I’m all for getting feisty about an issue.  For fighting society’s ills and all that. But, since the villain of the moment in this instance appears to be chick lit, I’ll pass.  Now, I admit to hating the name.  Chick lit.  Annoying, yes.  But, some articles and a good deal of internet chatter go another step and blame chick lit for the fall of feminism and the destruction of the brain cells of young women everywhere.  Maybe we’re over thinking this a bit. Could it be that chick lit titles of the flirty variety are just books read for fun and enjoyment and not the sign of the apocalypse or the end to the family unit as we know it. 

Two articles from the last few months debate the potential harm of chick lit books.  Guess there was nothing more to say about the war, world hunger or the disintegration of the planet’s ecosystem.   

First, in Girl Trouble, Fear and Loathing in Chick Lit, the reporter starts by saying:

Something creepy is happening in the pages of the 2005 book catalogues, those beautifully bound lists of new releases that publishers send to sellers and media at the start of each season.

And ends with:

Chick lit — in its original form and the new version 2.0 — can be liberating. Its success is a response to the smothering, simple-feminist notion that all our representations of women have to be ideal, that romance is a female rocket scientist and her stay-at-home mixed-race partner doing dishes together. But it’s bleak to think that the alternative to political correctness is this false, never-ending depiction of women’s lives as frivolous. Our preoccupations are not just shopping and sex, and our problems aren’t solvable with a wink and giggle and a new pair of shoes. Honey, sweetie, darling, a word of advice: please keep your fiction away from my reality.

The Chick Lit Challenge, Do Trendy novels For Young Women Smother Female Expression — Or Just Put A Little Fun In Feminism? takes a different tact, thanks to reporter Adjula Razdan.  The article is worth a read, if only for the reference to slut lit - yeah, I said slut lit.  Actually, it’s interesting except for a quote by author Hanne Blank which, honestly, borders on incomprehensible.  Don’t believe me?  Here it is:  "The chick lit juggernaut of consumerist husband-hunting femme stereotypes is no less a pastiche (and in many ways no less a parody) of culture’s directives to women than, say, Tom Clancy or Dean Koontz novels are . . . of the cultural directives aimed at men."  There had to be a clearer way to say that.

Forgetting that quote for a minute, if you can, (and Blank does redeem herself at the end with a quote most folks will understand) here’s how this one wraps up:

So is the critical uproar over chick lit over the top? Could be. After all, who says that trashy beach reads can’t coexist with smart postfeminist books? (One of the points of third-wave, "lipstick" feminism, is exactly that — that women don’t have to be one kind of human being, with one kind of pleasure, all the time.) Even within so-called chick lit, there is variety in quality and subject matter (witness new branches like "mommy lit" and "Latina lit"), and it is hard to make generalizations — another lesson of modern feminism.

And maybe we can do even better than that. Hanne Blank thinks that chick lit can and should be improved. "The solution to bad chick lit isn’t to get rid of chick lit, it’s making the effort to produce a chick lit that’s more nutritious, more interesting." After all, there’s more than a little of the chick lit spirit in the novel-of-manners tradition that produced Jane Austen — and who’s to say that this thriving genre won’t produce a modern-day Austen who can turn Prada, martinis, and the quest for Mr. Right into literary gold?

I’m still thinking they’re books and, as with all books, some folks will like the style and some won’t, so let’s all unclench a tad. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 5:41 am and is filed under About Books, About Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.