«Women are better writers than men»: novelist John Boyne sets the record straight

Publicado originalmente por The Guardian el 12/12/17.
Do you know what the literary tea towel is? It’s an Irish phenomenon that can be found hanging in half the pubs of Dublin and all the tourist shops. Also taking the form of a calendar, a beer mat, a T-shirt and a poster, the tea towel features images of 12 great Irish writers, most of whom look as if they’ve spent the morning drowning puppies.
There’s George Bernard Shaw looking constipated, while Flann O’Brien stares into the distance. Oscar Wilde at least has a half-smile on his face, as if Bosie has just lifted his shirt to show off his abs. Only Brendan Behan seems truly happy, but then he is sitting in a pub.
Twelve writers, supposedly our greatest ever, and not a vagina between them. Sorry about that, Molly Keane, Edna O’Brien and Maria Edgeworth. “You’ll be on the tea towel one of these days,” remarks a character in my most recent novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, speaking to the fictional writer Maude Avery, who is well regarded but eschews any form of public recognition. “That will never happen,” she replies. “They don’t put women on that. Only men. Although they do let us use it to dry the dishes.”
Every few years, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle when a prominent male writer or aged university professor declares that he doesn’t read or teach novels by women. The Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, for example, has said that there is no female writer his equal because of women’s tendency towards “sentimentality” and also because a woman is “not a complete master of a house … so that comes over in her writing”.
I’m not sure if Naipaul has read anything by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro or Penelope Lively, all born within a year or so of him. But if he has, he should recognise that sentimentality is a crime for which none of these could be convicted. And, however they run their homes, they are certainly masters of a good sentence.
It’s the same story whenever the world, or Time magazine anyway, feels the need to declare a new Greatest Living Novelist. Most recently, in a daring and original move, the dubious honour of “greatest American novelist” was awarded to a white male, Jonathan Franzen, despite his having produced only one novel of real merit, The Corrections. His two subsequent works – Freedom and Purity – were so wrapped up in their own self-importance that they only needed single word titles to signify their status as Significant Works of Literature. Franzen might take note that Pet Shop Boys albums have been employing this conceit for decades – and three and a half minutes of the Boys generally contain more insight and humour than 600 pages of Franzen’s tedium.
Throughout the mid to latter part of the 20th century, it was always the men who, like more bookish but less witty versions of Muhammad Ali, declared themselves the Greatest. In the US, it was John Updike, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, all carping at each other from the sidelines, or having dust-ups on chatshows.
The first four are dead and the fifth is retired but, despite their determination to survive into posterity, can you imagine anyone today picking up a copy of Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost or Vidal’s Live from Golgotha? To read, I mean – not just to dust the shelves around them. I can’t. But I could certainly see myself revisiting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
In a recent speech, the writer Anne Enright, displaying an agility with numbers that could yet see her installed in Carol Vorderman’s old role on Countdown, explored how books by women are rarely reviewed by men, as if it is beneath their dignity, while books by men are appraised by critics of both genders. The implication is that literary editors believe books by male writers express universal concerns while those by women are regarded as much narrower in scope, lacking the subtlety needed to engage the mind of the cerebral male.
I’ve been publishing novels for almost 20 years. In that time, I’ve become increasingly aware of similar double standards in the industry. A man is treated like a literary writer from the start, but a woman usually has to earn that commendation. There are exceptions. In recent years, some new female writers – Sara Baume, Belinda McKeon and Kit de Waal in particular – have broken through quickly due to the indisputable quality of their work, but others have struggled because they clashed with publishers over how female-oriented their book promotion should be.
I’ve known men who, on showing me a proposed jacket design, have felt pleased by the seriousness of the approach, a sign that their work is intellectual and provocative. And I’ve known women who’ve had to fight tooth and nail to prevent a bare-legged girl lying on her back in a field of hay, laughing her pretty little head off while holding a forget-me-not, being the first image readers associate with their work.
It doesn’t stop there. Last summer, I attended a literary festival where a trio of established male writers were referred to in the programme as “giants of world literature”, while a panel of female writers of equal stature were described as “wonderful storytellers”.
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