It’s the same old story of how everything a woman does gets refracted through a prism of gender politics that prevents her from just doing what she does in an uncluttered fashion, as Lewis suggested. Then three years later people are wondering where all that promise went, which makes them out to be undeserving frauds rather than just, you know, young writers who were still figuring it out when they wrote their first books.
You call young women’s books “promising” rather than good and commend their talent (their immense talent, their palpable talent, their untamed talent) rather than their writing. Oyler’s book is not very good, I’m afraid, but it’s written in the idiom of the contemporary internet and is about “the Millennial experience” so it’s receiving the kind of desultory positive reviews we give to young women writers who look like the future, which in the long run turn out to be a burdensome type of white elephant. Male novelists face dangers in being overhyped too, but no one’s backlash is prosecuted as lustily as a young woman writer once known as precocious. But I am aware that Oyler is receiving a certain treatment in the literary media that provides formulaically good press up front in exchange for a maddeningly superficial understanding of the book itself, one which allows them to anoint Oyler as “one to keep an eye on” even as it ensures that she will inevitably be dragged into a kind of literary backlash cycle we also reserve for young women. I have no idea what Lauren Oyler looks like, I’m happy to say, despite reading a half-dozen professional reviews of her debut novel Fake Accounts.
But when Lewis references “an asymmetric value system where men do, and women are,” it speaks to a problem that is now more complicated and harder to detect than women writers being judged for their looks. Yes, it’s true as Lewis says that women writers are judged on their appearance in a way that men simply aren’t, and that sucks.
A couple years ago Helen Lewis published a piece on the status of women novelists that, to me, came frustratingly close to a novel understanding of a growing gender imbalance before skittering off into well-worn complaints about looks.
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