In my early undergraduate days, chick lit didn’t yet exist as the recognisable genre it is today. The moniker was first applied to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, which wasn’t published until 1996. By the beginning of the 2000s chick lit had become le mot du jour in certain circles, usually the ones which loved to comment on it in disparaging terms. I don't feel that to call a woman a 'chick' is patronising, especially when female friends often do that, but in this instance it is evident that the association of chicks and literature is a not-so-subtle way to underline the in-com-possibility of literary fiction and a certain type of female.
Chicks (the feathered variety) are supposed to be stupid, ergo this is literature for morons. And if this is literature for morons, we are in the presence of an oxymoron of sorts as that which is defined as literature cannot be moronic. If it’s moronic then it isn’t literature. So we are not simply saying that this isn’t literature at all; we are adding that it's a pale imitation most likely written by morons for morons (or 'chicks' in the worst sense of the term) who cannot possibly grasp how we are taking a swipe both at them and at the books they are reading.
As for me and my posse, we were doing English in order to develop the ability to read a text profoundly, intensely and attentively; by the time we undertook the theory and practice of criticism, in our second year, it was evident that there were so many complex concepts by so many different thinkers doing the rounds (Foucault! Said! Derrida! Baudrillard! Lacan! Barthes!) that the only printed escapism we had time for were Cosmo and Maxim (oh, the irony).
As we did fancy ourselves as a Bloomsbury Group in the making, plentiful afternoons were spent in the JCR shouting at one another, especially by the time we hit Lacanian theory and an un-bridgeable chasm had opened between the girls who loved their feminism and those who were immensely irritated by the implicit assumption that to be female meant to be destined to a life in the critical arena of women’s studies (I can only add barf to that, dear reader). Naturally, Bridget Jones’s Diary did not come into our picture if not fleetingly. Those who did read it, tore into it with such a furious critical verbosity that could only mean they had already implicitly graduated to a supreme intellectual level way above Fielding’s pointless prose.
The feeling stayed with me for quite some time. I recall walking out of a cinema and scoffing at the poster of Bridget Jones’s Diary, as if its mere super-starry level of worldwide appreciation were a reflection of the intellectual inadequacies of females everywhere, including me. Fast-forward to London at the beginning of 2002, and I am having dinner in Knightsbridge with a colleague. I am telling her all about my forthcoming New York trip (again) at which point she whips out a pale pink paperback from her bag.
‘I brought you this. It’s soooooo funny, I know you’ll love it. I did! Look, I’ve written something in it for you!’
I flip to it and I really am touched (To Steph! Shop ‘til you drop in NYC!), but I evidently linger on it for too long and she senses that I am somewhat taken aback by the type of book I am handling. I guess I must have looked as dumbfounded as a nun receiving a box of condoms.
‘I mean, I'm sure you’re probably not into chick lit’, she almost back-pedals, ‘But, really, it’s just read-it-once-and-pass-it-on, isn’t it? That’s why I am giving it to you. I am not gonna read it again, my sister gave it to me. Plus, the girl in the book reminds me of you. READ IT!’
The book was The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. I did read it and Dee was completely right, it was extremely funny, so much so that I subsequently read all of the ones that followed (they are now six in total).
For all critical purposes, and in postmodernist fiction-terms, the Shopaholic books qualify as a super-text. While we do have six separate novels, the presence of the same characters in the same narrative zones means that, like in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles or Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, we are really reading one, very long novel and not six, ten or thirteen separate ones respectively.
However, the problem with these books is that they are becoming so spectacularly trite and formulaic in their execution that they are more similar to the Friday the 13th cinematic saga than to any other novel out there. In other words, read one and you’ve read them all. One could expect this issue to manifest itself across any series, but I cannot say this to be the case (although I do concede that I haven’t read each single series of novels out there, maybe you have).
For example, if compared to Terry Brooks’s Landover books (or to any cited above), they too constituting a super-text, the execution of the Shopaholic series fizzles into continuous, disappointing repetitions. When Mini Shopaholic was published last year, I recall flicking to the first page whilst in the bookstore and even before my eyes found the first chapter, I knew what the first few words would be: ‘Ok, don’t panic’. This is the way each single novel has begun and while the author of any sequel is invariably faced with the prospect of pleasing the readers with a subtle mix of familiarity and novelty without dashing their expectations, these first few words epitomise the repetitive content of the novels.
Equally, while any book contains a story arc with a character (or multiple characters) changed by the end of it, in these all of the characters’ faults return with a vengeance with each new episode, as if the scarring events of the previous ones had never even taken place, let alone left a memory. I know that there are many stupid people in the world, but I sincerely do not believe that anyone can be as much of an idiot as Becky Bloomwood and nobody can be half as blind and self-absorbed as Luke Brandon. By comparison, it is easy to believe that if you get bitten by a radioactive spider, you can swish among skyscrapers hanging by a web spurted off your very hands. I felt Kinsella had somewhat run out of story-telling steam by book three, Shopaholic Ties The Knot, and even then, I am being generous. But... I valiantly soldiered on to the latest one, only to ask myself why.
The answer is simple: what I find to be the only redeeming feature of chick lit is its page-turning quality. Even when I may not care about what happens to the characters, I feel compelled to check whether my predictions were correct (invariably, they were, and here’s the formulaic aspect striking again). In Kinsella’s case, her ability to create absurd situations breaks into the realm of comedic farce. She is immensely talented in this sense but I feel that her ability is somewhat wasted when, with Becky Bloomwood, she re-utilises the same story six times over. Even so, she remains above Helen Fielding and Lauren Weisberger by miles.
I have only read Bridget Jones’s Diary and not its sequel (in French, at that), and all I can say is that it is an extremely banal book (in its premise, in its execution, in its denouement) that was turned into an absolute Hollywood masterpiece, and I say this without a single speck of irony. As for The Devil Wears Prada, I cannot identify what’s so ground-breaking about it, and I speak as someone who has been (avidly) collecting (and reading) British, Australian, French and Italian Vogues for the past fifteen years, hence I supposedly represent the ultimate target reader who, most likely, would have killed for Andy’s job.
So, what has changed since the undergraduate days when I would not have been caught dead with a cheap chick-lit paperback, let alone talking about it? Well, I’ve grown up for a start. I understood that my intelligence or my ability ‘profoundly to read and understand a text’, as we were telling one another at the uni, isn’t hampered or marred or obliterated by reading something that isn’t Austen, Stoker, Shelley, Milton and so on. I am unfazed by the possibility that someone sitting opposite on the tube may label me an imbecile by glimpsing the cover of what I’m reading.
Secondly, I’ve also understood that the routes to escapism point in many different directions. Mine usually head to an ancient Arnie movie (say, Commando), while somebody else’s may point to these copycat paperbacks with copycat cover illustrations, where authors and novels are assimilated into a homogeneous reality where stories and characters become all similar, ultimately indistinguishable from one another. And who cares who chooses which path to escape from reality.
I’ll never forget the day I visited a friend of mine when we were sixteen or so. She used to read lots and lots of romance writing, especially lots of Mills and Boon and lots by Danielle Steel. On that afternoon, she had just finished Wuthering Heights and told me, with her eyes veiled with tears and her voice cracking, that there was absolutely nothing like it, it's changed me. Many years later I find that, yes, one has to agree on that one, only a philistine would not. And it’s for the same reason that I think that three chick lits (the six Shopaholic as one super-text, Bridget Jones and Wears Prada) are more than enough for me. Did I ever tell you that I am completely ignorant of Russian literature? It’s about time I stop wasting time on crap and start reading the life-changing stuff.
Comments