At age 87, Doris Lessing trails clouds of glory. She always did, but now she finally has the top honour for a writer, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot,” she told reporters in London who surprised her with the news as she returned from shopping. Beautifully unimpressed with herself, she told them to wait while she paid her cabbie. This old woman with a face like a scrunchy and a brain like a snapping, sparking electrical device has sailed to victory.

The joy spreads outwards: I am spared having to write my annual column on the misogyny, timidity and utter blindness of those cantankerous Swedish males who select the Nobel, and you are spared having to read it. They have been improving, haven’t they, with Orhan Pamuk and then Harold Pinter and now Lessing, the stubborn, stern oracle.

Lessing is such a fixture in literature that she enters every reader’s life at a different point. The Nobel people have singled out her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, of 1962. Its claim to fame was not just its interesting structure — a woman named Anna Wulf writes her life in multiple narratives or coloured notebooks and is finally able to become whole — but Lessing’s early realization, pre-Friedan, pre-Greer, that women’s lives were, well, an organized, designated misery.

The Golden Notebook made her famous. It is scarcely her favourite book — she calls it her “albatross” — but it gave her entry into the world of shiny literary success and a currency she has never relinquished.

No “-ist”

The great and rare charm of Lessing is that she fits no label. In publishing, writers are placed in categories, but she is a contrarian, a financial term meaning an investor who goes against the market, believing it will eventually work in his favour.

Not that Lessing ever sought favour. She has invited disdain from critics and put a pie in the face of every group to which she was said to belong, from feminist to communist to nuclear disarmer. Rightly, she despises the suffix “-ist,” but she paid a price for always swimming against the tide. She once watched a little boy bullied by his teacher in a classroom while the teacher turned to her to give her a wink of smug “feminist” collusion. She was outraged, and her subsequent remarks defending men and boys were used as proof that she was out of fashion and traditionalist, another evil “ist,” when she was merely trying to behave decently.

Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 but grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with an insider’s contempt for colonialism. Her parents were white Britons who specialized in discontent, her mother to such an extent that Lessing planned her escape early. “I won’t. I will not. I will not be like that,” she swore to herself, marrying young, twice, and then setting sail for England, leaving two of her three children behind.

Postwar Britain was as bleak as the lunar landscape, but she persisted, publishing her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950. She has since written 25 novels, including five works of science fiction that alienated the high-minded; two operas; 14 short story collections; three plays; six works of non-fiction; and two volumes of autobiography. Her work has been remarkably prophetic. Had it been a little less so, each work might have caught another wave of interest from the boomer generation. So take almost any subject and search earlier for Lessing’s version of it. Invariably you’ll find her, offering her stubborn, truthful view.

Long list

She has written about the path of the middle-aged woman (The Summer Before the Dark, 1973), terrorist bombers (The Good Terrorist, 1985), the impoverished elderly (The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1984), the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 1987), a dreaded monster fetus (The Fifth Child, 1988), other imagined worlds (the Canopus in Argos series) and life inside the brain (the Martha Quest novels).

She was a Sufi decades before Muslims became the world’s most investigated people. Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was given in part because the committee wished to draw more attention to the “increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states” posed by climate change. The world as the water dries up was the subject of Mara and Dann, her 1999 dystopia. Lessing would be annoyed by these callow summings-up, and she would be right. Each book has its own driving force. Her words are rarely fiery, but they are convincing and ultimately persuasive. She has a real narrative hold, which Nobel winners tend not to.

She is an old woman and has been so for some time, I remind those who seem startled that her brain still functions (although Harold Bloom’s hasn’t for years). Admittedly, it is odd to see “English writer wins Nobel” in The Huffington Post next to headlines about Uma Thurman’s stalker and Britney Spears’ conjunctivitis. But critics should reproach themselves for having erased the elderly from their gaze. I began reading this crone when I was 11 and she has accompanied my generation, several generations in fact. Fortunately, writing is something you can do right up to your expiry date.

The Nobel people, announcing her win, called her “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” I don’t know about that — she does male characters perfectly well — but they’re right about the skepticism and the scrutiny. Lessing has always had a gimlet eye for pretence, and nothing that is subjected to that eye comes out intact.

The catch with the Nobel is that readers are urged to buy the winner’s latest or best-known book. But her range is so wide that these last two (The Cleft and The Golden Notebook) might be misleading. Young people will prefer Mara and Dann. Poets should choose The Summer Before the Dark (the window scene in the gray dawn of rural Spain is one of the most magical passages I’ve ever read). If you are having a mid-life crisis, by all means read her 1987 manifesto, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, and it will get worse. Browse with care. You wouldn’t want to be put off. To the Nobelers, I say, “Skal!“ I shall be keeping a close eye on you.

This Week

I went to the premiere of Henry, a documentary about Henry Morgentaler, the doctor who won abortion rights for Canadian women. He’s a friend and something of an idol to me. It was extremely odd watching him the next night being interviewed by George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC’s The Hour. The great joy of interviews is watching two people who have nothing in common — age, geography, jail time, facial hair, you name it — meet and talk. The interview worked because there is a gentleness to both men. But it struck me that in daily life, people have a bad habit of clinging to their own types. If the Conservative Party leader in Ontario had ever talked to a normal non-Bay Street person, he wouldn’t have torpedoed his campaign with a promise to fund all religious schools. People should consider talking to the last person they would ever consider. It’s educational.