Nom de Plume

My skylight is leaking again after Steve fixed it the other night, the dog’s eyeball is puffy again, and I came perilously close to pulling an all-nighter. All this is to excuse the fact that I am going to do something I hate. Yes, that’s right, I am going to join the ranks of the literblogi and post a review of a book review.

First, a little history.

Becky over at A Book a Week just read Sittenfeld’s Prep, a book that she had avoided because it looked like chick lit. But then she read something something called This is Not Chick Lit, which Sittenfeld had contributed to or something. So she changed her mind and read the novel anyway. She was not impressed.

This sparked an interesting conversation with Nonfiction Readers Anonymous about the chick lit/not chick lit debate. NRA also pointed out that Sittenfeld wrote a scathing review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot.

So naturally, being sleep-deprived with a damp keyboard and an impending vet bill from hell, I googled the review. Sure enough it was the NYT Reviling of Books, which lets face it, is essentially a temptation for writers to write horrible reviews of other writers they are jealous of or that they’re afraid they’ll become. It was beyond scathing. She even admits it:

To suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut — doesn’t the term basically bring down all of us? And yet, with ”The Wonder Spot,” it’s hard to resist.

Hoo boy. It goes on.

A chronicle of the search for personal equilibrium and Mr. Right, Melissa Bank’s novel is highly readable, sometimes funny and entirely unchallenging; you’re not one iota smarter after finishing it.

Isn’t this GREAT?

I’m as resistant as anyone else to the assumption that because a book’s author is female and because that book’s protagonist is a woman who actually cares about her own romantic future, the book must fall into the chick-lit genre.

Don’t you love how woman are always women’s worst enemy? Here’s the kicker:

So it’s not that I find Bank’s topic lightweight; it’s that Bank writes about it in a lightweight way.

Good freaking LORD.

You know what? I liked Prep. I liked it enough to read her second novel. I liked that too, though not as much. I also don’t really care if people know that I have weakness for well-written chick lit novels or regency romances. They’re like candy. They’ve got to be better than TV. And there’s no doubt they’re a LOT better than the US Weekly subscription Sittenfeld admits to having in one of her Salon.com articles.

If our argument is sexism in the literary world (which is what This is Not Chick Lit is all about), I have no quibble. One need only look at any copy of the New Yorker or any bookstore display to agree.

But if, on the other hand, the underlying argument is that Sittenfeld herself is not chick lit, well, that’s another story altogether. Because that’s just obnoxious.

The thing is, I wouldn’t characterize Sittenfeld as being a chick lit author … yet. Her first novel certainly wasn’t. But if she follows the trajectory she’s set forth with her second (self-obsessed, neurotic teenager to self-obsessed, neurotic twenty-something), she might have a problem. That’s why she is so dismissive of Banks’ novel.

In my original post, I wrote that there were peeps of maturity in her writing and that I am interested in seeing where she goes from here. I took out the first part because it sounded so condescending, and have I published anything? No.

I hereby put it back in.

But with a caveat, because I am completely vindicated in my theory that Sittenfeld’s two protagonists are really herself: completely neurotic and utterly self-obsessed.