Does Katie Roiphe Touch Sensitive Areas?
How We’re Literary Now: In A Bubble. Responses to Roiphe’s Great (White, Straight) Male Novelist piece are all over Tumblr—thoughtful, sharp, glib, funny, annoyed, appreciative, concise responses. Go to NYTimes.com, however, and Roiphe’s piece, which has had five days to circulate, is among neither the most emailed, most blogged or most searched. For those of us who care, let’s consider her piece adequately contextualized, refuted or seconded.
But are the works she discusses sexy?
Strictly from a craft point of view, I think her examples demonstrate how going into great detail about character reactions is at odds with making what those characters are experiencing come alive. Maybe this is inextricable from thematic concerns and shows the egotism at the root of these works, as if the writers Roiphe cites would actually just as soon hold forth about sex in a smoking ban-flouting bar than have sex. But substitute different subject matter and perspective—say, Thoreau enjoying his pond—and I think there’d be the same process of abstraction and removing us from the experience itself. I’m wary of the old MFA chestnut “show don’t tell,” but it came from somewhere. For sex scenes, Roiphe’s examples can be awfully non-tactile.
Conversely, at times their focus is too microscopic. View something too closely, and it’s easy to lose sight of its shape.
Edmund White, introducing Amy Hempel at a 2008 reading, said that reading her work made it impossible to imagine writing like Updike anymore. One can get lost in the funhouse of lavish prose. White could have equally been praising Carver or Chekhov. They all work short (vs. Roiphe’s doorstoppers) and they don’t specify how to think or what something means. They ask us to participate.
