I've just read five books in a row written by male authors. I'll freely admit that this doesn't qualify as a statistically significant sample. And yet I feel compelled to wade right in and share with you my thoughts on the abilities of men to really really understand their female characters. We're not talking Nicholas Sparks here, so Buckle Up. It could be a bumpy ride.
In my fantasy "authors I have a bit of a crush on" life, for some reason I have William Boyd pegged as a Big Game Hunter type of a man - leaning nonchalantly against a muddy Landrover, smoking a Camel. As a result I'm always taken by surprise to rediscover that he writes really well about women. In The Dreams of Bethany Melmoth the portrayal of Bethany herself is very finely wrought. However, not to move the goalposts, I think that Boyd is trying to appeal to a female readership here, I just can't picture male readers taking to this book at all.
Colin Cotterill gets round the problem of writing about women by simply excluding them, if not altogether, in the main. In The Rat Catcher's Olympics there are really only two female characters and they are like male characters only with female names and husbands. This doesn't deter me from Cotterill as an author, as his male characters have quite well-developed feminine sides anyway. Colin (I feel we are on first name terms) is the only author I have ever tried to meet: in Chiang Mai at The Blue Diamond Cafe which I had heard he frequented. The Rat Catchers Olympics is a hard novel to recommend to others. Dr Siri is an acquired taste and you need to have a high tolerance level for all things Laotian and in this book, Russian.
Chris Bohjalian in The Flight Attendant, takes the cliché of a promiscuous air hostess and weaves an unsettling murder mystery out of it. Like a lot of male authors he's really better at vampish/bad girl females - chances are you'll not easily recognise yourself in Cassie.
Deon Meyer in the brilliantly dystopian Fever gets round the whole issue by paring the female presence in his books right down to the bare minimum - the very beautiful and the very sporty. Post an apocalyptic disaster, guess what? - it will still be a man's world!
Only William Nicholson in Adventures in Modern Marriage comes even close to trying to get under the skin of females you might meet in your everyday life. One woman at a time he does this really well, but he too has a problem with interactions between women - which , let's give credit here, he does at least attempt to portray.
This seems to me to be a major problem area for many male authors. They struggle to write about women in groups, they have no ear for dialogue between women.
There, I have said it. What do you think?
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