In the last fifteen years or so, the women’s novel has turned into the Amtrak of American literature; crashing through the gates at Aristotle, jumping the tracks at Horace, ignoring the flashing red lights at Boileau, and scooping up Alexander Pope in the cowcatcher. The rules are down and it’s every stylist for herself in this best of all Tupperware parties, where plot and characterization have been replaced by the kind of non-stop chatter that enabled the French Foreign Legion to meet its enlistment quota for a hundred and fifty years. In the unlikely event that future scholars will bother to give our era a cultural tag, it will be called the Age of Women’s Litter.
ATTRIBUTION:
Florence King (b. 1936), U.S. humorist, essayist, social critic. “Women’s Litter,” Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, p. 179, New York, St. Martin’s Press (1989).
