Male Rage, Female Fury

Book excerpt: In four chapters, each dedicated to an experimental American novelist of the postmodern period, Male Rage Female Fury investigates what happens when novels that have defied traditional literary conventions such as temporal chronology, refuse to break with traditional gender-based stereotypes. The result, Maxwell argues, is an ambiguity or "internal tension" that may eventually produce more misogynistic images within the texts. Central to the study is an analysis of the violence, male and female initiated, in the works of the minimalists Barthelme and Didion, and the mythicists Pynchon and Morrison.