Women on Men, Men on Women
Tess Crain on contemporary male fiction, Alex Perez on contemporary female fiction
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Dear reader,
I’m temporarily un-paywalling two pieces from Mars Review of Books Issue 3: Alex Perez’s “Damaged Women” on contemporary female fiction and Tess Crain’s “Burning Man” on contemporary male fiction. (I wrote the headlines. Blame me if you don’t like them.)
Together, these two pieces address questions that I haven’t seen any other literary publications tackle head-on. Anyone who takes a glance at the NEW BOOKS table at their local New York independent bookstore will notice that women are very well represented. Meanwhile, male novelists seem to either be competing with each other to see who can seduce Big Publishing with the most milquetoast fiction, or shouting angrily from the sidelines.
What’s going on here? Questions of sex and gender have always been germane to the novel. Just read about the novel’s history, especially the history of the first bestseller, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
To find out, I commissioned two brilliant writers in Alex Perez and Tess Crain. I wanted something like the great pieces you could find in the back issues of the NYRB which would tackle an entire subject, connecting the threads of individual books. The one that stands out most in my mind is Gore Vidal’s hilarious dismissal of the entire “postmodern” movement in fiction. (The only writer in that class whom he liked at all was William Gass.)
We live in an age infested with theory. And yet, oddly enough, when I read book reviews, I seldom see the reviewers highlighting that the work under review is downstream from forceful sociological and technological pressures. Obviously there are different pressures informing what sorts of novels can be written today vs. 10 years ago. And yet we still review books as though they’re these organic emanations issuing straight from an isolated individual’s mind to the written page.
Damaged Women by Alex Perez
Burning Man by Tess Crain
I think Perez and Crain lead us out of that morass. I love these two pieces and I hope you will too. Read them while you can. And subscribe to the Mars Review so you’ll always be able to come back to them when they go back behind the paywall.
Best wishes,
Noah Kumin
Editor in Chief
Mars Review of Books
"Big 5 publishing will not allow nuanced male writing, which is why publishing is devoid of healthy masculine energy." What a terrible world to grow up in. That's why the Zac Smiths and Dolan Morgans abandon reality for their weird dream-worlds. Or Jordon Castro writes about going to the bathroom. They're not allowed to exist in or comment on the reality around them.
Damaged Women was a good read. I'll definitely have to check out Aesthetica, The Rabbit Hutch, and I Fear My Pain Interests You.
What I found really fascinating about the piece was how for the supreme avatar of the white Brooklyn tote-bag lady literature that Perez blasted in his Hobart interview, he actually points to an Asian American author, Celeste Ng, in the Mars Review piece. It makes sense, though, because imitators have to carefully and meticulously study their subjects, to the point where they can out-original the original, almost like a caricature. And no other group has model minority'ed more successfully than Asian Americans, especially elite Asian American women, in terms of becoming politically, economically, and socially indistinguishable from white people.