Piers Anthony and A Spell for Chameleon

So, I started getting tired of reading critical theory for my book proposal, so, almost by accident, I started writing something about A Spell for Chameleon and the different possible ways of reading a text. (I'm viewing this as a reflection on our habits of reading, both through "innocent" or "reparative" readings against critical readings.) 

Browsing through the commentary on Anthony, though, and there's a lot of overviews and summaries and so forth. Plus, I saw a few book chapters, mostly from the 1980s, one peer-reviewed article from 1975 in the then-nascent Science Fiction Studies, and even one short introductory book by Michael R. Collins from 1983. Judging from what I've been reading, I suspect that Anthony -- particularly as his reputation has shifted over the last five decades -- might have been rated higher as an author had he *never* written a Xanth novel. Or even, perhaps, had he even stopped at only one or two. Some of this early commentary is quite complementary, and his Incarnations of Immortality series seems to have been rated highly ... but now the crushing sexism of A Spell for Chameleon seems to be all that anyone can remember.

For myself, I'm doing my re-read of Spell right now ... and actually, I think that if you ignore the sexism (and plus I'll deny that the book is misogynistic), I think the novel holds up surprisingly well.

FOLLOW-UP:

Something else worthy of note. Despite the cries of sexism and misogyny, Piers Anthony is, in his own words, "far liberal", in political terms. And he seems like a genuinely nice guy,: married his childhood sweetheart for 63 years until her passing, a vegetarian, a tree farmer with a wildlife refuge, a good father, kinds to his fans, and active in helping young writers get published. (In facts, he's won award to that effect.)

Within the hermeneutics of suspicion, we're always on the lookout for things in texts to denounce ... but, while we castigate texts (and their authors) for problematic views, it seems strange to me that the critical attitude is wholly negative. That is, we never give authors (or texts) credit for when they're awesome, and that somehow never makes up for what we see as problematic about them.