I wish I could say that I understood The Men In My Life. When I finished reading it a couple of days ago I felt so puzzled that I immediately started reading it over again. Now I have read it twice. The writing is lively and vivid, but I am not closer than I was at the beginning to actual comprehension.
Vivian Gornick published the book in 2008. Then it was nominated in the category of criticism for a 2009 National Book Critics' Circle Award. There are nine short chapters discussing a total of twelve male writers whose books have loomed large in the reading life of Vivian Gornick. She wants to explain their importance to her by telling a little bit about the difficult personal history of each one, with the hope of showing how the outstanding literature each one made required particular experiences of depression and pain and loneliness. (True, to me this linking up of pathology and creativity sounds like kind of a dubious cliché, but that's a comparatively minor problem.)
Here are the chosen men: George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, James Baldwin, V.S. Naipaul. They all have the depression/pain thing in common, but what they also have in common (with the significant exception of the two gay guys) is a towering level of misogyny, expressed in one of two ways. Group "A" can't conceive of women as full-fledged people at all, and Group "B" actively hates them.
Vivian Gornick originally became famous as a Seventies feminist. She must be about my own age, and consequently shared the liberationist politics that my whole generation once upon a time regarded as inevitable. True, most of us repudiated those values later – but I myself never did so, and neither did Vivian Gornick. That's why I can't imagine choosing a stable of male writers to admire who are practically all the most flagrant possible sexists – who mostly have already gone to their graves, ignorant and unrepentant. How could I face my daughter and say that these are the men I admire?