The Chick Lit Challenge

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But, as author Hanne Blank pointed out in the Baltimore-based weekly City Paper (Sept. 10, 2003), we're not talking about the Great American Novel here. 'Our entertainment reading choices, by and large, are not precisely gems of deathless prose, world-changing philosophical tours de force, or breathtakingly unpredictable in their characterizations or narratives,' Blank writes. '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.'

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.

Most chick lit isn't out to change the world anyway, only to reflect a part of it. And, as Helen Fielding, the grande dame of chick lit, pointed out in 1998: 'If we can't laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack over what it says about women, we haven't got very far with our equality.'

So until the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri or Margaret Atwood or Annie Proulx start being marketed with pumps, purses, and martinis on their Easter-egg-colored dust jackets, why worry about it? There's no rule that says we can't have our Woolf and our Fielding too. (Mrs. Dalloway and Bridget Jones would have got along swimmingly.)

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?

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