![]() Wolitzer, at that point the author of ten novels, had recently been asked by a male guest at a party to describe her books. In 2012, she published an essay in the Times Book Review called “ The Second Shelf,” in which she complained that books about women’s lives are often treated as a niche, trivial genre, shunted to a separate section of the bookstore, much as women used to be hustled off to the drawing room after dinner so that men could smoke cigars and talk seriously of the world. “ IF WE DON’T HAVE THAT, PEOPLE, WE ARE FUCKED.” ![]() “ THE YOUNG MALE DEMOGRAPHIC IS ESSENTIAL,” she announces by fax from Los Angeles. Selby Rothberg, abandoning all pretense of solidarity, pulls the plug on Jill’s Canadian-ladies project, and on all other company projects geared toward predominantly female audiences. Every generation of American women hopes to enter the promised land of true equality, but, as Jill discovers, the odds aren’t great. ![]() ![]() Wolitzer’s “utopian middle distance” must refer to the same vague point in time as the current popular feminist slogan “The future is female”: not so near the tarnished present as to be patently ridiculous, but not so far off as to be cause for despair. Ten years later, Jill’s idea of women furtively infiltrating the house of male cultural authority like ninjas, or wood lice, is as funny as ever-she would be gratified by Frances McDormand’s “ inclusion rider” Oscar speech-but nearly as dispiriting, too. ![]()
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