The Men in My Life (review)

Reading The Men in My Life is like listening to a smart friend on a tear, sizing up the output of (mostly) late twentieth-century male novelists. Vivian Gornick has a crow to pick with these literary men, and it's a familiar-looking bird. Here is the question she puts to the likes of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and Richard Ford. Are the women to be found on their pages given space to think and feel, to flounder and suffer—to live, in short, as more than targets of male fantasy and resentment?

I guess we know the answer to that question, if we can bear to ask it. If too insistent, the question risks invading the terrain of art with Title IX calibrations. If asked politely, though, it might serve as an honest bid for greater generosity (and sensitivity) from our novelists. Mostly, Gornick handles the question well. These particular men are, after all, writers whose work she's long admired—if, perhaps, for qualities other than generosity. She presses her question partly because so many critics are happy to ignore it, crediting what these writers do well and overlooking any meanness or smallness. Bellow and Roth, as Gornick sees it, had their hands full creating a new fiction from the immigrant experience. In the case of the younger writers, it was perhaps enough for them to follow the narrow path set by their masters, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose male characters (Adams, Barnes, Carraway, Diver, et al.) are normally light years more evolved in intelligence and sensibility than the female sillies and monsters (the Daisies, Myrtles, Bretts, etc.) making their lives miserable. Not all—it should be noted, but isn't—of the American modernists hobbled their women characters. Faulkner and Cather, Welty and Malamud—to name just two from either end of the century—invested themselves fully in both sides of the gender divide. (Of course, the great arbiter of the question of who speaks for which gender, and why, was Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, which, oddly, is missing in this account. For Woolf, Shakespeare was the quintessential example of the "androgynous mind," capable of imparting life to male and female.)

In another chapter of her rather odd book, Gornick faults another man in her life, V.S. Naipaul, for a callousness of a different kind; namely, writing "hundreds of pages of strong and original" social criticism "that uniformly withholds sympathy." Deprived of Naipaul's tender eye are people he dissects in both fiction and non-fiction: Africans, Indians, Caribbeans—Third Worlders often expelled from one dreary and luckless landscape to another. "Everywhere he went," Gornick writes, he finds things worthy of contempt; to whit "intellectual deficiency," "moral blindness masquerading as an assertion of 'authenticity.'" He abhors the "Africanization" of Africa in the 1960s and '70s, the rise of Black Power in the Caribbean, the deep-seated spirituality of India, and the ever-present social "illness" of political Islam. Some of this acid surely must be the product of authorial self-hatred, but that link is not present to sweeten or humanize the scorn.

Failure to find (or to seek) roundness in their women characters shrinks the achievement of Roth, Bellow, et al. Smug and judgmental hauteur blights Naipaul's work. So, who does Gornick admire among her males? The Allen Ginsberg of "Howl"—for his passion, rudeness, daring acts of self-exposure. George Gissing, for being a lifelong loser—and still writing a lot. H.G. Wells, for the late-life brainstorm that a lifetime of cheating might have hurtful his loyal and faithful wife; Randall Jarrell, out of empathy for the depression that eventually killed him. What does this set have that the first set lacks? Humility, honesty, a broad humanity—the ability (and the desire) to see the world without prejudice and give characters—real or make-believe—a fair shake. Is that too much to ask of a great artist? The great...