Fashion for Writers

This post is a guest post from Tony Tulathimutte, our friend (and writer) who has some thoughts that we thought would be worth sharing about this year’s Publisher’s Weekly Top 10.

I kind of hate this picture. -mw

I wrote this in response to my friend Vanessa’s request for my take on this article, which is about the outcry over this year’s all-male PW Top Ten Best Books list:https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:1401285.6538198957/rid:5f69f4e1bec8e463e35aefa189df62cb

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First I want to make it clear that it’s clear: the publishing industry is sexist, as all industries are sexist, as America—Home of the Whopper—is sexist; and then the rest of the world, by and large, is even moreso. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by now when this kind of brazen thing happens in public forums, so the main question is, What’s the proper response to a purely gestural inequality?

It’s completely appropriate to lament the clear imbalance, and to point out certain things about the biases of the PW as a hidebound establishment et cetera, but if anyone’s making the assertion that the whole system is this intractable phallolith under whose shadow women and minorities just can’t ever get a fair shake, then what should we make of last year’s list, which includes five women (still only a fifth of the 25 total honorees, but still better than zero) and five minorities (ditto)? That the biases are always there, but wax and wane? That there were more women on the committee that year? And what connections can we make—as make them we must—to the Obama Effect? The critique of “the system” loses a lot when you’re obliged to limit your critique to the handful of people, including at least one woman, who made the call for a particular list in a particular year.

I have an inherent (probably kneejerk) distrust of any measure whose primary intent is to shove the pendulum of public taste in a certain direction, even for purposes of rectification. A bias is a bias, after all, and I don’t see how the outburst of reactionary blogging and counterlisting (the top ten writers—all female!) is supposed to be any fairer or more clear-sighted than the original list. I personally must consider that, when I’m being honest with myself, my own personal top ten consists of nine white men and a white woman (Nabokov, Bellow, Tolstoy, Coetzee, Sontag, Norman Rush, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, Alasdair Gray), and don’t think that that doesn’t cause me any discomfort as a non-white writer.

Not enough weight is being given to this acknowledgment that taste is subjective, and that list-making, as an unnuanced and inherently exclusionary form (not enough women! Not enough minorities! Not enough genre fiction! Not enough poetry! Not enough translations! Not enough small press! Not enough criticism! Not enough science writing!), is incredibly subjective. Those who are in charge of giving out the award aren’t under any obligation to dole it out in any way that anyone considers fair, and the writer of this article herself admits that “best” is deeply subjective, so I wonder why anyone should be so surprised that subjectivity would carry with it the deep gender bias that you can practically inhale whenever you open a window. Wherever it is that artistic taste comes from, it sure isn’t the spirit of fairness. Nobody’s arguing, anyway, that it’d be a good thing if Publisher’s Weekly gave out awards based on what it thought the public would find most demographically pleasing; and so then what is the alternative? Purge the sexists from the editorial committees? But what if the committee appointers are sexist, racist, literary chauvinists, et cetera? You see how quickly this becomes hopeless.

Suffice it at last to say that I think it’s idiotic to let someone else dictate your tastes to you. Books, in particular, are experienced individually—who cares what they think? The only function a Best-Of list serves for me is as a crib-sheet on the listmaker’s inclinations; if I trust that listmaker, I may be inclined to look into some of the books, and even then only to see whether or not I’d like it. But why would I trust Publisher’s Weekly? Why do I care about this list? I don’t even know those people.