Private Life: the latest Jane Smiley novel

by philg

Jane Smiley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, has a new novel, Private Life, which I recently finished. The book answers the question “What’s it like to be married to a guy with a high IQ but who is in fact a pinhead?” Probably a copy should be sent to every woman who has ever thought of dating a computer programmer.

3 thoughts on “Private Life: the latest Jane Smiley novel”

  1. This is, of course, a sexist (and heteronormative!) statement — you’re assuming that only a man could be “a computer programmer”, and only women (who are somehow by definition not computer programmers) could date them.

  2. Chris: When I was CEO of a software company, I hired a lot of female computer programmers, promoting many to senior management positions. They were nothing like the male programmers and nothing like the husband in Jane Smiley’s novel. The female programmers didn’t spend any time arguing about how one scripting language was vastly superior to some other scripting language. The female programmers didn’t spend any time arguing that their 25-table SQL data model was better than a 3-table data model that a more experienced developer showed them could do the same job. The female programmers didn’t spend any time arguing that if only we reprogrammed our system using Java Enterprise Beans we would be able to achieve world domination.

    What did the female programmers do with all of their spare time? Listened to the customers and built what was required for the end-users.

  3. No worries, Chris – I suspect programmer-types will have Real Doll API documentation to peruse in the not-too-distant future… (crossing fingers, anyway)

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