals to advance sexist and essentialist theories of gender in support of a conservative political and cultural agenda. The structure of the industry does matter—it will be much easier to publish a book with a likely huge market and the concentration of the publishing industry has only intensified the role of marketing in editorial decisions. But what cultural forces shape the market? We should be taking Chaudhry’s arguments more seriously here. It’s by failing to engage in the work of exposing sexist non-sense that we permit the David Brooks of the world to blithely cite the poor, put-upon Lawrence Summers in defence of the absurd notion that the dominant ideology can’t get a hearing anywhere. We should be asking how Summers, a very rich, powerful white man in charge of a major intellectual institution, could speak so authoritatively and influentially on topics for which he obviously had not done his homework. At least Summers was called out for his gaffe; why let Brooks or the rest of the conservative establishment off the hook? Why do we remain so allergic to criticizing sexism?

  Posted by spike on Aug 28, 2006 at 8:41 AM

  Hi Tommy,

  Have you heard of Lulu.com?

  Posted by barbatus on Aug 28, 2006 at 6:38 PM

  I think men are much more discriminating readers than are women.
  We like non-fiction because, almost always, its WYSWYG. Read the
  foreword and you can be reasonably confident that you will like the book. Not so with fiction hype.

  Personally I would much prefer a good work of fiction than the most
  erudite work of non-fiction. It’s just that it’s so damn difficult to find good fiction outside the classics, and I have read all of them. So, sometimes
  I re-read them, which is not reported in booksales.

  Posted by evreman on Aug 28, 2006 at 8:44 PM

  By what margin would womens readership figure outway mens if all Mills and Boon novels and other such braindead rubbish were removed from the stats.

  Posted by Oliver on Aug 30, 2006 at 3:47 PM

  I am surprised to learn that my reading habits are gender specific (chuckle), though I suppose it’s not impossible.

  I read a lot. I read science, politics, current events, history, technology. Not much time left for reading novels (though occasional short stories do come through).

  Whether gender related or not (evolution has created some interesting specializations) to me it’s more of a matter of getting the most information out of my reading time.

  jayh

  Posted by jayh on Aug 30, 2006 at 4:51 PM

  Or, just maybe, if men are natural seekers after money and status (or conditioned by society to do so), many of our producers and consumers of creative fiction may find the rewards much higher in the corporate world (eg. Enron) or in government service.  Just a thought.  Or am I too cynical?

    ...Mike

  Posted by mfunnell on Sep 1, 2006 at 2:53 AM

  Men being more visually stimulated (being one and knowing many I can say this) has made them more vulnerable to media - TV, videos, video games. Watching too much TV is akin to eating too much junk food. The easier it is to obtain and consume the lazier we become, the easier we want it to be to obtain and consume…

  Maybe I’m simplifying. Why do my two older boys like watching TV so much now. When they were younger it was less important. Peer pressure has made it more so. They are both big readers but if we let them watch unlimited TV they would. I used to watch unlimited TV as a child. I think those of us who have lived it have to know that it did nothing good for / to us. We should know better.

  I watch about one movie every two weeks and about 2 shows a month. I read between 3-5 books a month. I like to write. I spend time talking with my wife and I read about 30 articles a month. I’ve pretty much given up TV - too unsatisfying - leaves you either hungry or bloated. It hasn’t been totally conscious - the less I watched, the less I wanted to. Variety is part of it. The more widely I read the more I enjoy reading. The more narrow my reading the more easily I bore of it. I’m reading Old Man and the Sea to my boys. They really like it. They really enjoyed Fahrenheit 451. My oldest just read Lord of the Flies. We talk about what they read. I could go on and on.

  Cut the cable, kill the sat dish - do what you have to…and read

  Posted by aquraishi on Sep 6, 2006 at 1:39 AM

  I write novels (none as yet published), even though I personally prefer to READ nonfiction—these days, at least. On the whole, I think the quality of nonfiction being written these days may be superior to that of fiction. I don’t remember ANY work of fiction recently that involved me nearly as much as McCullough’s biography of John Adams.
  Yeah, I’m a dude. But when it comes to (serious) fiction, I much prefer the “girly” stuff—by which I mean stories with lots of psychological nuance. Even with male writers—I much prefer Faulkner and Henry James to Hemingway, and am inclined to think Hemingway would have been a greater writer if he hadn’t been so afraid (yes, afraid) of the “feminine” aura of fiction—which, incidentally, has ALWAYS been there, even in the earliest days of prose fiction (remember all those romantic subplots in Don Quixote?).
  I guess I don’t know what all the fuss is about. As a group, men don’t talk about (and probably don’t THINK about) what’s going on inside themselves with NEARLY the ease women do (just ask any marriage counselor about the differences between how the husbands and the wives engage, typically, in therapy).
  A lot of this is acculturation, of course, but why should we be surprised to see the same gender pattern be reflected in reading habits?

  Posted by parkerya on Jun 10, 2007 at 5:29 PM

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