This questioning of the canon comes from places of lived experience. It’s attuned to how great cultural work can leave you feeling irked and demeaned. For some readers, loving Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad requires some peacemaking with the not-quite-human representations of black people in those texts. Loving Edith Wharton requires the same reckoning with the insulting way she could describe Jews. Bigotry recurs in canonical art. And committed engagement leaves us dutybound to identify it. Shakespeare endures alongside analyses of his flawed characterizations of all kinds of races, nationalities, religions and women. Your great works should be strong enough to withstand some feminist forensics.
But resisting these critiques — whether it’s of “The House of Mirth” or the House of Marvel — with an automatic claim of canon feels like an act of dominion, the establishment of an exclusive kingdom complete with moat and drawbridge, which, of course, would make the so-called resenters a mob of torch-wielding marauders and any challenge to established “literary values” an act of savagery. Insisting that a canon is settled gives those concerns the “fake news” treatment, denying a legitimate grievance by saying there’s no grounds for one. It’s shutting down a conversation, when the longer we go without one, the harder it becomes to speak.
Music and mathematics have always been intimately intertwined. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument is aware of the presence of mathematics on every page of the score – from the time signature that sets a piece’s rhythm, to the metronome number that determines the speed at which the piece should be played; and, of course, the very act of playing music requires us to count 1, 2, 3… and arrange these numbers into groups, called bars or measures. So it comes as no surprise that mathematics has had a significant influence on music. Much less known is that the influence extends both ways.
“The Women Men Don’t See,” published by James Tiptree Jr. in 1973, is a classic work of feminist science fiction. The story begins with a struggle for survival when a small plane crashes in the Yucatan (I am about to spoil this story entirely, so if you’d like to read it first, please do). The narrator, Don Fenton, a Hemingwayesque spy and adventurer, survives the crash, as do the pilot and a mother-and-daughter duo, Ruth and Althea Parsons.
Despite the dire circumstances and close quarters, Fenton is unable to see the two women for who they are. At first, this non-seeing is literal — on the airplane seated next to him, the Parsons are “blurs” — and later metaphorical, as he confuses their competence and bravery for a hysterical devious femininity. The story ends with an alien encounter, and Fenton is flabbergasted when the women chose to leave with the aliens and flee Earth.
But the reader is not surprised at all. Instead, Fenton’s confusion betrays how little he was listening when Ruth Parsons remarked, “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” Beyond that hopeless view of women’s lives, Ruth and Althea’s motivations are unknown. The story’s conventional male point of view implicates the narrative machinery controlled by and devoted to the Fentons of the world by denying the reader access to the truly compelling characters — the two women who have decided to leave the planet.
I’ve eaten by myself in France more than anywhere else, with the exception of my own country where, more than half the time when we’re eating, we’re eating alone. That’s more often than in any previous generation. Pressed for time at work or school, Americans frequently eat by themselves at breakfast and when snacking, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. More than half of lunch meals are solitary. And more than 30 percent of Americans have dinner alone because they’re single or on a different schedule than their partners.
The trend is being seen in other countries, too. In South Korea, for instance, it’s largely driven by long work hours, according to Euromonitor International. Many may not be dining alone by choice, yet because more people are doing it, it’s changing perceptions. “Dining alone has not only become socially acceptable in South Korea,” Euromonitor International reported, “it is almost fashionable.”
In a world of ever more convoluted plot twists, here’s a true novelty: a mystery novel where the mystery is set up on the first page, and then straightforwardly solved at the end. Emma Healey is the young novelist whose debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, about an elderly woman with dementia, won the Costa first novel award in 2014. The achievement of this follow-up lies its finely drawn mother/daughter pairing and sharp take on the nitty-gritty of contemporary familial relationships.
I didn't know how much I needed a laugh until I began reading Stephen McCauley's new novel, My Ex-Life. This is the kind of witty, sparkling, sharp novel for which the verb "chortle" was invented.
At the very least, Rose’s pages provide myriad astute observations about the nature of fiction. Let me close by sharing just one: “There is nothing so trite or pat as an ‘unreliable narrator.’ ”