TBR: Life
Today’s book is Life, by Gwyneth Jones. It’s science fiction, although it’s set in the near future of a world not too different from ours. It plays with issues of gender and sex, feminism, love, parenting and science. I enjoyed reading it, but was ultimately somewhat disappointed by it, as it never really delivered the climax it had promised.
As I mentioned previously, the main character is a working mother, a scientist, and her husband is a househusband and at-home-dad. This isn’t really the main focus of the plot, although it gives Jones the opportunity for a few zingers. Attending his kid’s soccer game, Spence comments to one of the moms, "It hasn’t been too bad. I got to hear about Delilah’s mastitis, the hail isn’t right in our faces, and I managed not to be linesman." Jones (as narrator) concludes: "They laughed together. There’s definitely something Ivan Denisovich about being a full-time parent. You learn to take comfort in small mercies." Come on, youth soccer can be bad, but comparing it to a Stalinist labor camp seems a bit over the top.
Jones’ theme is that in spite of feminism, the sexual revolution, post-feminism, girl power and everything else, things stay pretty much the same. And even if you erased biological differences (or rather, recognized that there’s more of a continuum than a dichotomy), things would still say much the same. I agree with her that gender is a powerful cultural construct, even beyond biological sex (just as race is a powerful cultural construct, even though most scientist agree that there is little biological reality behind it). But I think things are changing more than she suggests, although not as fast as I might hope.
