The chair of this year’s Orange prize for women’s fiction, Daisy Goodwin, has complained of having to wade through too many novels in which the ‘subject matter was unremittingly grim’. Having read all the candidates, she felt like a social worker in a deprived London borough. ‘There needs to be some joy, not just misery,’ she pleaded.
Commentators have suggested that women writers focusing on dark subjects are merely striving to escape the chick lit label. The implication is that women writers can either do fluffy or grim, but nothing in between. It’s a sign of a lack of confidence that we accept this sort of put-down.
Amy Bloom, novelist and psychotherapist, finds the debate absurd. She told me, ‘I don’t know what these girls are up to, writing about such grim subjects, just to prove they’re real writers.’
Bloom points out that women writers are liable to be patronised whatever literary genre they choose.
‘Sometimes I can’t keep up: chick lit demonstrates women’s essential mental fluffiness, serious work our essential wannabe status. As we say in Texas, can’t win for losing.’
Bloom herself deals with dark subjects (betrayal, bereavement, incest) in her latest collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out with flashes of humour and redemptive warmth. Nothing fluffy or wannabe about it.
Before we start complaining that women have no sense of humour, take a look at the books on the Orange prize longlist. Goodwin has actually answered her own plea: here are books dealing with murder, child death, tyranny, bereavement, slavery. More than the average social worker’s caseload, I admit. But humourless they are not. They tread a line, as one reviewer said of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (above), ‘between laughter and horror’. In A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore’s student narrator is archly comical, her story laugh-out-loud funny and then hauntingly sad. Andrea Levy ‘dares to write about her subject [slavery] in an entertaining way’. Kathryn Stockett’s writing in The Help, about racially segregated Mississippi, is ‘a blend of rage and humour’.
Misery memoirs, devoured by a reading public avid for experiences worse (one hopes) than their own, have lately been equalled in popularity by slasher crime novels in which unspeakable horrors are committed, usually upon female victims. Clearly women readers do not shy away from grim subject matter. Which is just as well, since there’s a lot of it about, and the novelist’s job is to write about the world we’re in. The best women novelists writing today show beyond any doubt that what they’re good at is a light touch in the darkness.
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