It was womanhood they were entering, the deep forest of it, and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little difference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about in it like birds.
ANDRE DUBUS, “A Father’s Story”
The men in my 20th Century Short Story class are frustrated. They want to know why, in contemporary American fiction, men are so often summed up in a few sentences, not just the men in the stories, but all men, summarized, written off, dispensed with as if they were no more complicated than a T-bone steak. And I have to admit, they have a point. Last Monday we read Alice Adams’s “Barcelona.” The protagonist, after watching her husband chase a thief who has snatched her purse, ends the story by wondering:
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