"That preoccupation is not my battle … However, some of the debate has centred around this idea that I use male material. "Writer rolls her eyes," said Kushner in response to a question about the debate. Tóibin, chairing an event with the writer at the Edinburgh international book festival, put it more humorously: it was as if Kushner was announcing that "if anyone thinks there is a 'male novel', and anyone thinks that women should write a different kind of novel, I've just arrived on a motorbike covered in leather and I am ready to eat you all". In Salon she was dubbed the novelist "who scares male critics … When Rachel Kushner – not a venerable male auteur – writes the Great American Novel, male reviewers are flummoxed". Novelist Jonathan Franzen has called her "a thrilling and prodigious novelist".Įlsewhere, though, the novel has prompted accusations that its so-called "macho" qualities (there is a great deal of speed, risk and bodily excitement) explain "why it has been received so enthusiastically by the critics". Perhaps the most important American literary taste-maker, James Wood, gave it a lengthy rave review in the New Yorker, calling it "scintillatingly alive … It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures".
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