LovelySalome was kind enough to forward me a rather scathing attack on the omnipresence of ChickLit courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
Trouble is, all her columns are for Times Select readers, and as I am not one, I don’t have linkage abilities. And personally, I try not to circumvent subscription-only services by copying and pasting the content here for free, since, well, the Times? Kind of cranky about things like that.
Dowd is of the opinion that women who enjoy ChickLit are stupid fools who are blissfully and blithely ignorant of that’s wrong in the world as they indulge in pink-covered lipstick chronicles of fluffy nonsense. She found the ChickLit shelved with literature fiction and cries horror at the stupidification of women readers who pick up their Kinsella books shelved next to Kipling.
So what else is new? It’s a retread of every other accusation leveled at women-authored and women-marketed literature. I’m not personally a fan of chick lit, as I cannot suspend reality long enough to believe there are that many British women working in advertising and publishing who find husbands in the bottom of a cocktail glass. But the article seemed so familiar in its condescension.
LovelySalome wrote in her email: “I would agree with her on certain points, if my knee-jerk antagonism toward her snootiness didn’t stifle genuine debate. I mean, we’re fostering the war on terror by indulging in chick lit? Do they even know that chick lit authors can’t sell their MSS because the genre is dying?”
One quote that I will excerpt, until the Times rattles a saber at me, is as follows:
Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers, Manolo trippers, girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”
I wonder what Dowd would have to say about a survey of historical romance? Good thing our books are housed in their own special shelves.
“Good thing our books are housed in their own special shelves.”
We are safe then! She would’nt dare dirty her hands with our shelves she probably averts her eyes as she walks past on her way to her beloved “literature” section.
Chick lit ala’ Sex and the City is very much on it’s way out. Pretty much because the gals who enjoyed the show are now 5-6 years later, wifes and mothers. They have been steeping in reality for awhile now.
Well, many writers aren’t happy unless they can shit on someone else’s genre and, therefore, feel oh-so-bettah than everyone else. Newspaper columnists are no different. Meh, I’m so over the genre-slam. Yawn.
It’s particularly interesting that this Dowd piece ran just after that Times (non-Select) article last week on the growing percentage of American woman living alone. There was a similar article two weeks ago in England’s “Daily Telegraph.”
The way I see it, although we may all get sick of the pitter-patter of little Manolos, these novels respond to a massive demographic and cultural shift. For the first time, we have a large, unmarried population of young, professional women, struggling to build lives on their own, and wondering where they missed the boat. There’s certainly lots of awful chick lit out there, as there is with any genre (you’ve got to love those historicals where the villain chortles, “You will be mine, my lovely!” “No, Sir Reginald, I will never be yours, never! Damn. Not ANOTHER bodice.”), but at its best, chick lit affords a medium for smart social satire on the changing norms of courtship and marriage. How is that so different from Austen?
How come nobody turns against all the boo-hoo, woe is me, I was abused as a child so I turned to substance abuse and my life broke into a million little pieces fantasygraphies out there with such vitriol?
Sadly, books are still judged by the sex of their authors, if not their covers.
I have to confess, it kind of bothers me that ChickLit gets shelved in Literature – but Science Fiction and Fantasy are in their own section. If the catch-all section was called “general fiction,” it wouldn’t bother me, but I do find the implication that Random ChickLit Title is more literary than, say, A Stranger in a Strange Land, insulting to geeks everywhere. If we were just talking about Jane Austen (whom the fiction specialist at the library where I work does say was one of the first ChickLit authors) who was being assumed to be better than Heinlein or Asimov, then I’d say “tastes differ” and leave it at that, but to say that the dregs of ChickLit are still more literary than the best of Science Fiction?
That goes for the dregs of “literary fiction,” so-called only because they don’t fit into any genre, as well. Being in a seperate section doesn’t mean that a genre is less literary, it means that enough people ask for it by name that it’s easier if there’s just one place to show them. Life became much easier in the library once we moved fantasy out of the general fiction – now people can go to a certain row, instead of being told to look through the general fiction for the books with the unicorn stickers.
But I digress. The only sensible thing I can think of is to get the rest of the world to follow the same plan our libraries do: the catch-all section is called “fiction,” or if they prefer to make it clear there are genre sections as well, “general fiction.” No judgment made about the literary level of the contents.
Yeah, the quote that I was referring to there came from a colleague she quotes from the New Republic:
“‘These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,’ Leon said. ‘And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down Will Francine Get Her Guy? and pick up The Red Badge of Courage.’”
Go on, ladies. Read up on your Stephen Crane. That’ll make the terrorists stay home and Dubya behave. Made me see red, mostly because shithead comments like that make me have to DEFEND chick lit. ARGH….
Of course, as I point out at GalleyCat, “the last time Wieseltier read a work of fiction that was so un-insular as to directly challenge the political moment, war and all, in which we find ourselves [Nicolson Baker’s Checkpoint], he branded it treason.” So contemporary literature just can’t catch a break with this guy.
FYI – You can access Wall Street Journal, zacks, mornignstar etc for free with a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com
Andrew Tobias blogged about this last week, I thought it was a great tip!
Strange—post about the NYT and Manbitches delurk 🙂
Oh, I’m sure I’ve popped out of the woodwork before. I just never have anything to say about book jackets, and I’m not well versed enough in the genre to win the contests.
Makes me not want to buy her book. I always see it at used book stores, must not be all that great anyway if everyone’s trying to get rid of it.
I confess, I have been known to read a chick lit on occasion…I read part of the shopaholic series, Bridget Jones, and maybe a few others, but I can’t say that I love the genre. I’ve added “Manolos” to my most hated words list. I may read chick lit sometimes, but I also read genre fiction, classic lit, scholarly non fiction, and other pretentious literary pap. And I think many readers are the same, with reading habits sprinkled throughout both genre and literary. So you can’t really say that someone who reads widely, but occasionally needs a dose of chick lit brain candy, is “blissfully ignorant of what’s wrong in the world”.
Dowd just needs to grow up and realize that people can read whatever the hell they want to read. But WE all know this.
Yikes! I just read the Dowd screed. The whole time, I was thinking what an insufferable elitist! But then, she’d probably be happy to hear that comment, ha. Elitists always sniff when they don’t like what the middle classes do at play. Poor dears.
To be honest, I think she did chicklitters everywhere a service, if anything. That piece came off as pompous, arrogant, elitist and probably reminded more than a few women why they read their brain candy.
O’Dowd also thinks she can’t get a guy because she’s too smart and successful. Yeah, right.
“Being in a seperate section doesn’t mean that a genre is less literary, it means that enough people ask for it by name that it’s easier if there’s just one place to show them.”
I researched niche marketing, and I found, to my suprise, that books sell better if pulled out of the general fiction section and put into an area with books that were even tangentially similar. It’s a decision about marketing, not quality of writing.
Personally, I fail to understand why books by disaffected young men about their inability to form relationships, their dissatisfaction at work, and the ways they screw up are always seen as literature, regardless of the quality of writing, but books by women are always trivialized, even by other women.
Deanna Carlyle has written about chick lit as coming of age novels. But everyone is always looking for the next Holden Caulfield, and not the young woman who stumbles occasionally on the road toward adulthood.
Also, good to know that about wicker baskets leaking!
Maureen Dowd? Oh, riiight. She’s a feminist. Who obviously hates women.
Hypocrite much, you miserable cow? Just shut up. Go give Al Franken a blowjob or something and keep your snotty little opinions to yourself.
(Okay, maybe December’s had a little too much to drink tonight.)
In the back of my brain I wonder if Maureen is a secret chick-lit reader, full of self-loathing and her screed is an excuse for having all those pink covered books laying around. She bought them in the name of research, people. Not that she might enjoy them, not a chance they might make her laugh or just be fun to read.
I’m not a chick-lit reader myself, the few books I’ve read have characters that are remarkably similar and dull. However I will defend anyone’s right to read the book of her choice. Even Mo O’Dowd.
If the catch-all section was called “general fiction,†it wouldn’t bother me, but I do find the implication that Random ChickLit Title is more literary than, say, A Stranger in a Strange Land, insulting to geeks everywhere.
I don’t think this is so much a slam against sci-fi as an acknowledgement that there’s enough of it to get its own category. It’s also a lot easier to distinguish between sci-fi and “other” books; just look for the spaceship or robot.
I tend to think of literature (the category) as more of an easier-to-spell miscellaneous.
My opinion is that women who don’t like Cinderella bodice rippers are no fun in bed!
Maybe I have to restate that: women who’ve never gone through a stage when they’ve liked Cinderalla bodice rippers are no fun in bed.
Hey, Rosemary Rogers showed us exactly how much fun a Cinderalla bodice ripper could be. And there is NO way Rosemary Rogers is wrong.
(maybe I shouldn’t post and drink. I might regret this in the morning…)
Another ‘women’s pasttimes are silly and so are they’ article. Notice how no one talks about how the frivolity of football/basketball/hockey/etc games.
Forgive me, Maureen, for indulging in something light as I sit in the cancer clinic while Mom gets chemo. I’m just silly that way.
I have read the Red Badge of Courage, and Dubya still won’t take my calls.
I am perfectly well aware of what’s going on in the world. That’s why I want to get the hell away from it for a couple of hours.
Can we contact this woman personally on the Dumb Bitches site?
I think the closest I’ve come to chick lit is the Stephanie Plum series, and I don’t know if that even qualifies. Yep – reality has to be suspended a little, since I doubt any insurance company would offer a policy to a woman who blows up at least two cars per book. But I also laugh out loud reading them, so who cares about a little suspended disbelief?
I fail to see the connection between reading something enjoyable and terrorists, but leave it to some people to link anything and everything with the “war on terror”. It’s so silly that it’s worthy only of an eye-roll and nothing more. I read to forget about the crap that’s going on all over the place, where I can count on a happy ending, for the most part. And I don’t recall there being all that much bodice ripping in any genre these days.
Sounds to me like Maureen Dowd has a few issues and if it takes pulling down an entire body of readers to make her feel better about herself, I say, ‘whatever’. She’s so not worth my time and energy. Not to mention she needs to go reread her Jane Austen, who probably would have been considered a chick-lit author in her day.**gasp** Heaven Forbid!
That’s exactly my point. Call it what it is: general, not literary. (General’s even easier to spell than literature.) Then the Dowd’s of the world can stop getting their panties in a twist over what’s in it.
Kim took my response. Jane Austen was considered “fluff” in her day. As was Shakespeare.
*shrugs* Anyone in the romance industry knows that those who claim to read and write “literature” knock the “fluff” put out…….for billions of dollars a year.
I think Jennifer Crusie can take her money to the bank laughing all the way.
“O’Dowd also thinks she can’t get a guy because she’s too smart and successful. Yeah, right.” -Marta Acosta
Hmmm…or maybe it’s because she’s a bitch.
Jane Austen wasn’t actually considered anything in her day at all. It took 50 years after her birth until she started to be canonized as Great Literature with snooty british accent. But I guess that’s the fate of fluff—NOT being considered.
And Dowd needs to get over herself.
I just don’t get it. Why must so-called critics harp time and again on either romance novels or chick lit? I’ve never seen someone treat any other genre with such disdain. It would be interesting to see what the readers would say if someone typed out “Oh, that 1984, seems like that guy was WRONG!” There would be a massive backlash.
Then again, history has shown us that women can’t be authors without paying for it. Jane had to publish under a pseudonym as did many other female authors of her time and those writing today do not get the credit they are due compared to their male bretheren.
I’m personally not a huge fan of chick lit, but I say let people read what they want. It does not make them less informed, it just gives them a place to hide from the horrors of reality for a little bit. I’d bet that if a survey was done, people who read fun books for pleasure are less stressed than those that don’t.
I can’t claim to have seen that, but I’ve seen somebody say “One of my favorite authors is George Orwell” in one paragraph, and “I don’t like science fiction” (which was not immediately followed with “but” or “except”) in the next. It’s easy to call a genre bad when you stop considering the good examples part of the genre- just like Jane Austen and ChickLit.
The closest thing to ChickLit that I read is the Pink Carnation series (I don’t even like Jane Austen), but I can tell the difference between “not to my taste” and “bad.” I don’t like The Godfather, either, but I’m not going to say it sucks, or that all movies about organized crime do.
Since I’m fairly paranoid and tend to think the worst of people when they show their lack of imagination, originality and/or coherent mental function by generalizing about any group or genre, this is my opinion:
She said it to get the readers riled up like we did when those ads went up on the Metro because she’s not getting the attention she needs and is attempting to cause a kerfluffle to get it.
Mine own thoughts, but it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.
And having seen my seven-year-old spew Cheez Doodles over a beige leather couch once, I actually have to say I agree that any man who will watch you do it and still call you after IS a keeper.
I’m still not sure what “chick lit” is, but there seems to be only one logical response to such out-of-touch elitism: “Guess what, bimbo. People BUY this stuff, which is why other people WRITE it. Take a little stroll through the Real World and get a grip, however tenuous, on The Way Things Are…then go bitch at your own fucking readers!” (Yeah, I can fer sher see George Sand triving in today’s “literary” marketplace.)
Sorry. That should have been thriving, but I am fucking steamed!
We all like to feel a bit elitist about something. Dowd actually had me going that she had a legitimate view (that there were a flood of so-called “Chick Lit” books) until she hit on the “Brit Chick Lit” of “Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging†mentioned up thread as the Young Adult book that it is. I know. I’m an adult male without a child under 20 years of age in sight and I can say that I’ve read the entire series. (My saving grace here is that I didn’t buy them – my wife did) The entire book series is written as a coming of age series, and I wouldn’t have a problem handing it to about 85% of the “Tween”-age girls out there.
The point here is that if Dowd couldn’t recognize Young Adult for Chick Lit. There’s not much defense here, because it was obvious when she quoted a passage. All this means is that Maureen Dowd opened herself up to being labled as clueless and as someone who judged books if not by their cover, but judged them by where she found them in the bookstore.
The entire topic of being shocked at the volume of women’s fiction that’s not staid literature has indeed been covered before—I’m shocked that here’s an entire editorial that provides no new insight and provides not one shred of information we didn’t already know. Ms. Dowd has judged a whole section of books at the bookstore without giving one real alternative that her audience hasn’t already read.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Ms. Dowd gets paid a premium for being in Times Select for paying subscribers and I imagine those fine folks have little chance of finding out how out of touch Ms. Dowd appears to be.
It’s women like her who make me feel ashamed about reading Katie Fforde on the train! Damn them, and her too.
I read a lot of different types of books, usually fluff before bed and in the evenings, and literature on the train and on weekends. Who gives a shit?!
For what it’s worth, chick lit has it’s own area (usually a small table) in Dutch bookstores, and I recall that the bookstores in Australia often had special chick lit shelves as well.
I KNEW I should’ve clipped that article NRC*Next (a Dutch paper) ran. The general gist of it was that many female authors are wasting their potential and talent on chick lit, and hopefully in the future they’ll ‘come to their senses and write real books’. Seems like it’s romance/chick lit bashing week in media all over the world.
Lauren Willig said: but at its best, chick lit affords a medium for smart social satire on the changing norms of courtship and marriage.
So true.
Maureen Dowd displayed her own limited brain capacity by not recognizing this aspect of pop literature. Artists in general and comedians specifically are usually ahead of their time and that’s why there’s little or no immediate value placed on them. But the good ones get their due in the end.
Why do we feel the need to attack someone for posting their opinion about literature?
Maureen Dowd is a satirist, not the last word in books or culture. We pride ourselves in being open minded – about being tolerant. Even if it steams us, we shouldn’t have to explode under her provocation.
If we keep attacking critics, no one will dare criticise. What will art and literature look like with no honest criticsm to shape it to the social context in which it’s formed?
Will political correctness take the edges off everything and leave us living in a bland world where everything is declared palatable because no one dares say it’s crap? Has no one heard of the Emperor’s new clothes?
Some people might enjoy chick lit. Others find it akin to invisible clothes.
But if we’re not free to voice our opinions, then we’ll all be reading i-Universe books in a few years, because everything will be wonderful.
She can totally voice her opinion on chick lit and its readers, and we can fully oppose her opinion. Should we hold her tongues, just because it’s her ‘opinion’? And a badly argumented one at that, with bringing the war on terror into it and everything.
Isn’t the whole purpose of freedom of speech that you can oppose the opinions others voice, without having to be afraid of repercussions?
Dowd is free to voice her opinion, but as Smart Bitches, we can voice ours right back and say that she didn’t do any research, she apparently mixed up YA with chick lit, she’s voicing tired old opinions that have very little traction because they’re backed by very little more than scorn for literature by and for women. True literary criticism does a leetle bit more than say a genre is leaving the world open to the terrorists—it interrogates the sociological and narrative elements that make chick lit popular and speculates about its place in culture. It doesn’t tear it down without thought, research, or theory.
Ooh, word verification: analysis84
Exactly!
If we keep attacking critics, no one will dare criticise. What will art and literature look like with no honest criticsm to shape it to the social context in which it’s formed?
And if we *don’t* keep attacking critics, criticism will become this hideous, bloated behemoth with no checks on its accuracy, relevance, or self-importance.
The whole point of criticism is the dialogue.
As for chick lit, I read it. I even really like some of it, if I find the heroine(s) to be competent adults. My problem is that the novels classed as “chick lit,” the novels that Dowd is reaming, are sometimes really interesting, well-written, and powerful novels. I’m thinking of Marian Keyes, for example, whose books were the *last* thing I was expecting. (I thought I’d get a happy bunch of fluff, and instead I got this insightful look into the lives of three very different and interesting women.)
Also, does Dowd realize that the critiques she’s leveling against chick lit are precisely the same ones people have levelled against Austen, for talking only about women in drawing rooms and not about the fact that she, too, lived in a time of war?
Maureen Dowd(Galleycat posted a link to her blog,which repeats what she said in the NYT)seems very out of touch,as Hall and Oates would say. Her “discovery” of the chick lit genre is akin to turning on a music show in which the host exclaims”Hey,did you know there’s thing called hip-hop?” The response to that by most of us in the know is”Where the hell have you been,dude?”
As to reading the Red Badge of Courage vs. a chick lit title-hey,Leon,plenty of us read that book in high school and it was boring then and still boring now. Just my opinion,but that’s the funny thing about a democracy-we’re allowed to have opinions and not be bullied into reading and thinking the same way about life and politics by people who believe they’re the arbiters of intellectual thought.
I had to throw my two cents in on that Red Badge of Courage quote. Do you really think that people who are at war want to read about other people at war?
When I was in Afghanistan, we’d get dozens of Tom Clancy and other hoorah he-man novels. They’d languish on the giveaway bookshelves while the chicklit got snapped up faster than freebies at Wal-Mart.
Also, you’ll note, what’s worthy reading? A book apparently first serialized over 100 years ago? So I guess these silly women writing all this scrawl about Jimmy Choos aren’t the only culprits in the lack of relevant literature today, huh?
I’m not saying there are no good war novels being published today. I have no idea if that’s true or not; I’m too busy berating my mother for merely borrowing, rather than buying, the newest Mary Balogh, thus depriving me the delight of stealing it from her. I’m saying she seems to be saying there are no good war novels being published today.
By the way, I agree that critics of literature should criticize literature. And people should criticize them when they do it badly, or when they don’t appear to be critics of literature at all, but rather clueless and out-of-date whiners. And from what I’ve read of Maureen Dowd, I think she’ll be able to withstand even our clever and blistering criticism.