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"Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport"
Some things do change: In a new anthology, women jocks take up the pen.
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"Walker Evans"
A more critical eye could have taken this wonderfully researched life of the photographer to another level.
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[08/11/99]

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"The Kind I'm Likely to Get"
Yet another collection of stories tackles downtown anomie, but this one has real feeling.
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[08/11/99]

Ivory Tower
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Gabaldon has said -- directly in various places as well as sneakily, through various characters -- that Claire and Jamie turned out the way they did (a combat nurse and a Gaelic hunk with a real, human person inside) not as any kind of statement, but just because Gabaldon herself doesn't especially like weenie women, and rather appreciates men as people. There's something almost avant-garde about that. You can find a halfway version of it in the novels of Mary Renault, a mid-century crypto-Sapphist who wrote detailed historical fiction about ancient Greek heroes, and who didn't seem to like femininity at all, while quite liking Amazons. Flannery O'Connor had something like it, but in a mean way.

But when you look at even the edgiest of contemporary fiction, you get the impression that men and women are supposed to be essentially different inside, and that male and female strength is always supposed to be in conflict -- as though each had some sort of mystical energy that negates the other. Female characters are commonly strong despite male opposition or through there not being any real masculinity around to contaminate the air. Male characters are commonly strongest when the literary universe they inhabit is a contrivedly masculine one. But the striking thing about Gabaldon's books is that while Claire and Jamie were clearly raised very differently, and while they're always behaving like a typical romantic couple -- falling into torrid couplings, and squabbling and smacking each other, and storming off in fits of pique and suchlike -- they get along pretty well as friends despite it all. You get the feeling that they'd still be crashing around together if one of them tripped and fell through a stone sex-change circle.

From the reader reviews posted on Amazon.com, a lot of romance purists are suspicious of Gabaldon because of that sort of thing. Even though a new genre, the time-travel romance, has sprung up in the wake of her books, she's viewed as something of a carpetbagger, a weird historical novelist on romance territory. The rough-and-tumble relationship between Claire and Jamie, the battle scenes, the violence. Who the hell wants that stuff? The historical-fiction community, for its part, disapproves of the time-travel, which keeps catapulting characters back and forth between the 18th and 20th centuries, while the hardcore sci-fi crowd just thinks all the smooching is icky.

As if that weren't enough, it gets wronger from there. The genre people practically hop around and shake their fists in unison over the fact that "Outlander" rambles along for almost 300 pages before the main characters even get together and start making Main Plot. But what Gabaldon's book does instead is introduce an entirely fresh sort of popular fiction -- a freer, more authorial version of the middlebrow airport novel than the English language has ever seen before. Gabaldon can craft characters and situations like a real author, and can motivate them like a real author, and has a prose style that almost -- almost -- manages to sustain a sort of adjective-rich lyricism, while hitting the occasional magisterial cadence. Here's Claire pausing after stitching up a wound, from the upcoming novel, "The Fiery Cross":

I never prayed consciously when preparing for surgery, but I did look for something -- something I could not describe, but always recognized; a certain quietness of soul, the detachment of mind in which I could balance on the knife edge between ruthlessness and compassion, at once engaged in utmost intimacy with the body under my hands and capable of destroying what I touched in the name of healing.

Gabaldon's critics also hoot in chorus and kick over wastebaskets because, once the third book, "Voyager," kicks in, 20 years have passed and Claire and Jamie are both in their mid-40s -- which everyone knows is too old for the sort of thing they're always getting up to. Her detractors shatter crockery and spit down mail-shafts over the fact that Claire finds herself in love with two husbands in different centuries, and has to split her loyalties in order to keep the one from avenging himself on the other's forebears. Many people hate, particularly, that Gabaldon not only gets away with all this weird, wrong stuff, but that her books are flying off the shelves because of it. Ah, well. To Gabaldon's critics says Robert Burns, "Some books are lies frae end to end." To Gabaldon:

Misled by fancy's meteor ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray,
Was light from heaven.

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