“Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes?” Roxane Gay reviews Joyce Carol Oates‘s The Sacrifice and simultaneously explains how to write difference well. Hint: it “demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent.”
How To: Write Difference
The Limits of Good Taste
In his review of a collection of rejected New Yorker covers titled Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See, Jeet Heer details the magazine's history of straddling the divide between bourgeoisie complacency and bohemian angst.
Fusion of the Popular
Here is Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Michael Berkeley for the BBC Radio3 broadcast about his new novel, Flood of Fire. In the interview, Ghosh talks about his childhood by the water and the influence of the sea on his work. He also curates a playlist of influential music that ranges from Bengali boat songs to Phillip Glass to ‘Hindoo airs.’
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Reproduction is a Funny Thing
"Motherhood has always been contested terrain, but for the last decade or so it’s been a virtual battleground; every year, almost like clockwork, we have another flare-up in the so-called Mommy Wars, with another Tiger Mom or Get-Back-To-Work-er or Can’t Have It all-er launching a grenade as prelude to a book tour. And as much as I have an obvious stake in these battles as a mother and a feminist, I’ve come to find them depressingly repetitive, all sound and fury but offering little in terms of the policies that might actually affect our decisions.” At the LARB, Stephanie Bower gives her take on Why Have Kids?, Jessica Valenti's new treatise on parenting.
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Free Wodehouse
PSA: Many of P.G. Wodehouse’s earliest stories are available in the public domain. (h/t Anna Wiener)
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RIP Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. The Colombian writer was a prominent novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch and won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work.
Lest the hasty reader think this is article is about how to actually write about people different from oneself, the link is to a review of a book that stupendously fails to do it.
Or rather Joe, the link is to a review by Roxane Gay, who calls Joyce Carol Oates “deeply offensive” for not writing about black people in the right way (a way in which, apparently, only Roxane Gay is privileged to).
@Mygod
Considering she provides some examples of books that write across the racial divide, I’m not sure your parenthetical is charitable.
Although you could maybe take issue with the examples she provided. Southern Cross the Dog is a Southern Gothic novel about a black man written by an Asian American who has never even visited Mississippi. Considering the many imaginative leaps Cheng was already making, Gay may have been more generous with her assessment than she would have been in a strictly realist approach, such as Oates’. Round House is written by Erdrich, a native American, but almost all the characters are Native American except a handful of secondary characters (including the villain) are white. So that strikes me as an odd example for Gay to pick.
I don’t think Gay’s position is indefensible at all, just that her examples are somewhat strange. I wonder what she thinks of Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner.
It’ll be interesting to see if other authors or critics, particularly black writers/critics, will respond to Gay’s review.
Oops. Please excuse the typos.
@Ross – thanks for the detailed reply. To be a little clearer about it – while Roxane Gay does indicate that there writers who can write across “the racial divide,” I was implying that I don’t see how Gay has more claim to being an arbiter than Oates.
In other words, there’s a bad faith at work here – wherein Gay assumes she knows “the correct racial fiction” and Oates has clearly failed whatever definitional line Gay thinks is clear, I strongly doubt that the definition holds up under any scrutiny. This is unfortunate, because if it’s this easy for a good author like Oates to be accused of racism (which is the underlying message here, or at least, an accusation of drastic racial insensitivity) the less people will write novels with a diverse cast.
Another perspective on Oates and difference:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mchadburn/wonderland-woman#.lw5KRA4REV
@Robin Thanks, that was a welcome counterpart.
I myself think that Oates can be critiqued as much as one likes from a literary standpoint but accusing her of a lack of empathy and then saying she writes “deeply offensive” works about race is pretty much the definition of insanity, or rather, the definition of the “if you’re not on my side in my exact way you’re expressing ancient evils” mode of argument that people like Gay fall into at the drop of a hat.