Employees at Waterstone’s, Britain’s largest bookstore chain, prefer male authors to female in a recent survey. “The company asked its 5,000 employees to name their favourite five books written since 1982, when Waterstone’s opened its first store. The resulting list of the top 100 favourites is dominated by male authors,” reports the UK Telegraph.
A store spokesman said, while women don’t care about an author’s gender, “Subconsciously, I think men stick to male writers. They think that what women write doesn’t appeal to them.” (via Books, Inq.)
My first novel, THE ARC AND THE SEDIMENT, is being released by Utah State University Press on May 1, 2007. I noticed, while reading through critiques and reviews, a difference in reactions by male versus female readers. Overall, I’ve received very generous reviews from authors Darrell Spencer, Helena Viramontes, Francois Camoin, and E. Ethelbert Miller. But other readers (not authors) have divided into camps: while all have responded kindly, men seem to have had a hard time being willing to accept a female non-heroic protagonist, seeming more likely to judge the morality of the main character (here, lacking, as the main character is an alcoholic with serious issues), while women seem more inclined to judge the quality of writing. (This isn’t entirely true, as my acquiring editor and the state arts council representative who have supported me are male.) This struck me as very interesting, because the perceptions I’ve encountered over the years point to a female readership more invested in works that convey a sort of morality. Further, the novel deals with interracial marriage and families (Native American and Caucasian), and while I expected to encounter more resistance from non-white audiences (the same audiences who seem less-than-pleased about my own interracial marriage), I sense more concern about political correctness from white readers. I’ve always wondered about gender ratios: my MFA program seemed filled mostly with females, yet males seemed to experience more success; also, most contests seem to render more male winners than female. Whether this related to quality or simply the politics of exclusion, I have no idea. Maybe unwisely, I’ve pretty much accepted the gender gap that exists, but I’m interested now in how it relates to gaps resulting from race. That is, how well are non-heroic protagonists accepted from dominant culture versus minority culture? Does the dominant culture (or gender) expect a kind of commitment to the promotion of a moral agenda that they don’t expect out of their “own kind”? And vice versa? Just curious about others’ thoughts.
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Christine, I didn’t have time to comment on this last night and may not until tonight, but if you see this in the meantime, would you describe “non-heroic protagonist” a little more? Are you talking about an anti-hero with few admirable traits? Is this non-heroic protagonist the alcoholic you mentioned?
A nonheroic protagonist that’s done well (and I fear mine isn’t) is characterized by more than a lack of qualities–ideally, he or she is defined by a refusal to measure themselves against the heroic model (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/hero). Instead of aspiring to gradiosity, climax, victory, etc., they might get off on simply seeing and feeling and interacting with whatever messes they happen into–maybe the rubble of the world is =/> intruiging to them as the western drive to narrative arc, accrual-as-lifestyle, and superior endowment.