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intimacy of the first person, the emotionality, the
hyped-up intensity of the adjectives, most of which
describe feelings (sympathetic, choked, fearful,
half crazy with fear), the self-conscious, self-correcting
(‘tell her in my way I loved’) solipsism of the
unspoken confession, the sentimentality with which
the narrator surrenders to the Dickensian, eternal
mother, the breathlessness of the syntax, the hazy
vagueness of detail, the merciless focus on the self.
The second selection is, as obviously, the work
of a man’ though we must imagine what manly
writing is, since no one has explained how, precisely,
a writer deploys ‘the remnant of his balls at the
word processor. These cool, hard-boiled, distanced,
third-person sentences turn their unblinking eye
on a man dying horribly. His incoherent confession
is punctuated by his confessor’s (and murderer’s)
bullying demands that he shut up. There are almost
no adjectives (‘hard is the most notable modifier),
nor much emotion, any sentimentality (sentiment
is undercuts sliced through by the implacability of
those, shut up’s), the whole grisly scene culminating
in the hard slap, the, male’s supposition that a
human life is worth less than the specter of damage
to one’s vehicle, the giddiness of that made-up word
splurt, and the fastidious attention to the smears of
blood on the bumper.
In fact, the gender of these authors is the opposite
of what I’ve suggested. The first passage comes from
Frederick Exley s A Fan’s Notes, a memoir-novel
that, in the three decades since its publication, has
assumed an iconic status thanks to its painfully
honest portrait of a certain sort of male writer and
career alcoholic. The second is from Wise Blood, by
Flannery O Connor, the writer who shocked Ozick’s
students by turning out to be female.
And if we move beyond these passages to consider
the whole books, everything keeps subverting our
stereotypical expectations. O Connor takes the
aerial view, gazing down from above, charting the
mysterious wriggling of her tiny, comical humans
as they scurry about, looking for salvation in all
the wrong places. Unlike a humorless girl writer, O
Connor is hilarious, structuring long scenes so that
their jokes keep building. She’s not terribly engaged