When the National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction was released this week with only one woman author out of 10 nominees (and only one person of color), I thought, wow, the jury (two of whom are women) must have completely missed the increasingly vociferous discussions over the past few years about the lack of gender equity in the literary world. Then I read the
Slate essay in which
Katy Waldman calls nonfiction the “patriarch of the book world.” As the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book, a biography, I have become aware of how male-dominated the field of biography is. But why all of nonfiction?
Last year’s longlist wasn’t much better: only three women out of 10. Prior to last year, the National Book Award announced only shortlists, which look pretty good since 2010 (two or three women out of five) but for much of the 2000s were dismal (mostly one or even no women out of five). A recent
study in
Mayborn also showed that among all of the major prizes in nonfiction over the past 20 years, only 20 percent were won by women and five percent by people of color. The study also found that these results don’t simply prove jury bias; the percentage of books by women submitted to the major competitions was only 30 percent last year. (The study also found the awards skew towards East Coast writers nurtured by institutions that are predominately white and male.)
Are fewer women writing nonfiction, you might ask. I suppose it depends on what you call “nonfiction.” According to the last few years’ NBA juries, it is mostly history (preferably about war or early America); biography (preferably about men, especially presidents); or reportage (preferably about war, the economy, or non-Western countries). Even within these parameters, there were some notable, well-reviewed books by women that didn’t make this year’s list:
Louisa Lim’s The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited
Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Lynn Sherr’s Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space
Joan De Jean’s How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City
Karen Abbott's Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War
Two books in science, a topic which attracts surprisingly little attention from NBA juries, should have been strong contenders this year (along with
E.O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, which did make the list):
Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History
Dianne Ackerma’s The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
There are other nonfiction genres, however, in which women are prolific—namely memoir and the essay—which get short shrift from the major awards. The only book by a woman on this year’s NBA longlist is a graphic memoir by
Roz Chast called
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. It is also the only memoir on the list. Of the past 50 nominated books, Waldman points out, only four have been memoirs (three of them by women—one of them won,
Patti Smith’s Just Kids in 2010). Women’s attraction to memoirs and essays, many of which focus on the issues unique to women’s lives, may in fact have much to do with their low profile. Memoirs and essay collections by women that deserved the judges’ attention this year include:
Leslie Jemison’s The Empathy Exams: Essays
Eula Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculation
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything
Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist: Essays
Jessica Hendry Nelson’s If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir
Then there are those nonfiction books that defy genre. In 1976, when
Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction with
The Woman Warrior (her
China Men won the NBA in 1981), it seemed as if nonfiction had experienced a seismic shift. Unfortunately, in recent years, the major awards have not reflected much of an interest in works that defy category—whether it be in their play between fiction and nonfiction or simply in their interest in combining elements of subgenres within nonfiction (such as history, biography, literary criticism, and memoir). There are a number of compelling works published this year by women that inject memoir into these more conventionally objective subgenres. I would conjecture, in fact, that women writers are more likely to investigate how their own lives intersect with larger issues—such as great books, our nation’s founding documents, or returning soldier’s PTSD—as they did in these works:
Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch
Danielle Allen,
Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
Jennifer Percy’s Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism
Azar Nafisi’s The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
This year’s NBA nonfiction longlist is disappointing not simply because of its dearth of women writers but also because of its unwillingness to think beyond the male-dominated forms of nonfiction that have garnered the most gravitas in the past. We can keep hoping, however, that the subtle biases that govern out understanding of literary value—why is a great work, as
Ron Charles points out, called “seminal” rather than “ovular”?—will gradually become as quaint as those 1950s videos instructing women in how to become the perfect housewife.
I haven't read Johnson's novel yet, but I suspect Sarvas made the right choice: "slight" seems to fit with my impression of Vida's book as well. There are stunning pieces to her writing, and I was entranced by the setting, but there were so many missed opportunities to take the story deeper (not necessarily longer), that I finished the book rather frustrated. Vida's talented, and I'll look forward to her future work, but this novel is underwhelming.
Since when can a novelist not be a critic as well?
The word 'slight' must be stricken from one's vocabulary after being published? Many of our greatest novelists have also been our greatest critics… I really hope that our best writers can recognize when a book fails to achieve that special something… and many are able to look back on their own work with an equally critical eye.
While I remain unconvinced by Sarvas' appreciation of "Tree of Smoke" (for me, the action/'longueur' combo was exactly the point…), I feel the need to defend his right as a critic.
Oh, and "Tree of Smoke" was amazing.
Though my money's on "Remainder", which was equally great (better?).
Aside; am I the only one who hated "Oscar Wao"?
Winjer, I respect Mark Sarvas as a critic (I like his blog a lot), and of course I think one can write novels and discuss them in the public sphere, but certainly it's not as easy as doing just one or the other. Since I didn't read Tree of Smoke or Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I can't say which I'd "advance" to the next round (which, is a pretty funny way to read books anyway, but so entertaining!).
For the record, I loved Oscar Wao, and absolutely hated The Remainder–but I seem to be the only one who had a hard time with that one…
Thanks for your comments!
winjer —
While I certainly didn't hate Oscar Wao (Diaz can flat-out write, there's no doubt about it) I found myself very frustrated by the jumping around between characters. I felt like Diaz went through all this trouble to create a compelling, interesting, empathetic lead character in Oscar, and just when I would follow Oscar anywhere, poof!, we're in someone else's story. Maybe some felt this deepened the story, but I felt it made the story more superficial. Of course, that may be personal taste.
It also left me with the nagging feeling that Diaz didn't really have a story to tell, and when he ran out of ideas, he would just simply turn to a different character.
(It also, frankly, made me wonder what in this book took 10 years to write, when not only does it draw heavily on Diaz's own experiences, but his previous book of short stories, Drown. Here's hoping Diaz will broaden his horizons with his next book.)
For my money, Diaz also went to the pop-culture/geekery/nerdlinger well for references far too many times, and I felt like he used it as a crutch to avoid tackling real human emotion.
Of course, all of these tactics could just be his attempt to dress up what is essentially a story about a nerd trying to get laid.
I think the novel works best if it's looked at as a collection of loosely collected short stories, and not a "novel" per se. And once I realized Diaz wasn't going to be writing a story-driven novel, it became more enjoyable.
(Though I have to ask, why title the book that way? I think that also helped create a false impression.)
Anyway, this got a little long, but while I don't know if I would recommend this book, I do know I will at least pick up the next thing he writes, as long as he stretches his wings some.