“You don’t read women authors, do you?” a pretty waitress in an otherwise empty Boston restaurant says to Bob Dylan in “Highlands,” his noirish 16-and-a-half-minute ramble. This after she doesn’t like the sketch of her he does on a napkin.
“How would you know and what would it matter anyway?” he answers.
“You just don’t seem like you do,” she says.
He says, “You’re way wrong.”
“Which ones have you read then?”
“I read Erica Jong,” he says, before slipping out of his chair and into the night.
Among the traits the elder of my two daughters and I share is a tendency to have a novel going at all times. Another is a struggle to break out of the gender trap in our selections.
The best I can say about myself in this regard is that her name, Penelope, was inspired by the author of a 1979 book I loved, “Offshore” by Penelope Fitzgerald, a Brit who started writing around age 60 after her husband died. A winner of the Booker Prize, the slim novel follows a group of befuddled but likable losers living on houseboats on the River Thames.
The worst I can say is that I’m two-thirds of the way through my ninth Lawrence Block crime novel starring Matthew Scudder, a down-and-out ex-cop and alcoholic with a hooker for a girlfriend, residence in a nondescript Midtown hotel room, and a penchant for large quantities of diner coffee and hitting the butchers’ Mass at St. Bernard’s in the Meatpacking District.
What can I say? He’s a comfort to me.
While my daughter and I both like to “change it up,” our reading, that is, thematically from book to book, or vis-a-vis genre, in truth her tastes are wider ranging, for instance tackling massive fantasy titles like R.F. Kuang’s “Poppy War” trilogy. Still, I’ll get my 2 cents in by reaching back into my 20s to recommend Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic “The Left Hand of Darkness,” written by a woman, yes, but gender-bending.
Crime fiction, however, might not be in the cards for her. Sticking with the X and Y chromosomal hands we’ve been dealt, I’ll see you one Patricia Highsmith, daughter of mine, and raise you an S.A. Cosby. Because I noticed you tried one of his and quickly discarded it, but I’ll pick it up.
Gladly. The guy looks like a trucker.