These are the novels of Fielding and Tolstoy, of Flaubert and Hawthorne, of Lawrence and Joyce, of Hemingway and Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald, of Mailer and Gaddis and Baldwin and Bellow, of Gide and Collette, of Kesey and Brautigan and Berger. Even Beckett, as his novels stray near plot, catches in the same gaping groove. These, to take the most random and easily replaceable of examples, are spectacularly the novels of Thomas Pynchon: Where is Oedipa Maas’s treasured collection of pre-thirties Coca-Cola bottles? What happened to her passion for discovering new junked car-yards? The major punishment is that novelists deny the very calculus of invention second nature in their creation of the male character to any and every female character. They cannot place her in a structural position in that completely artificial construct called “the story” so that, in her purposes, in her actions, and in her reactions, she resonates as a whole and autonomous creation. Whereas the male characters are automatically conceived as a matrix of purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions, the female characters, if they are “bad,” are all purpose, or, if they are “good,” are all gratuitous. It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males. In a political field where men have declared women must be kept inferior, especially at the level of language, actually to show a woman as equal threatens the whole field with overthrow because it implies the possibility of superiority, which is so socially anathema that no one (except certain Radical Lesbian groups and Radical Effeminists) will even consider it. The proscribed limits on what is allowed women characters in novels are stricter than any Hayes Code or Lord Chamberlain’s Office. They define the novel. If the novel is dying, this above all (as Fiedler hinted at, but could never quite come out and say, in Love and Death in the American Novel) is what is killing it. And if no novelist, from Barthelme to Oates, from Didion to Gass, can break these strictures, then better it die! For it is always understood—it is worked into the texture of the language with which the novelists cover their pages—that the men in these books, no matter how formal a structure binds them, be it the Czarist Army arrayed against Napoleon’s troops or the intrigues of Left Bank Bohemia, are free; it is only the betrayal of this freedom that decides if they are bad men or good men; no matter how grudgingly, they are a fraternity of free beings. But they are not society, even when they have power over it. Often they are society’s victim. Through stupidity or malice, they may be society’s dupes. But society itself—no man in a novel is ever shown thus.