The Female Man by Joanna Russ
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the essential books in the world. Four women in parallel worlds intersect and collide, their views on their own sex unfolding: Jeannine, Janet, Jael, and Joanna. Each world approaches gender in completely different ways, to the point that the conception is mind bending. One world is in the midst of a perpetual war between the sexes; another is a world where men disappeared long ago; another is like our own; another is similar to our own but the Second World War never happened. Sounds as though it might feel like allegorical writing or a polemic on feminism – it is called a feminist novel, though I think that’s confining it to box, which is something we do in order to dismiss a thing. This is simply brilliant fiction. You are dropped into the middle of this crazy situation where worlds and times and people are intersecting with each other, and somehow, through the incredible coherence of her writing, Russ unfolds the story in front of you and everything falls into place. I read it as a study of the same woman born in four different worlds. Some of the ideas in it are intensely hilarious – the world where men and women are at war with each other is particularly biting, because, of course, they still trade with one another, including a brisk business in the export of children from the women’s nation to the men’s. Jael’s lover is particularly soothing in terms of the satire and the pungency of it – an ape transformed into a man, an idea that cuts so many ways it’s dizzying, and Russ plays with it masterfully. Like all her novels, this one is brief and dense, white hot all the way through. A truly extraordinary performance.