Meghan McCarron weighs in on the chick lit = tempest making the rounds (again) this week:
The arguement, as well as I can parse it, goes, "Lots of women in the 19th century wrote a lot of popular but forgettable novels that society decried, and a tantalizingly similar thing is going on now. The 19th century produced Jane Austen, whose books (okay, movies) we all know and love, so it’s totally okay that the 21st century’s female literary culture resembles that of the 19th."
That is a terrible arguement. No one deserves that arguement. In fact, if I were to argue in favor of chick lit, from one genre ghetto to another, let’s say, I would put it like this: Pulp always has something to teach us. Its freedom from respectability allows it to experiment, most notably with voice and convention, in a way the literary mainstream rarely attempts (see: Chandler. See: Dick). Chick lit is no exception. I’ve read very little of it, but what charmed me about what I have read was the voice. It observed ravenously, it paid hommage to the world of female friendship, and made me laugh. It was wrapped around narratives that alternately bored me and made me uncomfortable, but it is a big mainstream testament that women are funny, and that women like funny, and women are paying just as much attention as wryly observing men to what’s going on. I am disgusted by the trend of properly MFA’d writers (Sittenfeld, as well as Meghan Daum, whose ‘Quality of Life Report’ has WAY more in common with "Good in Bed" than it does with any reasonable facsimilie of literary 20-something angst, blurbs and credentials aside) writing chick lit and then waving their degrees around and claiming they are somehow ‘better’ than it, when in many ways their literary insecurities actually hamper their efforts in the genre. Chick lit is doing some worthwhile things. To dismiss it as pure crap would be just as irresponsible and almost as dangerous as embracing it whole-heartedly.
Much more there.
*Not that there’s anything wrong with teapots.
So, we had some early dinner guests and figured out how to hook up one of those Atari joysticks with seven or eight games from the 2600 era. That’s right: I’ve been playing Adventure. (Which contains the first ever Easter Egg. Not to mention the Bat. And the best duck-like dragons ever.)
I must confess that I may actually end up laming up the place this year. I’m tired, have a little bit of a head cold and had planned to just work on the revision. I suppose I could stick up the first chapter of the novel, but instead I may just malaize (it’s my word!) on the couch commenting on the efforts of others and such. We’ll see. Adventure!
