Women and The Rise of the Novel

The title of this post is the name of one of the best classes I took at Yale. If anything prepared me to write Chick Lit, it was this class. (Actually, I named a character in my book Clarissa after Samuel Richardson’s famous heroine. We read the ENTIRE, unabridged version in “Women and TRON,” an accomplishment that caused the department head at the time to shut his office door before admitting in a whisper that he hadn’t.)

The funny thing about all this chick lit bashing (cf. Sittenfeld’s “slut” mud-slinging, and etc. ad nauseum) is that it follows in a grand and glorious tradition of belittling fiction that is primarily by and about the contemporary role of women. I don’t have clue one as to why this is such a popular pasttime, nor do I understand the naysayer’s assumption that if any particular piece of work in a genre is a mite fluffy or poorly written, the whole genre ought to be dismissed as so much trash.

I’m pleased as punch whenever I see an article such as the one that appeared in this week’s Salon by Rebecca Traister that reminds us all of the grand old tradition of chick lit, chick lit bashing, and why everyone needs to shut the hell up already.

I was happy to see her responding to those who blast Bridget Jones’s Diary as merely a modern send-up of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice and reminding them that Austen’s own Northanger Abbey was a send-up of the runaway bestseller The Mystery of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (which I read in TRON).

I was overjoyed by Margaret Atwood’s recognition of the validity of the genre. (I might even overlook this whole long-distance pen nonsense).

“Some chick-lit books are better than others. I thought Bridget Jones was quite a howl. There’s good, bad and mediocre in everything … So … if it’s about young women we’re not supposed to take it seriously?”

Traister writes:

“The urge to condemn chick lit is also born of a shame about our own femininity, a desire to distance ourselves not just from bad writing, but from retailed versions of womanhood that might affect the way we are perceived by men and by each other.”

The irony rests in the fact that though chick lit authors have been arguing that chick lit is more than cosmopolitans, rich boyfriends, and publishing assistants, the industry (driven by these prejudicial reviews and the public’s growing association of the chick it label with the steroetype, rather than the genre) has taken to saying that “No, these books are more than chick lit.”

I am reminded of the old science fiction argument. I was once told that serious science fiction authors never refer to their work as “Sci-fi”. “Sci-fi” is cheesy space operas with alien chicks in bikinis. If you’re talking about hard science science fiction, replete with serious philosophical examination of string theory or whatever, then you say “sf” or “speculative fiction” or something similar. I don’t know if that’s true; we’d have to ask someone with a PhD in the subject. I do kknow that it hasn’t seemed to hurt the success of the cable channel “SciFi.”

Lately, I’ve taken to calling my book “a comedy.” I’ve rationalized in my head that this might invite more male readers. But how many men are reading ShopGirl, even if it is by Steve Martin? (Come on, is that a chick lit cover or what?) Am I, as Traister asserts, submitting to the genre fear? Or am I attempting to let the potential reader know that if they want urban, swinging city girl out of my heroine Amy, they are going to need to give her a few years.

My book has several “shout outs” to the genre touchstones, but every one is twisted on its head, from the pink drinks to the job in publishing. The naysayers who like to make checklists of “chick lit plot points” will ave a field day with my story. But since when is it acceptable for literary criticism to reduce a novel to to its elemental inclusions, rather than seeing the work as more than a sum of its parts?

A pink drink is nothing more than window dressing, like the chase scene in a thriller. They are the set pieces through which an author can craft a transcendent tale.