Not the impossibly openly empathetic and expressive male too often inserted into novels written by writers of romance, and not the opposite, either, Diana, as written by Charles Baxter is deliberately a woman as seen from a man’s pov. This is what makes her so interesting to me.
The set up in Feast of Love (book not film) is that “Charlie” asks all these people their love stories, and they tell him, creating the Feast of the title. But one person, Diana, refuses. She doesn’t want to be in Charlie’s book, doesn’t want her story told, not even fictionalized. “I’ll make you a lawyer or something,” Charlie bargains.
Diana still says no. And yet, there’s her story Or the story of Diana the lawyer, who is a ball-busting maneater who likes rough sex and thinks love gives people permission to smack each other around. There’s way more to her than that, and I like some parts of her, but as I read her scenes, I thought “only a man could write a woman this way.” And then I remembered the lawyer comment and realized that was exactly what Baxter was doing, he was deliberately viewing her through a male lense, even from “her” point of view.
We had six at book group discussing this, and Micki had seen the same thing and agreed with me. Ann and Wendy said they knew women exactly like Diana and that yes there were women like that, they weren’t just male fantasies. So I said well then I guess there really are empathetic openly expressive males out there, too, and somebody said, yeah but they’re gay.
Guess I left myself wide open for that one. Just like a woman.
Leave a Reply