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to Joan Walsh for the discerning review. I've come to the conclusion that what makes Flanagan's writing so grating is not her hypocrisy in cataloging the imagined sins of employed mothers -- or even her one-woman war on feminism -- but the fact that she's basically a snob. A wonderfully witty and genuinely gifted snob, but a snob nonetheless.
Unlike earlier masters of the domestic genre -- such as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck, who Flanagan professes to admire -- she can't quite manage to sustain the level of self-deprecation that made those writers truly funny and compelling. But then, unlike Bombeck and Kerr, Flanagan doesn't want her readers to identify with her --she wants to seduce them with her flawless prose so they'll stand still while she twists the knife. And frankly, it's not unheard of for magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly to launch the careers of writers who excel at that particular art.
