Female novelists might not be getting the respect they deserve, but they sure can get rich trying. This, in short, is novelist (and, disclaimer, my friend) Teddy Wayne’s response to Jennifer Weiner’s recent post about the New York Times’ persistent bias towards male novelists — an issue that The Sisterhood has been following.
Weiner found that while the Times showed some improvement in 2011, women still got only 41% of all reviews, and were far less likely to get profiled in addition to getting reviewed.
Wayne acknowledged the preference among critics for male authors, but points out that, apart from the “literary 1%,” it is much harder for male novelists to make a living than female ones.
He writes:
For the majority of male literary authors — excluding the upper echelon of [Jonathan] Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances — it’s actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career.
In his new debut novel “Kapitoil” (Harper Perennial), Teddy Wayne tells the story of Karim Issar, a young man who relocates to New York City from Qatar to help a big financial firm prepare for the Y2K bug. Though shortly after beginning his new job, Karim ends up creating a computer program that helps his company make gains through oil futures by following political instability in the Middle East. The program is successful and, at the same time, morally questionable. But life in New York isn’t all business for Karim. He also has a chance to get to know the 1999 twenty-something scene in New York, and develops a romance with a colleague named Rebecca Goldman.
In an interview with The Sisterhood, Wayne, who is Jewish, discusses his book and the Rebecca character, who, unlike many Jewish female characters in books written by Jewish men, is a rather likeable character.
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