MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
ACCORDION CRIMES. By E. Annie Proulx. Scribner. $25.00.
WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. By Joyce Carol Oates. Dutton. $24.95.
BABEL TOWER. By A. S. Byatt. Random House. $25.95.
AN
EXPERIMENT IN LOVE. By Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt
&
Co., Inc. $23.00.
ALIAS GRACE. By Margaret Atwood. Nan
A.
Talese/Doubleday. $24.95.
THE LAST THING HE WANTED. By Joan Didion. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. $23.00.
Dipping into the turbid, rushing f10w of novels this past year I discovered
that a surprising majority of the best or most interesting had been writ–
ten by women. Of course, women have
always
written novels - and some
of these were
always
among the greatest; when they read Jane Austen and
Charlotte Bronte, Scott and Thackeray themselves admired and even
envied something they could not have done. Women often understood,
also, the way to win a more popular success than their male rivals;
Hawthorne resented, declining to admire, the "scribbling women" who
beat him out in the market. But the older novel seemed to have had two
audiences rather than one. Virginia Woolf could still say in 1928 that to a
female reader books by most male writers seemed written by only one
half of the brain. Female writers, with access to the other half, were just
as shut out from masculine sensibili ty. She hoped that the time was com–
ing when the whole of human experience would f10w into the books men
and women could read together. As women's lives would come to resem–
ble men's lives more and more, realistic novels about society or novels of
external adventure would no longer be the exclusive products of male
imagination; the novel of hearth and home, the novel of private emotion
and personal sentiment, would belong as much to men as to women.
This has not exactly happened yet, and the idea of an "androgynous"
imagination has not appealed to everyone - least of all to those feminist
critics who insist on the specificity of a female tradition and a female voice
to which female readers are exclusively responsive. Woolf also had said,
"We think back through our mothers." She even thought there was such
a thing as a man's sentence as distinct from a woman's sentence, an idea
that has not died out for those who insist on the totalizing determinism of
