Well, all right: even accepting that men and women seek and find different things in novels, I'm still wondering why L'Etranger was the book, above all others, that had most sustained men through their times of crisis. They concluded that "men use fiction almost topographically, as a map" ( I'm not sure I know what that means) while many women used novels "metaphorically".
The authors did not offer an explanation or analysis of why L'Etranger was so seductive to young men. The only reason Harper Lee got on to our list, they hinted, is that we assumed she was a man. The evidence for their conclusion? Only one of the men's top 20 novels was written by a woman - Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird - whereas in their 20 the women cited six books written by men. We men, it seems, are only influenced by books written by other men, the authors suggested. I was, I admit, a little miffed by the patronising tone of Jardine and Watkins's article about the men's list (published here in G2).
What kind of problems could the interviewees have had that would have been ameliorated by reading The Outsider? A similar survey of men, the results of which were revealed last week, had The Outsider as the book most often mentioned as having helped them get through life.
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