canopus in argos is underrated and fascinating...

The opening of your article starts with: "For over half a decade, Doris Lessing has turned her prolific pen to just about every prose form--fiction, autobiography, essays, drama."

I believe you meant to say "for over half a century". She's been writing for over 50 years, not over 5 years. :)

She wins ahead of Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Haruki Murakami, Les Murray, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, Peter Carey, Alice Munro, Carlos Fuentes, Harry Mulisch, Chinua Achebe, Cormac McCarthy, David Malouf, Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco ...

Based on what? One good book (The Grass is Singing), and a whole boatload of self-indulgent twaddle and bad science fiction?

I have read only Shikasta, at the recommendation of a friend -- whose tastes have often let me down, come to think of it. I found it remarkably pedestrian and dull, ill-written and ill-constructed, and the ideas driving it little more than a kind of jury-rigged Platonic astrology. Joan Didion has a good piece on her somewhere (somewhere in these piles of books...) and talks about how she seems to shout at you things you already know. Didion, more generous than I am, kept reading though. I guess I shall now have to try again. Nobel winners are always great writers, don't you know...

I can't help but notice the scant response to some articles, especially if they're about literary figures. The pieces have an obligatory feeling to them ("oh, something big has happened, a death or a major award, we'd better get on it" -or, worse, "let's pull the bio out of the file").

Readers would rather fire in comments on the latest sordid tale in the Life section (My husband only wants sex with dwarfs!: "Cary, I've done everything I can to cater to his obsession: I've had dwarfs for dinner, I've sat through marathons of Little People, Big World, I've walked around on my knees all day"). I remember one piece about circumcision drew more than 200 comments, whereas pieces on Lessing and Sacks stay in the single digits. Not enough dwarfs, I guess.

After "The Fifth Child" comes "Ben in the world" (I think that's the title) which follows the demon child into adulthood.

Didion's review is in her White Album (1979). It's a review of Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

Lessing is a genius, Appoggiatura. The only reason she had to wait so long for the Nobel is that she's a woman (only eleven women have won in its entire history) and used to be a member of the communist party. I've read very few books that can compete with 'The Golden Notebook' for sheer wisdom, originality and flawlessly beautiful writing. 'The Tin Drum' by Gunter Grass (also a bit of a black sheep these days) is perhaps the only one that comes close. 'The Grass is Singing' was Lessing's first book and I certainly wouldn't describe it as the only 'good book' she's written. She's not what you'd call a fun read but if you want to give your brain a workout and strip away a few layers of illusion everything she's written is brilliant in its own way. I don't deny she asks a lot of her readers and of course, there was a time when the male establishment would have burned her as a witch instead of giving her all these prizes!

I read this book first in 1999 when I was in my late twenties and it wasn't quite what I expected. Reviewers refer to it as a book that changed a generation of women, a book about anna, a liberated woman. However, I found this to be a little misleading.

Only the first section has this liberating, maybe even germane portrayal of women living independently (or without the 'protection' of men)...yet in every subsequent section the book recounts with maddening detail, the life of a talented woman who is trapped, both through her thrall with a cruel, sadistic lover, and through the emotionally stunting prism of world events (communism, stalin, newspaper reports about soviet gulags...)....She is stunted...unable to act....unable to write....far from being "free" she is stuck, wrestling with her inner demons as well as the outer the world.

I'm not saying that the book isn't inspriting in a more complicated way, in its honest (and sometimes horrifying) portrayal of the fear and paralysis woman can experience even after liberation from traditional social values. But I wonder if in the hands of certain readers the novel wouldn't make a woman consider running and screaming back into a 50's style burb....or just giving up! Anna's world seems at least as harsh, stagnant and degrading as it is liberated.

When I taught college freshmen to read George Orwell, I remember a few of them commenting that Orwell must have been a conserative or a Republican to write such harsh critiques of socialism....maybe in the same way I think Lessing would be misunderstood by anyone who wanted a ra-ra girl empowerment story, or a straight advertisement for feminism.