Gregory Cowles
Tana French
Unsolved Mysteries: Do women write the best crime novels?
That’s the thesis of a recent essay in Salon by the critic Laura Miller,
who argues that mysteries by men have grown sclerotic and predictable — locked
into a hard-boiled formula little changed since the days of Raymond Chandler
and Dashiell Hammett. Meanwhile (Miller continues), women are mixing their
crime stories with other genres, mining the emotional terrains of home and
family to advance a field the editor Sarah Weinman calls “domestic suspense.”
One novel that features prominently in Miller’s analysis is “The Secret Place,”
by Tana French, which enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 4. “A thin vein
of the uncanny runs through most of French’s novels,” Miller notes: “mysteries
that go unsolved, premises that flirt with impossibility, paranormal
occurrences that may or may not be imagined.” I don’t know if Miller is right
about men and women; who is? But she’s not wrong about French, whose books
really do cultivate an appealing lack of resolution — at least in part, no
doubt, because she jumps in without a plan. “When I start writing, I have the
narrator, the basic premise and a load of coffee,” French told The Sunday Times
of London in 2008. “I don’t even know ‘whodunit.’ ” Not that she would let
uncertainty keep her from a genre she loves. “Crime fiction is one of the best
barometers of what’s going on at any different moment,” she added. “It’s about
society’s highest priorities and deepest fears.”
Poison Ivy: William Deresiewicz’s indictment of
the Ivy League, “Excellent Sheep,” is at No. 15 in its third week on the
hardcover nonfiction list. When an excerpt appeared in The New Republic this
summer, aiming a flamethrower at elite schools and the students they graduate
into finance or consulting, it quickly and unsurprisingly became the most-read
article in the magazine’s history. But it failed to persuade the Harvard
professor Steven Pinker, who recently took to The New Republic himself with a
scathing rebuttal: “Like countless graybeards before him,” Pinker writes,
“Deresiewicz complains that the kids today are just no good: They are stunted,
meek, empty, incurious zombies; faithful drudges; excellent sheep. . . . I have
spent my career interacting with these students, and do not recognize the
targets of this purple invective.” Yet Pinker too bemoans the state of
education at Harvard, it turns out, and despairs especially for the students
who skip his lectures (“despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard
Yearbook Favorite Professor”). “They’re not slackers,” he writes; rather, they
are “crazy-busy” with activities that “would be classified in any other setting
as recreation: sports, dance, improv comedy and music.” To counter the scourge
of improvisational comedians, Pinker suggests, Harvard would do well to rely
more heavily on standardized tests.
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