The Oceanic and the Rifle Woman

I recently read two crime thrillers published by NYRB Classics: In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes and Fatale (1977) by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Both were remarkably fun reads, and quite thought-provoking, especially in terms of their gender politics.

American Pastoral

 

Crowd control on the streets of Newark, 1967

“The Swede.” So begins Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997), a novel of truly epic proportions about a very ordinary man. And its hero, a tragic hero on the scale of the Greeks, is Seymor “The Swede” Levov. “The Swede.” A declaration. He doesn’t need a verb to be a complete sentence. He simply asserts himself. Not even “Call me Ishmael.” Not “Call me the Swede,” or “We called him the Swede,” just: “The Swede.”

The White Nurse in Ian McEwan's Atonement

In 1977 the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit published Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, a study of the ephemera of the proto-fascist interwar German paramilitary, the Freikorps. He analyzes the letters, memoirs, propaganda, and prose of the Freikorps officers in order to understand fascism’s psychic logic, in particular the role of women in the unconscious of fascist men.