I love Jonathan Franzen. I loved the Corrections, but he isn't the best author ever. I don't think he should have been on Time Magazine, and I didn't pre-order the book. I pre-order books I need to read. When I read about the fuss about his book, all I could think was this is going to be the most overrated book. Then I started reading about this white men vs. the world thing, and still I thought, who cares? Women and minorities are always left out.
However, after NPR and the Huffington Post I got to thinking that their may be something to this. At least to the argument that Jennifer Weiner makes about men create literature and women create chick lit. I'm bad for it; I give a friend of mine hell for reading "chick lit," which I define as a step up from romance fiction, genre science fiction, and horror. These are books written in a series that goes on forever. They follow archetypes and are completely predictable. But all books written by women for women aren't chick lit.
This isn't anything new. The novel itself was considered a feminine literary device during it's inception. Many women wrote them, and wrote them for other women. An interesting fact about slave narratives is they were written to resemble novels to appeal to white women, who they wanted to join the abolitionist cause. Women were kept out of the cannon and largely still are.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating Franzen's work; the concern is that the New York Times, Time Magazine, and a variety of others only celebrate the work of white men. Want a great book by a African-American female author? Check out The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow.
