Women's Prize for Fiction

Huge congratulations to A M Homes for winning the Women's Prize for Fiction for May We Be Forgiven, her hilarious, stomach-churning yet moving depiction of the implosion of the American Dream via the disintegrating life of a hapless historian trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard Nixon.

Homes is that really precious thing, most particularly in this age of fearful sensibilities: a writer who dares to break the false boundaries of taste and accepted sentiment in order to explore the complex, sordid yet touching truth about ourselves. There seems to me in Homes's writing a total lack of authorial timidity or self-regard, and I salute her.

In the (just less than) fortnight run-up to the prize I set out to read all of the shortlisted books and I managed them all except Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, of which I've only read a quarter. The thing that struck me most strongly was a transatlantic divide: three of the shortlistees were American and three British, and I found a literary-cultural difference in their books. It's often said that British literature is obsessed with the past, and it isn't only the UK Mantel's straightforwardly historical novel that seems to bear this out. British Kate Atkinson's structural tour-de-force, Life After Life,  is essentially about the horrors of war and plays with the thoroughly contemporary astro-physics notion of parallel universes and alternative lives; however, her focus is historical and the book pivots on a moment in 1910 when the protagonist is born into a Forsterian middle-class idyll about to be shattered by war. While the pivotal moment of Zadie Smith's NW is contemporary, an explicit theme is that of time, and much of the narrative is retrospective examination of how the characters got to the point where they are now.

It's not that the American writers aren't interested in history - Homes's protagonist is after all a historian - but what characterises all three are energetic plunges into the here and now to which history has led us, and a muscular facing up to the huge changes we are undergoing. Both Homes's novel and Maria Semple's very clever and entertaining yet moving Where D'You Go, Bernadette, are steeped in the technology that does indeed saturate our world, and capture the way that it is changing not only the texture of our lives but our psyches. Most urgent is Barbara Kingsolver's stunning Flight Behaviour, set in a place, America's rural bible belt, where climate change is seen as 'God's will' yet is most dramatically experienced.

A great shortlist, and great evidence of the strength of women's writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Orange Prize Shortlist, Connections and Misery

The Orange Prize shortlist is announced, and the interesting story of Rosie Alison, the shortlister who didn't get a single national review, becomes even more interesting: turns out she had a prominent books industry connection she made a point of not using, and her now shortlisted novel was turned down over and over until independent Alma Books picked it up.

And Daisy Goodwin continues with her theme of too much misery in women's fiction: 'The Lovely Bones has a lot to answer for', we are told she says today.

Test or Taste?

On the occasion of the anouncement of the Orange prize shortlist, Kirsty Lang, chair of the judges, sums up the dubious nature of literary prizes:

Kirsty Lang ... described the shortlisting process as "arbitrary". "Once you've whittled the books down and got rid of the obvious crap it becomes a question of taste, and books affect people differently ... there are books on this list that some judges hated."

Sour Grapes and Bitter Fare at the Orange Feast?

Question: Do we still need a prize for women writers?

Tim Lott doesn't think so. He objects strongly in the Telegraph to the notion that there's a need for the Orange Prize, but the bitterness of his piece and the tenor of some of the comments from men on the online piece fill one with the kind of female unease one thought one had long left behind. Lott reasons thus:

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

Yet he also acknowledges this:

Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn't give women their mathematical due - a 3:10 ratio remains.

What we could conclude from this, in fact, is that even in a situation where men are in a minority, it is maleness which gets you the most institutionalized accolades (the Booker being our most institutionalized and status-filled literary accolade) - just as while more women than men are teachers, more headteachers are men than women. (And I do hope that the failure of my comment pointing this out to appear on the Telegraph site isn't down to anti-feminism!)

But doubt about the validity of it all isn't just confined to men, and has leaked from the female Orange judges themselves. Last year chair Muriel Gray castigated the entries, and by extension women's fiction in general, for being 'too domestic'. This year chair Kirsty Lang* agrees that a lot of the books were 'domestic dramas'. Asked by the Guardian if she had a problem with that she said not, since 'most readers of fiction are women and we like our reading to reflect our experience', yet this is somewhat undercut by her later statement: 'I would have liked to have seen bigger political themes.'

In other words, here we are again: women may be in the majority as the writers and readers of fiction, but they are identified (rightly or wrongly) with the domestic and the domestic is not valued. (It would be interesting to examine the perception and to look at the precise proportion of both women's and men's books that are either purely domestic or tackle political themes 'through the prism of the family', as Lang says some of the Orange novels do.) (And anyway, when did we go and forget that the personal is political?)

The Guardian focuses on another aspect of Lang's comments: the fact that in general the novels had been 'infected by misery memoirs'. It's not clear whether this is a direct quote from Lang, or a Guardian interpolation, but it's a pretty loaded bombshell, with the negative connotations of 'infected', and its smearing of women's fiction with the dubious moral and aesthetic status (much discussed on this blog) of a non-fiction genre which the Guardian indeed calls 'much derided.'

Perhaps this is the trouble with a prize for women's fiction: it means that any trends in contemporary fiction get blamed on the women, and guys like Edward St Aubyn get off scot-free.


*Sorry, at the risk of proving how inept women are, I confess that in an earlier version of this I called her Kirsty Wark.