The Only Thing I Envy Men

I have often, in the past decade or so, wanted to write something about “women writers,” whatever that means (and whatever “about” means), but the words “women writers” seemed already to carry their own derogation, and I found the words slightly nauseating, in a way that reminded me of that fancy, innocent copy of “Little Women” that I had received as a gift as a child but could bear neither to look at nor throw out. What was I going to say? That this or that writer was not Virginia Woolf but was similarly female? That one of my favorite contemporary novels that also happened to be by a woman was “The Last Samurai,” by Helen DeWitt, and that one of the things I liked about it was that it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator’s gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son by setting him up to watch Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” over and over, a ridiculous but understandable plan, and that then the major section of the book is the son trying to solve the mystery of his paternity by investigating one potential father after another? It also seemed relevant to me that this brilliantly wordy and weird book actually sold many copies only because, randomly—and I feel pretty sure about this, though I’m only guessing—there was a Tom Cruise film by the same title that came out around the same time as the book. I had so many little artifacts like this that seemed to point to . . . I didn’t know what they pointed to. I had a strong feeling that I couldn’t see the contemporary situation, and I decided that this was because firsthand knowledge is an obstacle to insight. What of the other artifacts? There were those forgotten American noir women, like Evelyn Piper, of “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” and Dorothy Hughes, of “In a Lonely Place,” and Vera Caspary, of “Laura” (and thirty-eight other novels), and Patricia Highsmith, less forgotten, of one terrifying betrayal after another, and these oddities, and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around . . . something. As did the fact that the Feminist Press had reissued many of these books, which were otherwise out of print, and I wouldn’t have come across them save their placement on certain remainders tables. (I also felt that “Gone Girl” took most of its plot from Caspary’s “The Man Who Loved His Wife.”) Why so much crime? Why so many mysteries? Why was my copy of “The Collected Works of Jane Bowles” part of the Out-of-Print Masterworks series? The same was true of my copy of “Mrs. Caliban” by Rachel Ingalls, a perfect novel about a neglected housewife in love with a giant escaped lizard man.