SPOILER ALERT: ANNE BOLEYN SHOULD NOT BUY ANY GREEN BANANAS: Linda Holmes laments that fiction by women does get reviewed, but women are rarely given the literary it-person superstar full monty.* I don't read enough book reviews to comment on that, but I will venture one prediction: the biggest literary it-person superstar full monties this year will go to Suzanne Collins (in the J.K. Rowling mass market lowbrow division for commercial domination) and Hillary Mantel (in the highbrow division).
As to the latter, consider this. Mantel's Wolf Hall, a sprawling, funny, sad novel about Thomas Cromwell's rise and Thomas More's decline, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The sequel, which presumably will cover the rest of Cromwell's life, is now due in May. I would say that Wolf Hall was the best book I read in the last five years, except that a few months ago, Amazon released A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel's incredible 2007 novel about the French Revolution, for the Kindle, and that may, may have been even better -- even funnier, sadder, and more sprawling than Wolf Hall.
Two swallows do not a summer make, I am told, and the 2012 results may not look, in the aggregate, much different from the 2011 numbers. All I'm saying is that my prediction is that the biggest it-person superstars this year are not going to be Brooklynites with ironic neck-beards.
*That's a verbatim quote, but the quotation marks are killing my HTML, so please don't accuse me of failing to quote and attribute.
I don't know the links to which Holmes refers, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but aren't you proving her point? Suzanne Collins will be a very wealthy woman, but I've never seen a profile of her, nor does the endless stream of publicity about the Hunger Games movies mention her except in passing. Wolf Hall has been on my to-read list forever and I know that Hilary Mantel is an esteemed writer, but that's different from Franzen-(and his lessers)-level cover boy fame.
ReplyDeleteJ.K. Rowling may be the exception that proves the rule, particularly with her interesting life story, and Jennifer Egan got a bit of heat and light, but again not knowing the source of Holmes' tweet, I'd tend to agree.
Hilary Mantel announced recently that her story about Thomas Cromwell will be a trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies (to appear in May), and The Mirror and the Light (ending with Cromwell's death). HBO and the BBC are working on a miniseries.
ReplyDeleteI tried to read Wolf Hall, but just couldn't get through it, despite my love of historical fiction and my appreciation of her characterizations. I just felt that it dragged WAY too much. Just never held my interest.
ReplyDeleteI guess what I'm saying is that I expect that, come May, Mantel will get a run at Frantzen-level fame. And if she doesn't, it will be because she's more reserved and proper and less self-promoting than him, not because she isn't a guy. As for Collins, I expect those profile stories to come in conjunction with the release of the movie, as part of the big promotional push. In other words, my post was a prediction, not an account of anything that has already happened.
ReplyDeleteThis is the link she was referencing: http://jenniferweiner.blogspot.com/2012/01/back-in-summer-of-2010-some-female.html
ReplyDeleteAlso, Mantel's literary backstory is pretty interesting. The difference between her recent books and her earlier career as a novelist is pretty pronounced.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I was going to come in and be all excited about the sequel to Wolf Hall, which I hadn't heard about 'til reading this post. But now it's going to be a trilogy? Maaaaan.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Interesting stats.
ReplyDeleteIn some kind of ideal world that is gender-blind, Ann Patchett's books would get Franzen-esque attention -- interesting that Franzen's non-promotional style became excessively promotional for him. I am a huge fan of both, don't get me wrong. And Karen Russell would be the cover-story-next-big-thing. But I guess it's about how grateful I am to find out about their books as a reader vs. how much I follow buzzworthy stories, although I do see their place.
Hm. Some would make the case that she's not as self-promoting *because* she's not a guy. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/
ReplyDeleteTry A Place of Greater Safety. A lot more killing to fill up the space, plus it helps if you imagine a young Tom Hulce as Camille Desmoulins.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently in the middle of The Submission by Amy Waldman, which I'm really enjoying. Entertainment Weekly named it their best fiction book of 2011, but until then, I had hardly heard of it, or the author.
ReplyDeleteI disagreed even before I read today's NYT article about Shalom Auslander (that also referenced Nathan Englander). Gird your loins, folks, for articles about their new books, reviews in the weekday and Sunday NYT, Style section articles, and NYT Magazine articles that tell us what they do on Sundays. And that's just the NYT, which is I think what all the fuss is about. I get my book news from the NYT, the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Gawker, and NPR, which generally cover an annoyingly white and masculine group of authors.
ReplyDeleteMy point was only that even if the numbers don't change, I think this year in literature-qua-literature will belong to Mantel and in commercial-exploitation-of-literature will belong to Collins. I didn't really think the overall numbers would change.
ReplyDeleteWith Daulerio in charge, I'm guessing that Gawker is going to drop authors entirely, unless they're Will Leitch or Tucker Max. Or Drew Magary, who is kind of the average of the two, weighted a bit toward Max.
I'll give it a go--thanks!
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