SOURCE: Shechner, Mark. “Until the Music Stops: Women Novelists in a Post-Feminist Age.” Salmagundi, no. 113 (winter 1997): 220–38.

In the following excerpt, Shechner discusses recent trends in contemporary women's fiction and offers a mixed assessment of Accordion Crimes.

To please is her first care; and often she fears she will be displeasing as a woman from the mere fact that she writes. … The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. Woman is still astonished and flattered at being admitted to the world of thought, of art—a masculine world. She is on her best behavior; she is afraid to disarrange, to investigate, to explode; she feels she should seek pardon for literary pretensions through her modesty and good taste.

[Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1961), p. 666.]

One indisputable fact of American fiction writing over the...