A Massachusetts mayor, cool-headed but fierce, she conceals her skein (once it is discovered that young women can awaken it in their elders), and rises through the political ranks. That’s where Margot Cleary comes in, through whom Alderman offers up an imagined female rule of law. This distressing, introspective novel explores the many reasons why a paradigm in which gender expression aligns with power-physical, economic, political-is perhaps not the organizing principle for a better world that we want it to be.
A world run by women has long been imagined here, wistfully, as utopia. in November 2016, Alderman’s work arrives in the United States one year later, with a “pussy-grabbing” misogynist in the highest political office, and where a new horrific exposé of a male mogul’s serial abuse seems to land on the front pages every week. Many will find this vision objectionable. Except the question is more pointed (and uncomfortable) than that: The novel depicts a world in which women, empowered by a genetic mutation that enables them to harness and wield electrical currents, ultimately find themselves capable of the same greed and cruelty as their male counterparts. What is it like to witness the oppression you have endured applied to someone else? That’s the conceit of The Power, or it will be, at least, for the women reading it.
“I am so grateful you could spare the time.” It’s a device that we are to understand as an act of fictional intellectual property theft, as it’s Alderman’s name that’s ultimately on the novel. His letter to Naomi is postmarked accordingly from an organization unrecognizable to us in the real world: something called “The Men Writers Association.” “Thank you so much for this,” he gushes in a cover letter that resonates with any woman who has sent off her own fawning letters to men of influence. We can call Neil a “man author,” like we do so often with “women authors,” because, in the future Neil lives in, he’s the one who is cautiously writing against a tradition that excludes his sex. Or, rather, it’s the world of Neil Adam Armon, a fictional author who has sent a historical novel called The Power to a writer named Naomi Alderman for an early read. This happens to be the world of Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Power.
These complaints seemed to come from a future era, in which men have forgotten that, for the last few millennia, they were, in fact, the ones methodically creating spaces where only, then mostly, men could be. They claimed that if the same theaters had attempted to host an all-male screening of, say, Thor 3, no one would allow it. Earlier this year, groups of men were up in arms about a series of women-only screenings of Wonder Woman at Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Austin and New York.
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