I’m thrilled to be a judge in this year’s Tournament of Books, an annual treat for readers. The quarterfinal round I judged pitted James Hynes’ Next, a novel I had been meaning to read, against Anne Carson’s Nox, a highly stylized, fragmentary account of her relationship with her brother, who died suddenly in 2000. Here’s a piece of my decision:

[Next] is imperfect but powerful. It’s built to linger. This is partly due to its audacious final section. It’s hard to discuss Next in a meaningful way without giving away its ending. I won’t spoil it here, though it’s hardly a Crying Game-level shock when the novel pulls down its drawers. Having read some coy reviews at the time of Next’s publication, I had a pretty good idea of the surprise’s general nature. Still, the way Hynes orchestrates his final 50 pages, switching between a firecracker climax and the increasingly profound reminiscences of his protagonist, is impressive.

It was a pretty easy call for me, and the full explanation can be found here. I have further thoughts about why I enjoy the tournament so much, but I’ll save those for a post around the time of the final round — for which I’ll be part of a full panel of judges crowning the champ.

I feel like the blog is finally getting its 2011 legs. Or I hope so. This is supposed to be the biggest year in the site’s two-year history. (That’s what I read in Bloomberg Businessweek, anyway.) Time to pick up the pace.

One thing I mean to do this year is write occasional updates of what I’ve been reading but don’t have the time (or inclination) to fully review. I’ve recently finished a few novels, but they were preceded by two books about the financial crisis.

I can’t believe I waited until it was in paperback to read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I’ve been a big fan of Lewis’ ever since I read Trail Fever (now called Losers), his chronicle of marginal figures in the 1996 presidential race. In The Big Short, he follows a few key players who fully foresaw the subprime mortgage crisis. He allows you to understand real-life complexities while crafting a narrative that is much neater and more satisfying than real life could possibly be, the way he’s done several times before. I’m not sure anyone is better at what they do than Michael Lewis is at what he does.

I’ve heard some readers were put off by the book’s characters because they were betting against the market. I find this a bit bizarre, since betting against the market — especially on this scale — comes with its own considerable risks (“For the pleasure of shorting 100 million dollars’ worth of New Century’s shares, Steve Eisman forked out $32 million a year.”), and it wouldn’t have been as lucrative a bet if any number of entities — bankers, the SEC, and most egregiously, ratings agencies — were just a bit skeptical.

Eisman, the most outspokenly skeptical of Lewis’ bunch, is a great character:

Once, [Eisman] got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. “I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!”

Lewis made finance so accessible — and the story is so incredible — that I felt an urge to continue on the subject, and picked up John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. Lanchester (the author of The Debt to Pleasure, a novel I read a long time ago and enjoyed) isn’t trying a magic trick on quite Lewis’ level. He’s content to offer a broader take on the banking basics — “piggy banks” (or traditional banks) vs. “casinos” (investment banks), etc. — and some of the most troubling trends of the past quarter century, including the disastrous sundering of the connection between borrowers and lenders. The book really picks up about a third of the way through, when Lanchester begins a sustained argument. He writes, “The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the subprime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk), and a failure (that of the regulators).”

Like Lewis, he’s often funny and incisive at the same time: “The fact that noneconomists see the general assumption of rationality as self-evidently ridiculous has no effect on economists.”

Both books benefit from a tone that suggests the authors weren’t simply saving up ammunition for the day capitalism faltered, to claim it had expired. You don’t get the feeling that Lewis or Lanchester is walking around in a Che Guevara T-shirt, which gives even more weight to their assessment of the market’s insanity and continuing dangers, the way it’s come unmoored from its most basic principles and doesn’t seem much interested in (or capable of) returning to them.

I recently received a copy of Imre Kertesz’s novel Fiasco.

Born in 1929, Kertesz was imprisoned at Auschwitz at age 14, and later was a prisoner at Buchenwald. He has called Fiasco, which recounts a prisoner’s return home to another nightmare, “fiction founded on reality.” That would seem to be the case with two of his previous books that are companions to this one, Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child, which I’d like to read.

Through his publisher, Melville House, I recently found this interview with Kertesz, conducted soon after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. Here are two excerpts of the brief interview:

Q:You’ve said you feel lucky to have been at Auschwitz. Please excuse me for finding that shocking.

A: I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it’s like to be allowed to lie in the camp’s hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labor. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all.

***

Q: You’re the first Hungarian to win a Nobel literature prize. How is it to be getting a hero’s welcome?

A: It’s very strange for me because I’m certainly no hero. I’ve always looked on my writing as a very private matter. For decades I had no audience and lived on the fringes of society.

Q: You’ve said that it’s easier to write literature in a dictatorship than in a democracy.

A: That was too sweeping a statement, but there’s a truth to it. Because I didn’t write what the communist government wanted to see, I was cut off and alone with my work. I never thought my book would ever be published, and so I had the freedom to write as radically as I wanted, to go as deep inside as I wanted. In a democracy you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is “interesting” and “spectacular.” That may be the toughest censorship of all.

The opening line of Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll:

The female protagonist in the first section is a woman of forty-eight, German: she is five foot six inches tall, weighs 133 pounds (in indoor clothing), i.e., only twelve to fourteen ounces below standard weight; her eyes are iridescent dark blue and black, her slightly graying hair, very thick and blond, hangs loosely to her shoulders, sheathing her head like a helmet.

Ever since the organization VIDA released statistics in early February showing a stark gender imbalance in the world of literary reviews, there has been a sustained conversation online about what the numbers mean and how they might be changed. Writers and editors who have chimed in include Meghan O’Rourke, Katha Pollitt, and Ruth Franklin, among many others. At Bookslut, Jessa Crispin and Michael Schaub had an extended dialogue about the issue, and Drew Johnson, as many have, wondered about his role as a reader. The subtitle of Pollitt’s piece was: “If you really want more women writers, get more women editors.” I happen to know a former reviews editor at one of the magazines targeted in the VIDA study, and she got in touch to add her voice to the discussion. Jennifer Szalai edited the book reviews section of Harper’s from 2003 to 2010. Jen and I have been close friends since we served as Harper’s interns together in the fall of 2000. Our correspondence took place over e-mail:

Let’s get your background down first. How long were you the book reviews editor at Harper’s? And during that time, what was the general nature of the job (without addressing the gender balance in these questions yet) – how many people did you solicit vs. how many people pitched you? How much of what you assigned for review was nonfiction vs. fiction?

I edited the Reviews section at Harper’s for about seven years. The reviews we ran were a mix of pieces that started out as unsolicited pitches from writers and pieces by writers I solicited, some of whom were already in the Harper’s stable and others whom I sought out on my own. I would get pitched a lot, and from the considerable number of very brief, two-sentence pitches I received (“Would you like a review of X? I’d like to write about it.”), I had the feeling that many writers who had never written for the magazine felt that a review was somehow easier to write (and assign!) than the essays that ran elsewhere in the magazine. And I would have to tell these writers that our reviews, because of their length (3,500-4,000 words), had to be thought of as essays, which meant that the writer had to come up with an angle or an approach that would give me a sense of their argument, what they thought might be at stake. (Even among the writers I solicited, I would usually ask them to specify an angle or certain questions that they intended to explore before we’d agree on the assignment.)

This meant that assigning reviews of fiction was always harder than assigning reviews of nonfiction. With a nonfiction book, one has a pretty good sense of what the book is about, and often it’s mostly a matter of finding a critic who happens to have an expertise (or an intense interest) in the subject, as well as an original approach. With a work of fiction, whose ostensible “subject” makes up only part of the reading experience, I usually wanted to read an essay that revealed what happened when a particular critic encountered a particular book. This requires a lot of trust in the writer, simply because I could never be sure what I was going to get.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic wrote: “Confidence in one’s opinions and a willingness to engage in intellectual combat are disproportionately (though not, of course, exclusively) male traits.” Katha Pollitt, after considering notions similar to the one expressed by Chait, wrote at Slate: “There is probably a bit of truth in all these points: Women do often doubt their knowledge and abilities, and their diffidence probably explains why the pool of writers sending in pitches and proposals and unsolicited manuscripts is, at most magazines, disproportionately male.” What percentage of pitches you received, roughly, were from men? And were there any general tonal differences in their approaches from the approaches of prospective women writers?

A vast majority of the pitches I received were from men. In fact, during seven years in that position, I could probably count on two hands the number of women who pitched me — I’d guess that the ratio was something like nine or 10 to one. I also noticed that if I turned down a pitch from a man, he would likely send me another pitch the following week. Whereas women rarely pitched me again after getting a rejection.

Tonally, no, I didn’t notice much of a difference between the men and women. This is not to discount Chait’s point, since the women who did send pitches might be a self-selected group — a distressingly small self-selected group — but all the prospective writers would sound pretty confident in their opinions.

The statistics approach the issue from two angles: reviews written by gender, and the books being reviewed by gender. How separate or entangled are those issues to you? What do you consider unique elements of each?

I suspect the issues are connected in some way, though I’m not sure whether it’s as straightforward as claiming that the dearth of reviewed books by women derives directly from the dearth of reviews written by women. In fact, Ruth Franklin at The New Republic concluded that “the magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year.” She then wonders whether the numbers have anything to do with how “we define ‘best’ and ‘most important’ in a field as subjective as literature, which, after all, is deeply of influenced by the cultural norms in any given age.” She raises the possibility that the dismal proportion of books published by women has to do with unconscious biases, but then she doesn’t go so far to provide a confirmation one way or the other — an approach that, to my mind, is less evasive than it is honest. With a work as complicated as a book, whose creation and reception is dependent on so many factors, I’d find it hard to believe anyone who claimed they could pinpoint exactly why so few women were published. We should also keep in mind that Ruth’s sample excluded those “books that were unlikely to be reviewed — self-help, cooking, art” — which also happen to be books that are often written by women.

This connects to the question of which books are considered “important” enough to review. I do think there are a whole host of cultural norms that come into play — among them the bizarre obsession with “the Great American Novel,” as well as a condescension toward certain subjects like motherhood and a young woman’s coming of age — but then it’s hard to see how this contributes to the gender imbalance among reviewers (though I can see how it might very well derive from it).

I also wonder whether the economics of reviewing has anything to do with the VIDA numbers. Women often take on the responsibility of childcare in a family, especially if they’re the freelancer with what’s assumed to be the more flexible schedule, and a review requires a lot of time to oneself, for payment that would barely pay the sitter, if that. I recall one particular writer I wanted to have contribute to Harper’s who took almost a year before she finally agreed to an assignment, because she had young children to care for at home. Merely anecdotal, I know, but when I was reading all of these posts about the VIDA study, I was surprised that none of those I read even brought up the economics of it.

Did you ever feel the other editors at the magazine wouldn’t be amenable to increasing the number of female contributors? Or were otherwise comfortable with the balance of writers skewing heavily male?

The editors at Harper’s always wanted to have more female contributors. But as an editor, you’re juggling so many considerations at once that the gender of a writer will be one concern among many. Besides which, when assigning longer pieces and paying a relatively decent rate in this publishing climate, as many of the magazines cited in the VIDA study do, it’s harder to take chances on a writer starting out, because you’ll want to see clips — and if more men than women are getting published, then the pool of experienced writers will skew male. It’s a vicious circle. I thought the numbers might be better for women at smaller literary magazines, which are well-positioned to take chances on unpublished writers, especially because little (or no) money is at stake. And the numbers are better, though — with the sole exception of the poets being reviewed by Poetry — they still skew male.

One commenter on a VIDA post wrote: “Also, could it be that more men than women read these magazines?” I saw one page online that suggested Harper’s subscribers run 62%-38% male. The same site said the New York Review of Books was 71-29, male. Do those Harper’s numbers sound right to you? And does this — or should this — have anything to do with the final analysis of the VIDA statistics? If a magazine whose readership was 65-35 female had that percentage of female writers, would it be a story?

The Harper’s numbers sound plausible to me, though I can’t vouch for their accuracy. You bring up a good point about whether this would be an issue if a magazine with a 65% female readership published two female writers for every one male, and you see that all the time — in women’s fashion magazines, for instance. You also see the numbers skewed toward male writers in men’s fashion magazines, and the VIDA study doesn’t have anything to say about those. But it makes sense that VIDA would focus on the higher-profile literary magazines, because those magazines are where the cultural conversation takes place. Of course, this then gets into the question of why fashion is not considered as exalted as the other arts, but not having ever worked in fashion, I’m not sure I’m the person to go down that rabbit hole.

Is there a solution to this problem? Do you consider it a problem? Is 50-50 a worthwhile — or procedurally realistic — goal?

I go back to Ruth Franklin’s TNR post, in which she wonders whether the numbers have anything to do with how our cultural norms define what kind of literature is deemed important (not to mention which issues are deemed important), because I see the problem — and I do see it as a problem — starting there. I don’t believe the solution is as simple as having more female editors (which is what Katha Pollitt suggests) or having an affirmative-action-style approach to assigning pieces (another one of Pollitt’s suggestions). I’d like to put forth a solution, but I’ll admit that I’m still at the question stage, trying to get my mind around the bigger forces at work. I was also given a lot of encouragement and mentorship during my education and career, mostly from men, since most of my professors and most of the people senior to me were men. So I can’t say that I’ve felt shut out.

All that said, I recognize that my experience isn’t borne out in the VIDA numbers. Also, I think the real challenges for women come not so much when they’re starting out and they’re in similar life situations (20s, single) with similar backgrounds (good schools, good grades) to their male peers; after all, girls today are often brought up with extraordinarily high expectations from their parents, and many of those girls are considered just as successful as the boys (if not more so) while they’re in school. When they start actually living in the world, though, and they’re no longer in such an insular environment, they might be surprised to see some palpable tendencies in the culture at large to condescend toward women’s creative work — the chicks might be “hard-working” and “very smart,” but, with certain exceptions, it’s the dudes who are the real geniuses. And when these women find themselves having interests and experiences that are specific to women, they might be surprised to see how such interests and experiences are devalued, and must struggle to get accorded some serious respect. I don’t want to get into the whole “Franzenfreude” mess, because I don’t believe that Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner are trying to write the kind of literary fiction in which every sentence is considered and worried over, but I do think it’s important for both women and men to be aware of these larger questions, to render them explicit, without the denunciations and defensiveness that characterize too many of our conversations about gender.

Later today, I’ll be posting an interview about the recent VIDA statistics with someone who spent several years assigning reviews at one of the magazines in the study’s crosshairs. In the meantime, the statistics inspired me to look at the numbers for my own site. Of the 28 contributors listed on the home page, 13 are women. Of the 24 of those who have already written for the site (I’m working on the other four), the gender balance is an even 12-12. (There have been many contributors not listed on the home page. The reasons for this range from arbitrary to nonexistent.)

If you’re looking for balance in the actual reviews, the statistics don’t look great at first blush. There have been 89 Circulating reviews, 58 written by men and 31 by women. In the Backlist section, 24 of the 37 pieces have been written by men.

The misleading factor — particularly in Circulating — is me.

I think it’s only fair to remove me from the equation for this purpose, since I write more than my share of the reviews — partly because it’s my shop and partly because I like to keep things (relatively) updated when there are lulls in contributions from others. (At a one-man operation with no budget like this one, gender equality and a thousand other issues take a back seat to the simple attempt to avoid radio silence.) I wrote 22 of those Circulating reviews, so if you remove those from the tally, it’s 36-31 in favor of men. I wrote five Backlist pieces, so that score moves to 19-13.

Authors being reviewed is not so easy to gloss: Combining the two main review sections (and not counting the books in group features, like the one published this week), there have been 89 books written by men reviewed, compared to 39 written by women.

The Second Pass turns two years old today. I want to thank everyone — as always — for visiting, reading, passing pieces along to friends, commenting, following the site on Twitter, and generally making things both fun and gratifying for me.

To help celebrate the anniversary, I asked some of my favorite women — contributors to and friends of the site — to recommend underappreciated books written by women. That feature was posted in the Backlist section today. It was inspired, in part, by the quickly famous statistics released by VIDA in February about the gender divide in literary culture. There will be more about that on the blog by week’s end.

In the meantime, thanks again for reading. If you’d like to support The Second Pass in other ways, buying things from Amazon by first clicking through links here means a small percentage of the purchase goes toward the site. Also, perhaps the anniversary is an appropriate time to alert some book-loving friends who might not know about the site.

The Tournament of Books officially begins tomorrow, when Sarah Manguso chooses between Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil. Today, John Warner and Kevin Guilfoile, whose running commentary throughout the tournament is a big part of the fun, offer a pre-game primer. So while you’re tailgating — perhaps cooking up some hot dogs on the sidewalk outside a bankrupt Borders store? — head over to see read their initial thoughts. Here’s Warner:

Taken collectively, these books feel like a snapshot of a corner turned, and, as you note, many of them are infused with what it’s been like to live through the last decade. So Much for That is even more timely, since it’s the Great American Healthcare Novel, and takes up issues of class divide and wealth. Room is ripped from the headlines. Bad Marie and Savages could be. Nox causes us to examine what we even mean by saying something is a “book” or a “novel.” Super Sad True Love Story and Freedom could comfortably switch titles. Even Kapitoil, though it’s set in 1999, takes on current hot topics of Wall Street and financial arbitrage.

Are we missing something by not having a historical powerhouse like Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2009 champion) or Philip Roth’s Plot Against America (2005 runner-up)? Probably, but this list feels pretty right for right now.

Even readers who appreciated the brainiest subtleties of David Foster Wallace’s work might find his college thesis about the philosophy of fatalism rough sledding. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Requirements for the accessibility obtaining between worlds can be strengthened or weakened to yield different modal systems and models. A reflexive and transitive relation R yields the modal system S4, a stipulation that R be reflexive, symmetric and transitive yields the different system S5, and so on. For a simple and intuitive representation of Kripke’s device, we can assume that every member of K (with K of course being nondenumerably infinite) is accessible from every other member.

Of course.

The thesis — “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality” — was recently published by Columbia University in a book called Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. The thesis itself takes up only a bit more than 70 pages of the book, which also features Taylor’s original essay and several academic responses to it, and a terrific 33-page introduction by James Ryerson, a friend of mine.

Ryerson’s intro was featured, at length, over at Slate. The excerpt starts like this:

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication,” James recalls. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

The experience seems to have made an impression on David as well. Not long after he arrived at Amherst College in the early 1980s, he developed a reputation among his professors as a rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy. Even after he began writing fiction, a pursuit he undertook midway through college, philosophy remained the source of his academic identity. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, a professor now at Smith College who worked with Wallace at the time, remembers. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

Ryerson goes on to very sharply — but accessibly — describe the influence of Wittgenstein on Wallace’s work, and particularly on his first novel, The Broom of the System. In the essay, Ryerson also has a way with details that bring Wallace back to life — in a letter to someone with whom he consulted about his thesis, he referred to Descartes as “Monsieur D,” and to Kant as “the Big K.”

Even if Wallace’s thesis requires a specialized reader, parts of it convey the voice everyone misses, and the rest of the book makes it well worth owning for Wallace completists — of which, I’m sure, there are many.