American Dad, published originally in 1981, was [...] chiefly remarkable for Janowitz's choice of a male narrator and protagonist. It is relatively rare for a woman writer to adopt the male voice [...] women become, in theoretical terms, bisexual and it is rare for them to go further and claim the male voice in its entirey [...] Janowitz does not use the male persona here to deliver any sarcastic feminist critique of men. Her portrayal [....] is a gentle and sympathetic on as if she had merely transposed many of her own adolescent memories -- as one does in a first novel -- into a male body without any particular reflection on the obsession with gender difference that had seized the rest of the Western world [...] it frees Janowitz from any of the constraints of representing a world newly imbued with feminism which would have been unavoidable with a female narrator. At the same time it allows her to usurp a very male tradition of American fiction [...]