Roiphe has just published “Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the
Century’s End,” a work mostly concerned with how the AIDS crisis has
affected Americans’ sex lives. It’s a noticeably edgy and evasive second
book, as if Roiphe hopes that by constantly shifting her position she’ll
avoid some of the body blows she took as a result of her first. Katha
Pollitt briskly decimated “The Morning After” in The New Yorker,
dispatching Roiphe’s critique of rape frequency statistics like a lioness
gruffly swatting down a cub whose friskiness has grown tiresome. Of course,
Roiphe expected ideological critiques — she’d already been the target of
many outraged sophomore fanatics. But Pollitt hardly needed to bother with
that; she simply analyzed Roiphe’s “reporting,” in one example after another,
and showed it to be lazy, shallow and inaccurate, based on rumor,
exaggeration and, at times, just plain stupidity. “Don’t they teach
students … anything about research anymore?” Pollitt growled.

The problem with commentators like Roiphe is that the same half-cocked,
extravagant assertions that make them such good copy also make them easy to
dismiss. The overwrought, fear-mongering mentality of the campus anti-rape
movement in the early ’90s (particularly freshman “orientations” pitched to
the upper registers of gender-war hysteria) deserved to be debunked. But
Roiphe’s rank carelessness in questioning rape statistics (a relatively
minor issue) enabled her opponents to disregard her solid complaints that rape “education” programs only fostered female helplessness and
dependency on institutions.

Although Roiphe insisted that “The Morning After” was “not a political
polemic,” it was just that. With “Last Night in
Paradise,” by contrast, it’s impossible to glean any clear indictment or
recommendation from her tortured musings. Roiphe sees American culture as
having seized upon AIDS as an excuse to resume a puritanical stance on
sexuality. All too quickly, pious headlines calling the disease the “price”
of the sexual revolution appeared. The public’s eagerness to embrace
homilies and codes about safer sex, abstinence and monogamy betrays, she
argues, a panicky discomfort with the rampant hedonism of the ’60s and
’70s. “All the indulgent voices left some fundamental need for control
unsatisfied.”

This crackdown bothers Roiphe, who mourns “an ideal of recklessness and
abandon that’s in the process of being lost.” But then again, she also
welcomes it.

Roiphe describes having felt a deep, intermittent “revulsion”
about the casual sexual relationships of her college years, the parade of
young men who traipsed through the flat she shared with three female
roommates. “I felt almost sick with the accumulated anonymity of it,” she
writes. “It was then that I first felt a hint of our absolute readiness for
limits, for someone to say, for whatever reason, this is not a healthy way
to live.” Later, she watched a TV commercial warning, “If you’ve had
sex with two people, and each of those two people have had sex with two
people …” and showing a lone waltzing couple gradually joined by more and
more people until finally they’re dancing in a crowded room. In this light,
“my own fairly average romantic history seems impossibly sordid.”

That said, Roiphe returns to lamenting the new mania for “caution.” Readers
of “The Morning After” will recognize this yearning for chaos, danger and
mystery, things Roiphe finds essential to her notion of passion. She
admiringly and at length describes the autobiographical French film “Savage
Nights,” written and directed by Cyril Collard, an HIV-positive bisexual
who also stars. This slab of Gallic dreck (I’ve seen it, unfortunately)
concerns a group of young, leather-clad urbanites who spend most of the
movie shrieking about l’amour and chewing up the scenery. The hero,
a preening Lothario, beds a young woman without informing her beforehand
that he’s infected. When the woman discovers this, she melodramatically
casts away their condoms, crying “I want to share everything with you, even
your disease.”

“This is love,” Roiphe gushes. “True love is not concerned with
self-protection” or “the selfishness and prudence written into our new
sexual ethic.” That Roiphe sees pointless self-obliteration as the pinnacle
of love reveals her startling similarity to the passive girls she decries
in “The Morning After.” In fact, in a recent essay in Esquire, Roiphe
confesses further to “forbidden” fantasies about being “taken care of” by
a man of means. In traditional sex roles, she writes, “you can take a rest from
yourself … equality is not always, in all contexts and situations,
comfortable or even desirable.”

Actually, it’s being in charge of your own life that’s not always comfortable,
and many people go to great lengths to avoid it, Roiphe apparently among
them. Whether fretting about “permissiveness” or balking at excessive
“caution,” she seems to see her sexuality as public property constructed of
magazine articles and surveys, a weather vane that obediently turns with
whatever trend is currently breezing through the culture. She’s one of
those feminist writers who’s forever kvetching about what women are “supposed to
be,” as if we all have to be the same and feminism is just a matter of
settling on the right boilerplate.

A conversation with Christine, a self-described “secondary virgin” (someone
who has abandoned premarital sex and intends to remain celibate until
marriage), lashes Roiphe into a frenzy. At first, she envies the other
woman’s “glow” and serenity, but if Roiphe acknowledges the legitimacy of
Christine’s choice — according to her own crazy logic — that would mean
she’d have to follow her example. Instead, Roiphe decides that Christine’s
“calm” is “delusion” and “I find myself infuriated. I suddenly want to
convert her more desperately than she wants to convert me, although there
are definitely times when I wish that, like Christine, I had a giant book
that would tell me how to live my life.” Whew! No wonder Roiphe’s confused.
The possibility that Christine’s is a purely personal decision that works
for her and has no bearing on Roiphe’s own sex life never seems to occur to
her.

For all Roiphe’s touting of willful passion and adventure, “Last Night in
Paradise” is really just a book about norms; it’s remarkable how much she
dwells on what other people think. When promiscuity was
fashionable (in her early college years), Roiphe dreaded being thought a
virgin. Now she frets that “if you smoke a cigarette or order a glass of
wine at lunch, people will look at you as if you are somehow polluting …
the moral environment of the nation.” There’s nothing here, really, about
sexual pleasure or freedom, nothing about the demanding but ultimately
liberating discovery of private truths. Roiphe just ping-pongs between
wishing it were considered “OK” to collect sexual experiences and longing
for someone else to impose structure and morals on her emotional life. Whether she obeys or rebels, Roiphe
doesn’t know who she is.

With “Last Night in Paradise,” Roiphe still shows herself to be a bad girl, but the title
proves entirely unironic. And the operative word is “girl.”

You’ve written about Grace Marks before.

Yes, a TV scenario, produced in 1974 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but it used only one version of the story, which was the only version that I knew at that time. That was [journalist] Susanna Moodie’s rather theatrical and Dickensian write-up of the case. I was young and I thought non-fiction meant “true,” and I believed her mostly. I didn’t believe the part where she had Nancy being cut up into four pieces before being placed underneath the wash-tub, because I thought, “Why would they do that? Wouldn’t it take a lot of time? And which four pieces? Why four and why do it at all?”

So, that gave you a germ of suspicion.

Somewhat. I didn’t put the cutting up into four pieces into the television play.

What was it like to come back to writing about Grace?

I came back probably 20 years later. Somebody suggested I do a play based on the television thing, a theatrical play, but I didn’t like my incarnation as a theater writer. So off it went into the cupboard where we put things when we’re not thinking about them. As the Victorians would say, “beneath the threshold of consciousness.” Then it made a reappearance, and I started going back to the newspaper accounts of the time, once I had figured out where it had taken place, because Susanna Moodie didn’t tell us, and she got some of the names wrong. Then it became a much more ambiguous story than Moodie’s was.

So, your decision to write a different version of Grace’s story was based on …

It was based on the discrepancies among the different accounts. Believe me, if there had been cut-up bodies, it would have been in the newspapers; they wouldn’t have missed that part. They didn’t agree with one another. And the witnesses couldn’t agree at the trial. But that is standard, isn’t it?

When you were working on the original television play, were you convinced that she was actually guilty?

Yes.

What attracted you to that story? That version?

It is a fascinating and theatrical story, even Susanna Moodie’s version, which gets so many things wrong. Four people in a house. The gentleman has a mistress, Nancy, who is also the housekeeper. The housekeeper and the two servants are from the same class. The servants deeply resent the fact that this woman, who is in their class, is set above them. Grace fancies Thomas Kinnear [the master]; she likes him, and she wants to get her rival out of the way. In Susanna Moodie’s version, she wheedles and bullies and taunts [hired hand] James McDermott into killing [the housekeeper/mistress] with the promise of herself as the reward. It’s “If you kill Nancy, you can have me.” That kind of set-up.

Not until after McDermott has killed Nancy, and has then said, “Well of course we will have to kill Thomas Kinnear,” does the other shoe drop. Grace says, “Oh no, not him.” Then McDermott realizes that he’s been set up. He is furious; it is not him that Grace loves, but the other man. So, he says, “Either I am going to kill him, and you are going to help me, or I am going to kill him and you.” Even that story is pretty interesting. What then made it much more interesting to me, as a novelist, is the fact that Susanna Moodie was wrong! Other people were just making the story up from the moment it happened. They were all fictionalizing. They were all projecting their own views onto these various people. It is a real study in how the perception of reality is shaped.

The thing that makes it particularly charged is the class tension.

There was quite a lot of class tension, but I don’t think it’s the kind of story in which servants kill employers out of some well-developed sense of class injustice. I think the resentment was directed more at Nancy than at Thomas Kinnear, because, number one, she had moved out of her class, and number two, she was very inconsistent. It’s like Captain Bligh in “Mutiny on the Bounty”; one day she’s your pal and best friend, and wants to have a party and everybody’s going to dance, and play the flute. The next minute she’s giving you your notice, or bossing you around, or bawling you out for not having done something right, and “coming the lady.” She couldn’t make up her mind who she was, whose side she was on.

How does your characterization of Grace in this book change from the original?

I give the reader the benefit of both versions. I also pick her up at a much later point in her story, in 1859. She’s 31 years old and she has already spent half of her life in the penitentiary. She is a different person, more ambiguous than the original character that I wrote, of course.

How much of her character did you get from the different accounts that you were reading, and how much did you have to conjure up?

There was a great deal missing, but I didn’t feel that I could be completely inconsistent with those other accounts. On the other hand, the other accounts are inconsistent. One person, having seen her, says “She is malicious, she’s conniving, she’s manipulative, she’s evil,” and all of these things. Another person might say, “Actually she is quite amiable, she’s very nice.” These are people who claimed to have known her. You usually get conflicting testimony, especially when there is a violent crime involving both a man and a woman. The questions are always raised, you know, is this Bonnie and Clyde? Was she egging him on, or was she, on the contrary, drawn into it through weakness of will, not being able to say no? Who was the real instigator? This comes about time and again. Opinion is generally undivided about the man and divided about the woman.

Why do you think that is?

Well, I don’t know. We could come up with lots of theories. I think that traditionally, and certainly in the 19th century, women were thought of as being mysterious and unfathomable. So, we have a person who is by nature mysterious and unfathomable involved in a crime. That feeling of mystery is going to be multiplied tenfold. There is a book called “Victorian Murderesses,” which goes back over some of the hot trials of the 19th century. It’s pretty obvious that some of these women killed people and got off because we didn’t like the people they killed — the people they killed were not approved of. It is also pretty obvious that some of them didn’t kill anybody, but got convicted because they were doing other things that were not approved of, usually having an affair.

So, if a woman was involved in a case, and letters were produced, adulterers’ love letters, her chances for beating the rap went plummeting downwards. Two things that told very much against Grace, are, number one, she was found at an inn with a man — and if you have read “The Mill on the Floss,” you know that this is almost automatically a fallen woman; if you’re in a structure together, overnight, even if it was separate bedrooms, which it was, you’re reputation is very severely damaged. Number two, she wore Nancy’s dress to the trial, and Nancy’s bonnet and a few other items as well. This told very much against her and produced a sensation in the courtroom. When that testimony came out, everybody went [gasps dramatically] in shock and horror.

Why do you think she wore Nancy’s dress?

It was a good, serviceable dress. You wouldn’t leave something like that behind. Nancy had no more use for it. Waste not, want not.

She doesn’t seem to have a morbid imagination at all.

Well, she doesn’t have a middle-class, genteel imagination, which would have said, “I couldn’t wear that dress, that’s the dress the dead person …” She doesn’t have that kind of sensibility. A shawl is a shawl, a dress is a dress. You don’t just throw something like that away. Shoes are shoes. When you travel in India, you find that everything is used, just everything. You don’t find any plastic bags blowing around because nobody would let a plastic bag go to waste. It would be used for this and that, and when finally it can’t hold anything anymore, it would be cut up into decorations. This is where the patchwork quilt came from; you don’t throw things out, you make them into something else.

Grace is like a camera, she sees things so clearly. Then she has this sardonic side that she conceals.

Wouldn’t you? Especially if you were in prison.

Her reaction to the murder suggests that it was never real to her.

I read a very interesting article by a prison psychiatrist in England. He was talking about people who have been put in there for murder and so forth. He interviews them. Often they say things like, “Well I just gave her a little tap. I don’t know why she fell down.” Or “I don’t know how all those cuts and stabs got on there, I just sort of pushed them against the wall, I wasn’t doing anything that bad.” There is a definite psychological withdrawal. Whether it is real or lying, this guy said that you can’t always tell. Getting people to admit the full extent of what it appears that they have done is frequently quite difficult.

Equally intriguing is the character of Dr. Simon Jordan. Some of the most interesting parts of the book describe how the idea of the grateful woman, or the wilting, helpless woman, is powerfully eroticized for him.

It is very eroticized in the art of the period, in the painting, in the operas, in the poetry. It was really a very attractive thing to the male artist of the period, rescuing the fainting woman, the crazy, fainting woman. Just the image of Ophelia drifting downstream with her flowers. Flowers, singing, the hair down, state of derangement — all a central image for the period. In opera, think of how many mad scenes with women there are in the 19th century. The famous ones are “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Marguerite in “Faust.” Again, the flowers, the singing, the hair down, the nightgown, the dishevelment, the prison, in the case of Marguerite. Lots of them drown. It’s a much more romantic image for the imagination than, for instance, blowing out your brains. It’s kind of a mermaid or swan image, pretty to watch as they subside slowly. It would be on his mind. It’s there if you read the period novels, including the trashy ones, or even read the comic books of today. Isn’t there even a Nintendo game in which you have to rescue a damsel?

Was it difficult to imagine being a man, and attracted to that?

No, because I was an Victorianist once upon a time. I don’t know whether imagining yourself is quite the way of putting it. But was it hard for me to understand that? No, it is all over the Victorian period.

In an odd way, he imagines himself as both victimizer and rescuer.

People are strange. They are people. I don’t think it is necessarily sadism. I think it is that part in yourself that thinks, well if the plane crashed in the Alps, and I was alive and the other people were dead, would I eat them? Those questions you are always asking yourself: would I have behaved that way? Or how would I behave if suddenly there were two dead people in the cellar and this guy who doesn’t seem very well pulled-together is stronger than me, is the only one left in the house. What am I going to do? Am I going to go along with it? Am I going to try to run away? What is my position at this moment?

Another remarkable thing about this book is the sensual immediacy of it; it really feels as though you know what it was what like to do laundry in 1840. You acknowledge “Beeton’s Book of Household Management” as a source.

Also, some of it is just using your own imagination. Subtract the automatic washer, subtract the ringer washer, and what is left? [solemnly] It is the tub. And the washboard. There is the bar of soap.

In some ways, this is a book about laundry, as much as a book about murder.

It is quite a bit about laundry, but of course, the Bible is about laundry. There’s a lot about washing in the Bible and having snowy white garments and shining raiment. Clean and dirty is a primary human set of categories, like old/young and dark/light. Very primary.

The book actually makes laundry sound quite appealing.

There is something deeply satisfying about a nice, clean, folded towel.

Or sheets on the line.

Yes, sheets on the line are much more appealing than sheets in the dryer.

I ‘m wondering how you personally feel about housework.

It is nice to do the kinds of it that you like, and it is not nice to do the kinds of it that you don’t like.

You mentioned somewhere that your mother hated housework.

She wasn’t keen on it.

It’s ironic that you have written this book about a woman whose life is consumed with housework, and yet you grew up in a house …

Where the idea was to get it over with. One of the reasons my mother liked it up north is that you just swept the dirt out the door. You didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. The more objects, doo-dads and shining things you have, the more cleaning you have to do. If you don’t have silverware, then you don’t have to polish it. She was a minimalist in that respect. But as for me, I was always a bit more interested in it than she was, which was just as well, because I ended up doing some of it. She didn’t like it, and in that generation, kids helped out.

Do you start out wanting to write about someone who does a lot of housework?

No! If you are writing about a servant, well, that is what they did all day. If you read “Mrs. Beeton,” they get up at some ungodly hour in the morning. She lists all the different things the “maid of all work” has to do. It is extensive, a lot of stuff to be got through in a day. She gets up, she makes the fire, she boils the water, she cleans the grate, she lights the fire if it is winter, she sets the breakfast table, she brings in the breakfast. They eat the breakfast, she takes it away. She cleans off that. She takes off the table cloth, she does the dishes, she makes the lunch, she sets the lunch, she takes the dishes away, she washes the dishes, in addition to making the bread and making this and that … polishing the lamps, doing the laundry, making the beds. And the dusting, polishing the stove — all of this had to be done at a time when there were no screens on the windows. So, not only were you doing all of this, you were contending with all of these flies.

Mrs. Beeton says “a brisk, smart girl, who is good at her work,” will of course be able to get everything done in time, so that she has a couple of hours in the afternoon — and you think, for herself. But then she says, “To make her own clothes!” So, she is just not ever getting any time off. They finally did get a half day off every week. But this was dawn-to-dusk, back-breaking work.

How was it to try to write about that?

I have one chapter that is sort of Grace’s day, but it is not even Grace’s full day; we don’t even get to breakfast, and there are already all of these things that she has done. I think it is pretty interesting, but you can get too immersed in it, which I had to look out for. I took out some of the detail that I’d put in because the story must move forward. But it would have meant that she had been a pretty practical, down-to-earth person. She did say, to McDermott, “Don’t kill her in the room; you’ll get blood on the floor.” At first that sounds like a very callous thing to say. Then you think of course she had to clean those floors, and she doesn’t want to have to clean up a bunch of blood.

Which is one of the hardest things to clean.

It is hard to get out.

Did you do much research, beyond “Mrs. Beeton”?

I am old. I have accumulated piles of things in my head over the years. My grandmother lived in a farmhouse without electricity or running water, they had a pump in the kitchen. Those were very tactile places. Made all the bread, the butter, smoked the fish, you know, kitchen garden, the chickens. No broadloom carpets. No vacuum cleaner.

One thing that has happened to Western women in the 20th century — North American women, Western European women — is that cleaning devices have made it unnecessary to have a lot of servants. They don’t need to spend all day doing housework anymore. That is what has made it possible, really, for women to have outside jobs. What has made it necessary is the way the economy has moved around. A lot of families need to have two incomes. But if the whole day were housework and caring for children, the women wouldn’t be able to have jobs. Even quite poor people in the 1840s would have one servant, because they couldn’t run the house without them. Even Susanna Moodie, when she was living in her log cabin in the woods, had a servant.

Since you started writing critically about Canadian literature, acting as a spokesperson on behalf of Canadian writers, have you felt that there’s been a lot of change?

A tremendous amount of change in a great many areas.

Are there some recognizable qualities about Canadian literature now?

It’s not American, that’s for sure. There is a very great difference coming from a country that only has about 30 million people in it, and one that has 280 million. When Americans travel, they buy little maple leaves and sew it on their luggage, because then people won’t accuse them of being imperialist aggressors or yellow-dog capitalist pigs. It’s just these nice Canadians. The other thing is, of course, a certain amount of invisibility. Americans usually stand out from the crowd. The Canadians frequently blend in. I would say we are much more outward looking than you, because we are a trading nation to a much greater extent than you are. If you look at the total of GNP that comes from trading with other countries, a lot more of ours does than yours. So, like Grace, we have to know about you. You don’t have to know about us. We are not really affecting you to any astonishing extent.

One of the interesting things going on now for us is the degree to which foreign policy has diverged, particularly about Cuba. The United States is somewhat isolated on this issue. Canada, Mexico and Europe and just about everybody else thinks the Helms-Burton law is really a very bad precedent to set.

And so do a lot of Americans.

I am sure they do. I, on the other hand — having descended from United Empire loyalists — am quite looking forward to getting back those parts of New Hampshire and Connecticut that were stolen from my family by the bad revolutionaries in 1776, and I’ll take the interest as well.

You figure if that style of reparation has come back …

You could make a lot of money! A lot of people everywhere would be very interested in getting back these portions of things that were lost in governments that were overthrown. Let us not forget who did the first overthrowing in these parts. It was the U.S.

I found more academic articles about your work than I found interviews with you. Do you read those?

[mouths a long, silent "nooo"] I’d be driven quite thoroughly around the twist if I tried to read them. I can’t really. Maybe in the afterlife I will, but not at the moment.

This struck me as being unusual for a writer as young as yourself to be the subject of so many academic papers.

I think it is somewhat unreasonable. Have you researched anybody else? Toni Morrison, she generates a lot.

But not someone like John Updike, who many other writers also revere. It’s like a fan club.

It is kind of odd. Not exactly a fan club. Do you know about the Margaret Atwood Society? They’re really academics going back and forth, exchanging information on what they are doing. I don’t know. I try to stay more or less out of it. I think of it as a kind of job-creation project. They must secretly hate you if they have had to pick all of your writing apart to get something published.

“Women’s Ways of Knowing,” like the more popular writings of psychologist
Carol Gilligan (“In a Different Voice”), claimed, in the words of two
followers, that “women’s thought patterns are more contextual and more
embedded in relational concerns than those of men.” Women are supposed to
be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined toward empathy and
less toward seeking dominance. In opposition to “the rationalism,
separation and false ‘objectivity’ of masculinist models of knowledge,”
women were touted as caring more about personal experience, feelings and
intuition, which are felt in the body (“gut” feelings) rather than the
head. Even people who’ve never heard of “Women’s Ways of Knowing” or
Gilligan recognize such ideas  if only because they parrot traditional
notions of femininity, with the connotation neatly switched from negative
to positive.

Depending on your politics, a democratically-managed, feminist co-operative
might sound intriguing, heavenly or nightmarish. People who have worked in
other “alternative” organizations tend to offer a knowing, sympathetic
groan of agony when I talk about that part of my past. My former workplace
suffered from a litany of woes that plague such idealistic groups, most of
which just boil down to childish behavior. The difference was, in our
organization the perpetrators had a ready-made ideological justification
for every tantrum and dropped ball, every passive-aggressive stratagem and
rank prejudice, the wheel spinning and the finger-pointing. It was all,
somehow, a more feminist and womanly approach, an attempt to topple the
patriarchy by defying its cruel, oppressive, rational standards of
behavior. That ideology, picked up in college Women’s Studies programs and
various feminist books and journals, came courtesy of theorists like
Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy and Belenky.

Now, with “Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by ‘Women’s
Ways of Knowing,’” the four authors have anthologized writings by people
whose lives were changed by their original book  although not,
unsurprisingly, malcontents like me. To be fair, reading it I learned that
many of the boosters of “Women’s Ways of Knowing” have gravely
misinterpreted and simplified its authors’ ideas. But I also learned that
this (deliberate or just plain stupid) misreading keeps cropping up again
and again. Students who read “Women’s Ways of Knowing,” as one contributor
to “Knowledge, Difference, and Power” reports, invariably “heard [the]
authors as praising ‘connectedness,’ a voice of one’s own,
emotionality, ‘embodied’ knowledge and other characteristics,” all
described as typical of women.

Our company ran a retail store and mail order business. Trying to
accomplish the necessary, nuts-and-bolts tasks of such an operation, while
appeasing those staff who demanded that the company emulate this
“connected” vision of feminism, felt like playing tennis underwater. The
authors of “Women’s Ways of Knowing” don’t seem to recognize that the
“female” style of behavior they champion is the direct result of women
having had very little power throughout most of history. It completely
fails us when we actually have some economic and social muscle. But many
feminists, like many leftists, have such a moral phobia about power that
they have no idea how to exercise it constructively.

at our company, this phobia took the form of talk-mania and
decision-avoidance. Big decisions required a majority vote of all
worker-owners (eventually, as many as 40 people, although for most of my
tenure around 20 to 25). These took place at general meetings where the
unfortunate person or committee charged with getting something done
presented their recommendation to the entire membership. Discussion ensued,
usually a stultifying, circular one, no matter how hard we tried to reform
our meeting procedures. Far too often, weeks worth of preparation was
scuttled when a member abruptly raised a feeble, last-minute objection, and
requested “more information” (despite having paid little attention to the
information already offered).

Since everyone in our company had an equal voice, such objections had to be
taken seriously, even if they were based more on feeling than fact — no,
especially if they were. If the objector could convince enough members that
deciding immediately wouldn’t be “fair” (not enough people had been
consulted, not enough options considered, someone disempowered might be
left out), the whole thing was postponed. It often seemed that, as a group,
we lacked the will to decide anything, because to decide would be to act,
to risk, to use the sliver of power we had. We might make a mistake, or
offend someone, or find out a better alternative later, when it was too
late to change our minds. Better to refrain, to stay as stationary as
possible and talk and talk and talk, which is what we, as women, were so
good at. Reading “Knowledge, Difference, and Power,” I realized that the
biggest fans of “Women’s Ways of Knowing” are teachers, therapists and
counseling social workers, people whose jobs consist primarily of talking,
of working on how people feel and think. They aren’t, however, experts at
coping with, as one critic put it, “the intransigence of material
circumstances:” buying, selling, scheduling, accounting — doing.

Vague protests on behalf of oppressed people — sometimes racial minorities
(always depicted as a noble, unindividuated mass), but also the junior and
lesser-paid staff — were a surefire way to bring action to a grinding
halt. Women of color made excellent excuses because they were
especially powerless, and therefore must be especially virtuous,
being even less able to do anything than we were. We could assign several
people to a committee to endlessly discuss “doing outreach” to poor
“communities of color,” and since those communities didn’t have much money,
we were assured that the effort wouldn’t lead to anything compromising,
like profits, which might lead to something scary, like growth. However, to
be on the safe side, that committee somehow never managed to do much more
than insist that the staff undergo an expensive “diversity training.”

The purpose of “diversity training,” despite its name, is to make sure that
everybody thinks exactly the same way, or understands that if she doesn’t,
she is a reprehensible racist/sexist/classist homophobe. One of the most
peculiar notions perpetuated by “Women’s Ways of Knowing” and its ilk is
that feminist groups are accepting of differences. In fact, our group had
an unspoken directive: equality means uniformity. To be exceptionally
intelligent, motivated, able or talented was to make everyone else look
(or, more important, feel) inadequate. Excellence invited whispered
suspicions of “power-mongering” and hubris; it reeked of “hierarchy” and
testosterone. “What was the worst thing,” a fellow escapee once told me,
“was the attitude that merit and competence shouldn’t be recognized and
rewarded, but held back.”

Based on their interviews with 135 women, the authors of “Women’s Ways of
Knowing” professed admiration for the way that women reject the
“competition” rife among men. But women don’t really avoid competing with
each other — we usually just avoid admitting it, and that makes contests
more bitter. The purportedly “male” style of competition, while often
unnecessarily harsh, stays aboveboard and focuses on outdoing the rival.
Toeing the “nice girl” line means pretending indifference, while
criticizing the character and derogating the achievements of women who dare
to surpass the rest of us — how unwomanly, how individualist, how selfish!

Social sorting — deciding who are the good, respectable girls and who are
the bad — has long been a task bestowed on women. In 1994, Daphne Patai
and Noretta Koertge published the book “Professing Feminism,” an alarming
— but in my case, all too familiar — documentation of the deteriorating morale
in many university Women’s Studies departments. They point to “Women’s Ways
of Knowing” as a contributing factor to the departments’ inability to
handle internal conflicts and the use of “sentiment as a tool of coercion.”

Curious to see how the proponents of connected thinking would respond to
this critique, I found Patai and Koertge barely mentioned in “Knowledge,
Difference, and Power,” and then briskly dismissed as “misapprehending” the
theory. In a particularly hectoring essay, Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay
Tetreault refer to them as “‘feminists,’” with quote marks, implying that
Patai and Koertge’s “credentials” have been revoked, even though the
two women are professors of Women’s Studies who have worked in the field for
years. Feminists always agree, Maher and Tetreault imply, because if someone
disagrees with us, we declare her a non-feminist.

The main reason to avoid decision-making and enforce conformity is that if
you don’t, someone’s feelings might get hurt. The “Women’s Way of Knowing”
crowd consider the empathy and compassion they see widely practiced by
women as exemplary, especially compared to the detached, impersonal
approach supposedly favored by men. They don’t explore the possibility that
men might have developed that detachment because their life in the public
sphere exposed them to a greater variety of people and the possibility for
sharp conflicts over those ol’ intractable material circumstances. Yes, the
body politic could use a lot more fellow feeling, but why make inevitable
disagreements even worse by taking everything personally?

“The personal is political,” declares a famous feminist slogan, but take
that too far and you wind up with an incapacitating tyranny of the
emotions. In our workplace, one staffer felt so daunted each time another
informed her that she’d added up a column of numbers incorrectly that on
the third or fourth time it happened she began to cry. Tears always trumped
arithmetic in our workplace, so the two women involved, plus a conflict
mediator and a “support” provider for each, had to meet for hours to
discuss the problem. In another case, a woman applied for a promotion
although she’d already proven only marginally competent in her current job.
Her supervisor denied her request, but because the applicant was
sweet-natured and popular, while the supervisor was a prickly
over-achiever, several uninvolved staff members protested the decision and
even more meetings and unnecessary grief ensued.

I worked with women who were so “connected” in their thinking that they
agreed with whoever they last talked to. That lasted until someone with a
different idea came along. Clinchy writes that “the picture of the
connected knower as merely a jellyfish, clone, chameleon or wimp” is mere
“caricature.” But I assure you, such women not only exist, they
congratulate themselves on their womanly and feminist sensitivity.

For some of us, the political dissolved completely into the personal, and
the co-op was held responsible for matters that, to my “separate thinking”
mind, belonged in a therapist’s office. Staffers who felt insecure,
occupationally confused, or plagued by childhood traumas voiced their
“discomfort” and expected their co-workers to correct the situation.
“Alternative” businesses, ironically, tend to attract people who blame
their every difficulty on forces external to themselves — exactly the
infantile mentality most unsuited to the demands of an unstructured
workplace. But only in a feminist workplace can people get away with
demanding to be made perpetually “comfortable;” never mind that growth and
learning don’t often feel so cozy.

At its worst, this species of feminism gets outright invasive. At the
aforementioned diversity training, the weirdly synthetic-seeming
facilitators divided us into small groups. They instructed each of us to
tell the rest of our group about “your class background and your feelings
about it” for three minutes. You got three minutes whether or not you used
all the time, just to make sure that especially timid members didn’t feel
rushed. When my turn came around, I said, “My class background and how I
feel about it are very personal things, too intimate to be shared with
co-workers I don’t know that well. If stuff from my past is bothering me,
that’s my responsibility. I think a lot of our problems come from putting
too much of our private lives in the workplace, not too little.” Then we
sat for over two and a half minutes in decidedly uncomfortable silence.

“Silenced” is what the authors of “Women’s Ways of Knowing” famously dubbed
women crippled by self-doubt; protesting that people had been silenced was
a popular, melodramatic complaint in our company. Under the tyranny of the
emotions, what do we call women pressured into talking?

In truth, the sorry brand of feminism that bedeviled our co-operative
is a drastic vulgarization of the ideas in “Women’s Ways of
Knowing.” But then, the picture the authors paint of “separate knowing”
(Clinchy states, ludicrously, that a computer could do it) is equally
crude. The most brilliant scientists have always paid tribute to the role
of intuition and emotion, as well as logic, in their work. They collaborate
as well as compete. Ultimately, all the best minds — male and female —
engage in “constructive knowing” as defined in “Women’s Way of Knowing,” a
flexible blend of abstract reasoning, received information, personal
experience, empathy and debate.

It’s the small minds that cause the trouble, people looking for absolutes
and fool-proof formulas instead of the unpredictable, laborious business of
thinking for themselves. For every mulish fanatic who’s passionate about
thinking unemotionally, there’s a ruthlessly domineering enforcer of warm
‘n’ fuzzy connected thinking. Such people love their blinders. At our
co-op, we’d pat ourselves on the back for devising such a unique, superior,
non-corporate place to work, even though morale had obviously plummeted to
the earth’s core. It was just so much easier to believe that we had it all
figured out, could and should run things better simply by virtue of being
women. And that’s exactly what it was. Too easy.

At the moment, a revolution is brewing; in fact, by all appearances, it’s reaching a boil. On the barricades is journalist Laura Fraser, author of the new book, “Losing It: America’s Obsession with Weight Loss and the Industry that Feeds on It.” The buzz in the publishing world is that “Losing It” will be the next “Backlash” or “The Beauty Myth”  the kind of book read by millions of women whose vague feelings of beleaguerment come into sharp, testy focus by the time they turn the last page.

After many years spent writing about weight loss and body image for various women’s and health magazines, Fraser, a former bulimic, has assembled a formidable pile of evidence demonstrating that virtually every aspect of the commercial weight loss industry is a complete fraud. Supported most convincingly by the findings of a National Institutes of Health panel convened to survey a range of scientific evidence, she argues  as most experts do today  that diets don’t work. That includes crash diets outlined in bestselling books, the programs advanced by commercial diet groups and centers, doctor-supervised weight loss plans, meal substitutes and fat-free processed foods, intestinal surgery and the whole range of pills, potions and elixirs that promise to burn our fat for us.

every human body, Fraser maintains, has its own baseline healthy weight and will resist any attempt to starve it smaller with a bag of metabolic tricks. At the end of a diet, as over 90 percent of dieters know from firsthand experience, the weight comes back, plus a few pounds more. The body, convinced there’s a famine on, tries to store even more energy and resets its baseline at an even higher level. Dieting doesn’t merely fail to create permanent weight loss — it actually makes us fatter.
Fraser is joined in her ire by Glenn A. Gaesser, the author of “Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health,” and an associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia. Gaesser, like Fraser, fumes that the popular press and many physicians persist in blaming excessive weight for a variety of health problems, including hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. He’s got even more studies than she has, all proving that overweight people can be perfectly fit, provided they exercise and adopt some healthy eating habits — which won’t necessarily lead to weight loss. If anything, Gaesser is angrier than Fraser (who keeps a cool, reportorial head); he’s nearly apoplectic that the medical establishment continues to push the “panacea” of weight loss, against all evidence that it’s irrelevant or even dangerous to peoples’ health.

Gaesser and Fraser aren’t alone. Dieting has become so discredited that weight loss gurus like the buzzcut infomercial queen Susan Powter and books like Barry Sear’s “The Zone” tout themselves as offering “eating plans,” while still promoting draconian dietary restrictions and promising impossible bodily “perfection.” And people are still buying it, big time. To Debra Waterhouse, eating disorder expert and author of “Like Mother, Like Daughter: How Women Are Influenced by Their Mother’s Relationship with Food — And How to Break the Pattern,” the “culture of dieting” is so destructive that only extreme measures will do. She urges mothers to “legalize” all foods and eating habits — a radical abdication of control that her patients find outright “terrifying” initially — trusting that eventually, if they really listen, their bodies will point them toward reasonable eating decisions.

These three books are manifestos of sorts, and therefore rather thrilling. Fraser’s spirited, methodical damning of an entire industry that’s founded on — let’s face it — making many people feel lousy, exhilarates, even if, like me, you haven’t dieted in years. Gaesser’s respect for his overweight patients and righteous indignation on their behalf is exactly what’s lacking in most health care professionals. And Waterhouse, by demanding that women jettison their myriad little dramas of eating control and abandon, and walk head-on into the territory that scares us most, is issuing a more radical challenge than most feminists have in years.
What if we just up and decided it was OK for otherwise healthy people to be a bit fat, to blithely disregard the prevailing gaunt ideal? I suspect that most of us would feel nervous at the prospect, an unease we’d disguise as derision. There’s something un-American about letting yourself go, giving up on the dream of slenderness.

Critics have speculated endlessly on why, in direct contradiction to all previous human history, thinness has become a requirement of contemporary beauty. (Fraser provides an excellent, concise summary of their conclusions.) My pet theory is that it’s rooted in our secret obsession with class. The mania for slenderness began around 1910, after hordes of immigrants from the European peasantry arrived here intending to “better” themselves. Generations of hard rural life had selected for bodies equipped to handle physical labor and annual cycles of want and plenty: stocky and fat-storing. These new Americans could build fortunes, buy fine houses and send their children to the best schools, but they couldn’t circumvent their genetic heritage. The naturally svelte frames of old money elites have become the most elusive status symbol, a way of sorting out the riff-raff, and there remains a high correlation between poverty and obesity. Fat is the last front in our covert class war.

Just as the fantasy of getting rich spawned a genre of pulp writing — the Horatio Alger story — so has the dream of getting thin. Susan Powter’s “Stop the Insanity” is a modern classic in the field, the tale of an angry, self-described “housewife who figured it out” after being deserted by her husband, ballooning to a size 22 and finally whittling herself down to a flawless hardbody (no thanks to “the boys at the American Medical Association”). The new anti-diet books have their equivalent. Emme — a “plus-size” model who posed nude for People magazine — and Dee Hakala — an aerobics instructor and fitness advocate who weighs over 200 pounds — are both publishing their autobiographies this month (“True Beauty” and “Thin is Just a Four Letter Word,” respectively). Both stand up before us to relate their journeys from misery to triumph. Each had her crisis, her moment of truth, her conversion, like a wayward sinner standing up at a tent revival testifying how he saw Jesus reflected in a pool of beer on a barroom floor. But, unlike Powter and her ilk — whose revelations led to drastic weight reduction — these two simply learned to accept being large.
That’s where we leave Fraser as well, content to be plump but healthy after years of grueling and pointless “Adventures in Dietland.” But are we really ready to settle for just that, ourselves? Diets proffer the American dream stripped down to biological brass tacks: with enough gumption and stick-to-itiveness you can transform yourself into an entirely different person. The growing ranks of anti-diet agitators present overwhelming evidence that we aren’t, after all, created equal. That’s downright un-American, so can we accept it?

We can, writes Richard Klein, author of the peculiar but pleasing “postmodern diet book” called “Eat Fat,” if we can convince ourselves to love fat. A chubby professor who’s also written a book in praise of cigarettes, Klein has drafted his own manifesto, the first salvo in the battle to convince us not just to resign ourselves to fat, but to revel in it. “It’s easy to be fat today, but hard to love it,” he observes, even though throughout history people have mostly favored adiposity. The truth is, for the many Americans clinically or merely cosmetically overweight, fat is “the most sustained focus of our concerned attention, the single most important material object of meditation in our lives.” So why not enjoy it?
Surprisingly, Klein’s frisky little meditation on fat and its discontents made me believe that might just be possible. Veronique Vienne, the French-born editorial director of Mode, a new major fashion magazine directed at the 60 percent of American women size 12 and up, thinks it is. “In the past six months, we’ve reached the point of no return,” she told me. “You can feel it and see it. The majority of women are over size 10. It’s an undertapped market. Women are stronger. We elected Clinton and now we’re saying enough is enough. We have a voice.” The magazine hopes to “retrain the eye of readers” to appreciate larger bodies and sell “a fantasy with curves.” Vienne says that while interviewing prospective models it takes her 15 or 20 minutes to go from thinking “she’s really big” to the “revelation” that these women are often “more self-aware, gracious and elegant” than the “stiff” standard models. Mode will run no diet articles.
Perhaps Vienne is right and the times are finally changing. It would certainly make life more interesting. Looking up from reading “Eat Fat” on the bus, I spotted one of those Streetfare Journal placards placed for passenger edification on public transportation. It sported a Mae West quote, “When choosing between two evils, I always like the one I’ve never tried,” accompanied by a drawing of two ice cream sundaes. We all know that hefty Mae was thinking of something spicier than butterfat when she made that quip. Do our “sins” have to be so small and dull?
Maybe they do. Klein makes a passing, but very apt, comparison between the public spectacle of fat and the scarlet letter worn by Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s famous literary adulteress. We might be willing to give up the perverse narcissism of dieting, a miserable practice that allows us both to hate and mortify our bodies and to focus on them obsessively. Are we also willing to surrender the right to enjoy condemning our fellow citizens for the feckless self-indulgence we believe their fat betrays? In a society where 54 percent of respondents told a survey gatherer that they’d rather be hit by a truck than become obese, fat people seem to be flaunting the fact that they just don’t care what we think, and that really bugs us. How dare they not subject themselves to the daily grind of self-denial and guilt the rest of us endure? How dare they buck our disapproval for the sake of pleasure?
This superpower is still a Puritan village at heart, and that, finally, is the mentality that the anti-diet movement must combat. We might be convinced to cast off our habitual sufferings if writers like Fraser persuade us they’re futile, but can we forswear the daily opportunity to feel superior to everyone fatter than we are? It would be big of us.

Nevertheless, we’re delighted with the list we finally produced
after weeks of bleary-eyed reading, endless cups of coffee and quite a
few frantic, transcontinental e-mails (“Argh! I wanted to write this one
off, but it’s just too good. Can’t we choose 20?”). These are the books
we’d wholeheartedly recommend to our friends, books we’d clear our social
calendar to finish, books we returned to eagerly even when we could
barely focus our eyes on a page. They remind us of why we fell in love
with reading and why we keep at it in a world that’s simultaneously
cluttered with mediocre books and increasingly indifferent to the written
word.

This, ultimately, was our criterion — despite the fact that, like
most list-makers and award-givers, we felt vague, ambient pressures to
make “representative” choices and tip our hats to titles that seemed
eminently worthy, if not much fun. As online journalists, we’re just a
click away from our readers’ feedback, a fact which gave us even more impetus to choose what we truly loved, rather than to cover our butts
ideologically. Fortunately, when it comes to fiction, Dwight’s favorites
this year were stories with a more intimate, domestic focus — “The
Family Markowitz” and “The Giant’s House” — while Laura hankered after
novels that tackle historical and social themes, like “The Moor’s Last Sigh”
and “Infinite Jest.” So our list is nicely balanced, with David
Markson’s exuberantly experimental “Reader’s Block” rounding it out.

As for nonfiction, we could have easily selected five memoirs, the form
is so prevalent and the quality so fine these days (that’s the only
pronounced literary trend we’ve observed, by the way). Mary Gordon’s “The Shadow Man,” Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” and James Ellroy’s “My Dark Places” testify that the puzzle of individual history and identity remains a compelling theme. The two non-memoirs we chose —
Paul Hendrickson’s “The Living and the Dead” and Melissa Fay Greene’s
“The Temple Bombing” — are vivid examples of how a gifted writer can
find meaning in the chaos of daily experience and discover humanity in
history’s dry facts. In their different, eloquent ways, they showed us the personal dimensions of public
events.

We’re still, however, thinking about the books we couldn’t include,
ones that we nevertheless want to urge on you as provocative, thrilling,
enlightening, amusing and otherwise well worth your time.

We decided to limit the final 10 to books that hung together as a
unified whole, eliminating collections like Nicholson Baker’s droll book
of essays, “The Size of Thoughts,” and “Burning Your Boats,” a selection
of the late Angela Carter’s perverse, jewellike stories.

After reading Stephen Jay Gould’s “Full House,” we will never have a clear conscience about making judgments based on statistics — even if that middle
section on batting averages was tough going at times. Suzanne Berger’s
memoir of disability, “The Horizontal Woman,” made us contemplate the
unthinkable. Stephen Ambrose’s history of the Lewis and Clark expedition,
“Undaunted Courage,” is history made both gripping and immediate, and
kept us up late turning pages. Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on disappearing
people, “The Missing,” and D.J. Waldie’s “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir”
gave us chills. Mark Singer’s “Citizen K” made us regard our own
profession with a jaundiced eye. Richard Ellis’ “Deep Atlantic” took us
to a strange, fascinating environment we’ll never visit in real life. And
John Thorne’s vigorous memoir/cookbook “Serious Pig: An American Cook in
Search of His Roots” made us hungry to read everything this Maine writer
has ever put to paper.

To avoid the appearance of nepotism, we ruefully eliminated
excellent books by our friends: Jim Paul’s remarkable fictional
meditation on the persistent irrationality of human thought, “Medieval in
LA,” and Jonathan Lethem’s disturbing, hallucinatory short story
collection, “The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye.”

We savored some “big” books by established novelists — John
Updike’s “The Beauty of the Lillies,” A.S. Byatt’s “Babel Tower,” John
Edgar Wideman’s “The Cattle Killing,” Paul Theroux’s “My Other Life,”
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Autobiography of My Mother,” Ron Hansen’s “Atticus” —
even if other titles wound up shouldering them off the list. Novels and
collections like Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Sweetheart Season,” George
Saunders’ “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and Victor Pelevin’s “Omen Ra”
gave us reason to anticipate that these less-well-known writers will soon
become familiar names.

Despite the many times we’ve complained about the critic’s lot — plowing through piles of bad, boring and just plain mediocre new books — this project reminded us of just how many terrific books were published in 1996. In fact, our first New Year’s resolution is to get an early start on picking next year’s winners.