From a review, by Lucinda Rosenfeld, of the book “In the Land of Men,” by Adrienne Miller, in the New York Times Book Review:
Reading Adrienne Miller’s account of her decade-plus working at men’s magazines during the glory days of print journalism, I was reminded of how, in the 1990s, it was seen as daring and even outré for educated liberal men, reacting to the perceived scourge of political correctness, to say demeaning things to women. Hence, staffers at GQ, where Miller is hired as an editorial assistant, announce, “That’s the best set of tits I’ve seen all year.” When she wears a skirt to the office, a colleague asks her to twirl for him. And when, at 25, Miller becomes the improbably young fiction editor of Esquire, another tells her that “everyone wondered” whom she slept with to get the job.
Never mind that the publications where Miller toils trumpet both men’s achievements and good looks, but women’s good looks only—and only if the women are half naked and young. “Before I had this job, I had never known, like really known, that there were actually environments in which women’s bodies were evaluated as if they were tires, or trucks,” writes an understandably peeved Miller, who deftly brings to life the free-spending and freewheeling glossy magazine culture of the time. . . .
Meanwhile, of the men behaving badly in her midst, Miller attempts a nuanced view. “Even when the actions of the men were abhorrent,” she writes, “I tried to approach the behavior with a spirit of irony, leniency and good humor.” It’s a familiar reaction to those of us now middle-aged women for whom the desire to be “in on the joke” once seemed preferable to being incensed, even when we failed to find any of it funny or ironic. I suspect it also explains the ambivalence with which some Generation X women have greeted the #MeToo movement.
But neither the short story’s last hurrah nor the casual sexism of the literary world turns out to be Miller’s main subject. That honor goes to the complicated personal and professional relationship she had with the meta-novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. . . .
If “In the Land of Men” sometimes seems at odds with itself, it’s because Miller—who can be witty and knowledgeable about the clichés of fiction written by men—apparently regards Wallace as too special and too fragile to have been held to the rules that she applies to others. “Troubled male genius” is an old trope, but Miller elevates it to new heights.
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