There it is. Did that title catch your eye? It caught mine, too. What’s so tantalizing about negative terms? This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers seemed appealing for a reason I did not immediately pinpoint.
Is it rooted in my contempt for the idea of chick lit? Probably. But does this book transcend the boundaries set for by authors within the genre? Absolutely Not.
The subtitle still defines these writers by their gender. There’s no great feminist movement between these covers. The marketing is directed at precisely the same audience as chick lit: young, single women who enjoy light reading. The response I’ve had simply from carrying this novel around has confirmed my every suspicion, to an extent that I can only describe as amusing.
A waitress stopped me in a little New York cafe, when I was midway through the book. “Oooh!” she squealed. “GREAT book!” I was surprised that she had completed the book so quickly, and responded, “You’ve finished it already? It was only released two weeks ago.” She frowned slightly, and then said, “Oh. I thought it was This IS Chick Lit. THAT was a great book.” Then, to save herself, she said, “I’ve read that one, too. But I thought it was the second part of This Is Chick Lit, so I was pretty disappointed. It’s sorta so-so.”
Sure enough, you can buy both books together on Amazon. This might let the aforementioned audience down, if they get around to reading the book I’m reviewing here.
Buying the book was an endeavor in and of itself. This book was placed BELOW “chick” literature, including, I kid you not, He’s Just Not That Into You. The cover glowed with an effervescent cluster of bold, pink type (all caps, of course).
The back cover is promising. Gloria Steinem raves, “I’ll know we’re getting somewhere when equally talented male writers feel they have to separate themselves from the endless stream of fiction glorifying war, hunting, and sports by naming an anthology This Is Not A Guy Thing.” The paragraph above her quote promises “a celebration of America’s most dynamic literary voices, as well as a much needed reminder that for every stock protagonist with a designer handbag and three boyfriends, there is a woman writer pushing the envelope of literary fiction with imagination, humor, and depth.”
I sure hope so. After completing this novel, I am not reassured.
I wouldn’t add this to the James Frey list of Books I’d Like To Be Refunded For, In Time As Well As Money. There are a few beautiful passages, and it was entertaining. This Is Not Bad Subway Reading. And it helped me tune out the muzak in the doctor’s office.
“Meaning of Ends” by Martha Witt achieves everything the back cover promises. She takes the dissonance between English and Italian, then translates them into physical action and the protagonist’s perceptions of her relationship. Witt is exceedingly concise, teetering between prose and poetry.
Other pieces have their strengths, and a number “pushed the envelope,” though few were risky enough to be breath-taking. I will list first the few I adored.
Holiday Reinhorn deserves kudos for her experimentation with narrative voice. The story “Gabe” is six and a half pages of redefining a single character with each and every sentence. “Volunteers Are Shining Stars” by Curtis Sittenfeld chose an excellent example of women criticizing other women only because they cannot come to terms with themselves – I liked this story so well I passed it on to a friend. And Dika Lam’s prose was stellar in “The Seventy-Two Ounce Steak Challenge;” I’m determined to seek out her other work. The most rewarding part of reading an anthology is finding a writer one can continue to follow.
But I can’t shake the feeling that “Two Days” by Aimee Bender might have been marketed as chick lit, had the ending been just a little bit happier. “Gabriella, My Heart” by Cristina Henriquez is simply about relationships, though the main characters happen to be male. Perhaps there is more struggle in a character’s effort to define his own sexuality, but the story is still a love triangle. As is “Ava Bean” by Jennifer S. Davis, though the third character vying for affection is an old woman on her deathbed.
“Embrace” by Roxana Robinson felt like a Hallmark card that ended with a smash into one of the Twin Towers. It sounds heartless to say so, but I can’t read any more about the 9/11 attacks, especially in fiction. The gesture of an embrace tying three sections of a story together is a very good one; affairs and foreign plane hijackers make me cringe.
There are a few oddball pieces in the book, which are both rewarding and desperate for critique. “Joan, Jeanne, La Pucelle, Maid of Orleans” by Judy Budnitz was more effective than I anticipated. It plucks Joan of Arc from the fifteenth century and equips her with camera crew, then BAM! We’ve got Jeanne D’Arc, the reality TV series. I was initially repulsed by the idea, but Budnitz manages a comprehensible social commentary through a unique format.
“Selling the General” by Jennifer Egan is founded in a similar character juxtaposition: a wealthy New Yorker in public relations is hired to make a general, who is responsible for an enormous genocide, look human again. She throws on some designer clothes, slings her stereotypical nine-year-old/privately schooled/pink-clad daughter under her arm, hires a movie star for a photoshoot with His Highness, and flies out to the general’s palace to save his image. While Egan may have been going for social commentary, this piece is entertaining rather than profound.
Samantha Hunt concentrates on an entirely different kind of woman: the synthetic kind. In “Love Machine,” she creates a strange relationship between a robotic woman, designed to bomb a reclusive terrorist in his own log cabin, and the robot’s creator, Wayne. This was both entertaining and mildly morbid, but I wish I could have asked the author for more. Wayne is introduced to the reader in a nuclear-missile silo, where he spends two years during the Cold War with a man named Dwayne. Their relationship fascinated me more than the robot. How does one survive two years with a single companion? Hunt’s take on it, while brief, is utterly beautiful.
Perhaps I am better suited for the fiction glorifying war, etc. But I found this collection lived up to its title: it is defined by something it isn’t, rather than what it is. We cannot expect “women writers” to break into literary fiction until they are simply “writers.” I sincerely hope this volume will grant the most talented of these writers the chance for a book deal that does Not include bubblegum pink type.
Amusing? Yes. But literary? I’m not sold on the idea.