Sexism, Snobbery, and the New York Times Book Review

To know me is to know a giant bookworm. I read constantly, everything from biographies to classic literature to mysteries and, yes, even to adult contemporary fiction about women. You may be better acquainted with the latter genre by its condescending nickname, chick lit. While that genre of books may be wildly popular, it is also marginalized in the literary establishment. Books about women are supposedly for women, but books about men are for everyone. Nowhere is this attitude more evident than in The New York Times Book Review.

Popular authors Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner, and Laura Lippman certainly have noticed the difference in the way men and women are treated by The New York Times Book Review. Weiner points to the disparity in which memoirs are reviewed. If you are a man confessing to a shady past, then you are "brave," "smart," and/or "heartfelt." If you are a woman doing the same thing, you have probably "lost it entirely." Lippman notes that, while men and women publish crime fiction equally, an incredible 74% of those novels reviewed by the Times in the first six months of 2010 were written by men. For her part, Picoult tweeted just last week that she "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." Me too, Jodi.

The problem isn't just limited to fiction, either. According to a study conducted by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting between January 2009 to February 2010, only a tiny 13% of American political books in reviewed in The New York Times Book Review had women authors (only 5% were by non-white authors). Even worse, the percentage of women actually doing the reviewing was even smaller.

Of course, there are those who disagree. Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, says of efforts to include more female-oriented fiction in literary reviews, "This fake populism pretends to speak for women (as if women weren't the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men)." The witty Weiner responded, "My populism is real and it’s spectacular." Hello, Seinfeld reference! And she is right: popular fiction by and about women is too enormous of a market to blatantly ignore.

And since when is serious fiction mutually exclusive with popular novels? Correct me if I am wrong, but Times darling Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections was wildly popular when it debuted (even earning a coveted Oprah's Book Club Selection) and no one's claiming that isn't serious fiction. We don't deride books by and about men as "dick lit."

What else is there to conclude other than that The New York Times Book Review by men, for men? To trivialize and ignore a large portion of the literary market for no other apparent reason than that lots of women like those books is sexist. Chick lit, if it must be called that, is like any other genre: there's great authors and beautiful writing, and there's terrible authors and painful writing. Here's an idea: why not review the books individually, rather than make a blanket judgment against the entire genre? Surely a publication devoted to evaluating books can handle that. As Sarah Seltzer over at the sisterhood points out, The New York Times Book Review has resident experts on children's books and mysteries, so surely someone can be found who will deign to review commercial women's literature.

In the meantime, Weiner has created the Twitter hashtag #franzenfreude for people to share recommendations for “non-Franzen novels about love, identity, families, The Way We Live Now.” You know, for those of us who don't feel like waiting for the Times to acknowledge women's role in popular fiction.

Photo credit: Joe Schlabotnik