Was the Times review of Katha Pollitt’s new collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories?, insufferably sexist? That’s the contention of Pollitt-enthusiast Jessica at Feministing.com, and her commenters collectively nod their heads in agreement. I, too, am a big admirer of Pollitt’s column (couple of good ones here and here). I’ve also read two of the most cited pieces in the new collection, “Webstalker” and “Learning to Drive”, both of which originally ran in the New Yorker. But I think Jessica is playing fast and loose with the sexist label here. She writes:

So I was more than a little irritated to see this review in The New York Times. As Jill says, Pollitt gets "the usual shit that feminists catch when we write about our own lives (or about pretty much anything)." Indeed.

Reviewer Toni Bentley calls Pollitt "shameless," says she's "giving up her dignity" and she's (gasp!) angry:

Have you heard the latest? “Men are rats.” This directly from the desk of Katha Pollitt, a longtime feminist columnist at The Nation. It’s an absolute scandal. But with the recent surge of courageous investigative journalism from certain formidable women working around the clock at the front lines (which can involve detailed linen reconnaissance as they hunt down suspicious laundry), the news is finally seeping out. It still sounds a bit shrill, but I’m sure it will soon find its stride as the shock of it all wears off.

Groaning and moaning from clever, sassy women has become a genre unto itself, the righteous revenge of the liberal, pre-, during- or postmenopausal woman (anyone missing?) in the post-chick-lit age (it is over, isn’t it?). Perhaps this heralds the birth of fourth-wave feminism? (Or is it the fifth?) Or maybe it’s not something political, but just plain old biblical revenge: God knows women have centuries of wrongs to catch up on. An enraged, educated woman (Vagina dentata intellectualis) with her arsenal of experience, observation, self-deprecation and indignation is a force to be reckoned with, a kind of intellectual Mike Tyson — though, apparently, she is still not as likely to be seduced into bed as the bombshell bimbo, one reason she’s so irate.

Let's see here: shrill, enraged, and Vagina dentata intellectualis(!). So sexist, so predictable. Sometimes it seems like women are criticized just for having the audacity to speak the truth about their own lives. I'm so over this kind of hackneyed, backlashy bullshit. It's the easy way out: Don't want to bother with writing a thoughtful review of something? Just go the "harping woman" route, it's a winner!

This is completely unfair. Pollitt is not being criticized for “having the audacity to speak the truth about [her] own [life].” For one thing, Bentley’s review was no hatchet job; she turned in a nuanced piece that ultimately comes down somewhere in the middle on the book. She praises Pollitt’s “considerable imaginative dexterity” and calls one essay “interesting and moving.” How’s that for unthoughtful, “hackneyed, backlashy bullshit”?

Pollitt’s essays are filled with passages like this:

“Was [my ex-boyfriend] thinking what a drag it was to have a girlfriend who couldn't pass a simple road test, even in small-town Connecticut, who did not care about the value-price transformation problem, and who never once woke him up with a blow job, despite being told many times that this was what all men wanted? Perhaps the young art critic is a better girlfriend on these and other scores, and he no longer feels the need for other women. Or perhaps the deception was the exciting part for him, and he will betray her, too, which is, of course, what I hope.

Now as I drive around upper Manhattan with Ben I spend a lot of time ignoring the road and asking myself, "If I had got my driver's license, would my lover have left me?"

To describe this and the accompanying “Webstalking” as shameless, or even undignified, is not to be sexist. It’s merely the natural reaction to seeing an eminent political columnist whom you respect publish the details of her extended post-breakup agony. And besides, even if it is shameful or undignified, that doesn’t make it a bad read. (Incidentally, Jessica doesn’t quote Bentley in full on the dignity front; the full sentence is framed as one possible interpretation, and it’s hardly a knee-jerk attack on Pollitt: “Or perhaps she’s giving up her dignity in a generous motion of solidarity toward the rest of us who have already blown our cover?”)

If other middle-aged Nation columnists I read—Gary Younge or Alex Cockburn, say—published chronicles of their own midlife crises in pity-evoking detail, a reviewer would be practically obliged to do some needling.

Bentley’s review is a lot of things: remarkably snarky, unfunny, overfilled with parentheticals, etc. But go back and read the stories. Pollitt fills them with lines like, “Besides, it was one thing to stay up half the night going through the archives of obscure leftist Listservs and e-mailing this or that woman to ask if she had ever slept with my lover.” Is a reviewer supposed to respond with a heady philosophical treatise? Jessica cries bullsh*t on the “harping woman” routine. But it seems to me that Pollitt is self-consciously harping throughout these essays. She is angry at her lover’s infidelity. She is, yes, shrill. What of it? That doesn’t make it a bad book. And saying so doesn’t make it a sexist review.