A few weeks ago, I discovered Anne Tyler, a good few decades after everyone else. The first book I read was A Patchwork Planet and it is – in my opinion – a near-perfect novel. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, brilliantly observed, humane, perfectly plotted and warm and romantic without being too sentimental. As this was the first Anne Tyler I’d read, I then spent a bit of time in bookshops and on Amazon, looking at her other novels. I bought another two to take on holiday, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Ladder of Years. Both of these were excellent too.

In the process of my Tyler research, I noticed that Vintage seemed to be in the middle of a re-jacketing programme for Anne Tyler. Here are a few examples of the new-look jackets:

I can so clearly picture the meetings that took place as part of this re-jacketing programme that I almost feel as though I attended them myself. ‘She writes so brilliantly about families and human relationships’, someone in this meeting undoubtedly said, ‘How about some kind of photographic treatment that captures these small moments in everyday life, which Tyler observes so brilliantly?’. ‘She has that female, reading groups appeal’, someone else will surely have added, ‘How can we break her out to that Anita Shreve market?’ All perfectly reasonable points, and points I would probably have made myself, had I actually been in the meetings. And given everything I’m about to say, I feel obliged to note that I do think the jackets look very nice.

There was a thread on the Guardian books blog last week about why literary writers are sometimes packaged to look more 'lowbrow' than they actually are. I’m very sympathetic to the explanation publishers always give for this, which is: we do it to sell more books. Fair enough.

But let’s have a look at the jacket for Saint Maybe:

It pictures some kids’ toys scattered on a living-room floor, and one of them is the aforementioned whoozit - it's difficult to see with the image that size but you'll have to take my word for it. And this jacket does make me a little bit cross. Anne Tyler is considered by many to be not just good, but a truly great novelist. On the basis of what I’ve read so far, I think this is a fair assessment. She’s won the Pulitzer Prize. So this is my question. Can we imagine any man considered to be a (caps intentional) Great American Novelist having a whoozit on one of his book jackets? Philip Roth anyone? Don DeLillo? John Updike? Roth is also a brilliant observer of family relationships; surely it’s worth a shot at breaking him out to the reading groups market by putting a spacehopper and a couple of care bears on a new edition of American Pastoral?

I’m just intrigued by why the same ‘break-out’ rule isn’t applied to more books by serious Great Men. I was partially joking about American Pastoral but The Plot Against America, for example, is an alternative history novel that’s as gripping as most thrillers. Has it been repackaged to look like Robert Harris’s Fatherland in an attempt to get it into the supermarkets? No it hasn’t. It’s still got that big black ‘Roth’ taking up half the front cover, along with a swastika. Really, it would be difficult for it to be saying ‘I’m a serious literary novel’ any more emphatically than it is now.

Women writers who escape the jacket ‘downmarketing’ are rare. There are a select few who do, but it’s always pretty easy to see the reason why. Toni Morrison? Writes about very serious subjects. Iris Murdoch? Writes about very educated people discussing very highbrow things. Also gets added ‘seriousness’ points for being dead. But a writer who is a woman and writes ‘just’ about relationships between normal people? Forget it.

I know of several men who love Anne Tyler – not least her very famous fans, Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle. And if other literary men with equally good taste are put off Tyler because her jackets now feature soft toys and slabs of butter, I think that’s a shame. And I think that they will be because I think these jackets are not just ‘primarily female’ but actively off-putting to a majority of male readers. I’ve done a very thorough poll of two men who happened to see me reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and they agreed wholeheartedly.  

I say all of this with caution, as any blog post on this site that even touches on gender issues seems to kick off an enormous comments box bun fight. But I do have a very strong sense that if Anne Tyler’s books had been written by a man, she would always be named up there with the greats, and her book jackets would not feature soft-focus photographs of whoozits, slabs of butter and pieces of broken crockery.

[Jenny Geras works at Picador]