This past week I’ve still been adjusting to my new teaching schedule. For that reason I’ve barely been able to look at the current literary news and debate. I’m glad I finally took time to digest Meghan O’Rourke’s piece “Can a Woman Be a “Great American Novelist”?” I had been completely ignoring #Franzenfreude (except for a picture I snapped at Words! bookstore in Asbury Park of books by Franzen and Weiner side by side in the window) probably in part because I never felt particularly compelled to read The Corrections. I bought it, talked about it with friends, got excited about its prospects, followed the Oprah scandal, and told myself I’d get to it eventually. That, we know, was a while ago. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have avoided the book for its instant ubiquity alone, but maybe it has a little bit to do with it.

The main reason I think I’ve avoided reading The Corrections is because of a book called The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt. (No, it isn’t the basis for the Tom Cruise movie, but the fact that people always ask that is depressing). It came out less than a year before The Corrections, and I happened to pick it up first based on a rapturous recommendation from my brother who, because he’s five years older and a voracious reader, has long been a literary sage.

DeWitt’s book is a masterpiece and when it came out a few reviewers said so (isn’t there a Rotten Tomatoes for book reviews yet?). It’s structurally complex, moving, and challenges the boundaries of the reader’s intellect. And not many people read The Last Samurai. Today, it’s $4.00 on Amazon. I was completely wrapped up with this book when The Corrections came out. Now I regret not reading Franzen’s book because I can’t compare the two. I only have my gut feeling that DeWitt should have shared the spotlight with Franzen. She should have received more than a thimbleful of the hoopla. She certainly could have slid right into Franzen’s Oprah Book Club spot when he got himself uninvited. Or maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to. Or maybe, since her book was out first, she should have received an invitation from Oprah first.

Today, Dewitt can’t find a publisher for her second book that she completed years ago. Her difficulty was explored (and the novel was excerpted) in n+1′s sixth issue.

My gut feeling is that DeWitt was politely received, but the closely-guarded recipe for creating a juggernaut, a la The Corrections, was denied her, not because it was undeserved or impossible, but because of what O’Rourke calls, “the problem of unconscious gender bias and how it affects the ways we think about accomplishment and authority.”

One more quick thing, I often think of this woman as “Great American Novelist” question in the form of a different question. Why isn’t there a bildungsroman by a woman, with a female protagonist, as acclaimed as The Catcher in the Rye?