When a woman in 2010 sits down to write, she perhaps feels rather sexless. She is inclined neither to express nor deny: she’d rather be left alone to get on with it. She might even nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of ”women’s writing”. Why should she be politicised when she doesn’t feel politicised? It may even, with her, be a point of honour to keep those politics as far from her prose as it is possible to get them.

That “perhaps” isn’t there to weaken the writing: it’s there to mark the whole passage as speculation so that she can wiggle away from providing any actual examples. She, of course, does not know what any other woman feels when she sits down to write. There are certainly, however, many contemporary writers whose writing shows a clear awareness of their being women and of the experience of womanhood. I just finished reading Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows which is at its core the story of one woman’s life from the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki to post-9/11 New York. The novel explores storylines that follow the men she has been connected with but always returns to her situation, experience, and perspective. Then there’s Margaret Atwood, of whom Cusk surely is not unaware; could anyone account for Atwood’s work within hostility towards “women’s writing”?

So why is Cusk making such unsupported claims about women writers? Simple: she has fallen into the trap of either/or thinking and essentialism. After acknowledging that women now on occasion win literary awards, she states

But it seems to me that ”women’s writing” by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

Compare this statement with what Alicia Suskin Ostriker has to say in Feminist Revision and the Bible:

The choice between “difference” and “similarity” is one of those false choices proposed by phallogocentric logic which we should reject. Women are both similar to men and different from them. Shouldn’t that be obvious to anyone who hasn’t been brainwashed. Likewise our writing both resembles and deviates from men’s writing.

Ostriker is another writer whose work clearly engages with the experience of womanhood, though given that Cusk has specifically mentioned prose and Ostriker writes poetry, perhaps her work is out of bounds for discussion. At any rate, Cusk’s either/or thinking leads directly to an essentialist definition of women’s writing:

She can look at her own body: if a woman’s body signifies anything, it is that repetition is more powerful than change. But change is more wondrous, more enjoyable. It is more pleasant to write the book of change than the book of repetition. In the book of change one is free to consider absolutely anything, except that which is eternal and unvarying. ”Women’s writing” might be another name for the book of repetition.

My body doesn’t only repeat but also changes: I have menstrual cycles and I have a different face today than I had at twenty. Repetition is important (I’m now fairly certain that Cusk doesn’t read contemporary poetry), but I don’t think my period is more powerful than the way my joys and pains begin, slowly, to mark my face. Besides which, while my body is part of my every experience and should not be denied, it is not the limit of the shapes of my experience, nor should it be the limit of my writing. (Cusk has, perhaps, conflated sex and gender.) And then one has to ask how trans women fit into this. Or women who have had hysterectomies. Cusk has no place for them.

In fact, in the end, Cusk has place only for a very narrow definition of woman:

And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and ”mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2010, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.

In fact, the categories of woman and mother overlap but are not identical. Domesticity and family life are anything but ahistorical. Their shapes shift as society changes and creates new demands.

Rachel Cusk is right about one thing, however: at present there is no easily identifiable “women’s writing”. She’s wrong in thinking that’s a problem. What we should be striving for instead is to have women’s writings encompassing diverse styles and subjects from which we can discover not only how we are both similar to and different from men and people who have non-binary identities but also how we are both similar to and different from each other.

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By assigning numbers to books, the system discourages students from forming their own independent judgments. If you don’t like the Harry Potter series, the system tells you that there must be a problem with your tastes since those books are worth so many points. Indeed, the use of hard numbers creates the illusion of objective ratings (and thus the possibility of an objectively selected canon). Of course, there’s also the question of who decides which books get to be ranked.

The selection of criteria for the ranking of books is inherently subjective and in this case reflects a view of reading solely as a mechanical skill, not as a way to discover new ideas, not as a way to understand one’s own life better, and certainly not as  a way to learn about people whose lives are different from your own. It demonstrates a focus on the how of reading without considering the why of reading. (The same focus that killed Reading Rainbow.) While making certain that students have adequate vocabulary and reading comprehension is important, it is far from the only purpose of reading. A system in which that is the only value gives students the skills they need to fulfill workplace functions but not to become engaged citizens or to examine the world around them. It’s a recipe for quiet desperation and for cultivating a taste for apparently straightforward answers and evaluations whether or not they are accurate and sufficient.

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That said, book reviews occur in a different context from letters to the editor: whereas the latter are read by someone who has already chosen to pick up the paper, the former may influence the choice to pick up the book (though a book that receives negative reviews will probably sell more copies than a book that isn’t reviewed at all: name familiarity does play a role). Thus, it may be a bit more reasonable for an author to respond to a review that they feel is unfair or untrue.

But what are the bounds of an acceptable response?

1. Debate the points made by the critic, not the critic’s status or authority. Alice Hoffman asked who Roberta Silman was. I’ve had someone respond to a negative review of one of his poems by saying that I’d never written a memorable line of poetry in my life, which if true wouldn’t have had any impact on whether my critique of his work was fair. These sort of maneuvers don’t advance the discussion and are a sort of silencing: don’t go after me, or I’ll use my higher status to hurt you.
2. Don’t encourage other people to join in attacking the critic. This is a variant of the status argument: I will hurt you by bringing other people (my fans, since I’m more popular than you are) to say nasty things. No matter how thick your skin, it takes time to go through a deluge of emails, phone calls, or even blog comments.
3. If you feel the need to rant, do so but it in private. Have a friend you can complain to, preferably over a glass of whiskey. If this friend can double as someone to check your public response for constructiveness, that’s even better. Ranting can help get it out of your system, but screaming at people doesn’t help advance the conversation about literature.

What other guidelines should an author who responds to a review follow? Or do you think writers should never reply?

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James Joyce, too, was in self-imposed exile as he wrote the book, and it shows. His meticulousness about streets and landmarks is the meticulousness of an exile. When you live in a place, the precise landscape doesn’t seem so essential as when you are trying to remember it from another country. At least, in my peripatetic life, that has been the case.

The language of Ulysses is also that of an exile, questioning the bounds of a native tongue as if it were foreign. (This is one of many ways in which Joyce’s work as an EFL teacher influences his work; he had many opportunities to hear his own tongue spoke as a foreign one.) In places, the same could be said for the treatment of narrative, though the underlying story remains. Both of these tendencies reach their peak in Finnegans Wake, however.

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