In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe Page B

happen.
    Kate Millett might prefer that Norman Mailer have a different taste in sexual position, or that Bellow’s fragrant ladies bear slightly less resemblance to one another, or that Rabbit not sleep with his daughter-in-law the day he comes home from heart surgery, but one can’t deny that there is in these old paperbacks an abiding interest in the sexual connection.
    Compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s notion of sex as an“imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. The fluidity of Updike’s Tarbox, with its boozy volleyball games and adulterous couples copulating alfresco, has disappeared into the Starbucks lattes and minivans of our current suburbs, and our towns and cities are more solid, our marriages safer; we have landed upon a more conservative time. Why, then, should we be bothered by our literary lions’ continuing obsession with sex? Why should it threaten our insistent modern cynicism, our stern belief that sex is no cure for what David Foster Wallace called “ontological despair”? Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

Writing Women
    It may be surprising that there’s been no comprehensive history of women’s writing in America, but Elaine Showalter has undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume,
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
, in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing
, which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Princeton (she was the head of the department when I was a graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies.
    It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion—objected to being categorized aswomen writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women … to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive.”
    A Jury of Her Peers
announces its inclusiveness with its size and heft, and the breadth of Showalter’s research is indeed impressive; it seems there are women scribblers under every apple tree, in every city street and small-town café across our great nation. In fact, the encyclopedic nature of the book is both its satisfaction and its limitation. The entries are brisk, informative, and often less than a page long. There are too many writers here to go into much depth about any of them, and one finds oneself, in many of the more absorbing passages of the book, wanting more. Of course, distilling any writer’s lifework into a brief entry entails a certain amount of glossing over. To cover so much territory necessitates a kind of breezy simplification, and that very breezy simplification is also the pleasure of this kind of ranging, inclusive history.
    Although she refers