No, it's not 2005.
Maureen Dowd teeters ever closer to irrelevance today. I had to keep checking the date at the top of the column as she trotted out one anti-chick lit cliche after another. Complaints about the sea of pink covers? Check. Snide remarks about chick versus lit? Check. Inability to tell the difference between, say, YA fiction and fiction for grown women? Check.
Though it did amuse me to find that she'd swept A Certain Anthology I Refuse to Name under her chick lit umbrella.
Just as it amused me that she devoted column inches to deriding chick lit books, yet still bought thirty to take home.
Oh, well. We can't all write incisive volumes about deep social issues, raising IQ points around us with every word. Some of us just write about relationships between the sexes.
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Heels Over Hemingway By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 10, 2007
WASHINGTON
I was cruising through Borders, looking for a copy of “Nostromo.”
Suddenly I was swimming in pink. I turned frantically from display table to display table, but I couldn’t find a novel without a pink cover. I was accosted by a sisterhood of cartoon women, sexy string beans in minis and stilettos, fashionably dashing about book covers with the requisite urban props — lattes, books, purses, shopping bags, guns and, most critically, a diamond ring.
Was it a Valentine’s Day special?
No, I realized with growing alarm, chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham. The store was possessed with the devil spawn of “The Devil Wears Prada.” The blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.
I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering.
“Penis lit versus Venus lit,” said my friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who was with me. “An unacceptable choice.”
“Looking for Mr. Goodbunny” by Kathleen O’Reilly sits atop George Orwell’s “1984.” “Mine Are Spectacular!” by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger hovers over “Ulysses.” Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series cuddles up to Rudyard Kipling.
Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.
Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.
The narrator of that last, Georgia, begins with a note to her readers: “Hello, American-type chums! (Perhaps you say ‘Howdy’ in America — I don’t know — but then I’m not really sure where Tibet is either, or my lipstick.) ... I hope you like my diary and don’t hold it against me that my great-great-great-grandparents colonized you. (Not just the two of them. ...).”
Giving the books an even more interchangeable feeling is the bachelorette party of log-rolling blurbs by chick-lit authors. Jennifer “Good in Bed” Weiner blurbs Sarah Mlynowski’s “Me vs. Me” and Karen McCullah Lutz’s “The Bachelorette Party.” Lauren Weisberger blurbs Emily “Something Borrowed” Giffin.
I took home three dozen of the working women romances. They can lull you into a hypnotic state with their simple life lessons — one heroine emulated Doris Day, another Audrey Hepburn, one was the spitting image of Carolyn Bessette, another Charlize Theron — but they’re a long way from Becky Sharp and Elizabeth Bennet. They’re all chick and no lit.
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.”
In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.
“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.’ ”
The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times. In my local bookstore, it’s more like a makeup mirror.
This woman calls herself a feminist? What a hypocrite.
She's dismissing all of these books she's never even read just because she doesn't like pink. She assumes that "classic" literature is more "important" -- but did she happen to notice that 99% of it was written by men?
She writes, "The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times." Exactly. And we are finally getting to hear women's voices instead of having to read men drone on about about whales and war and wolves.
I consider myself a feminist, however, I think there is nothing worse than a feminist who derides other women for being feminine.
It is sexist to say that something that is associated with being feminine (soap operas, romantic comedy, pink, housework, motherhood) is inherently less important than things that are considered masculine (fighting wars, politics, sports, action and adventure movies, westerns).
Not to mention the fact that I don't really want to read about rape and tragic circumstances all the time, especially when the character dies in the end (Tess of the D'urbervilles, I'm talking to you). Sometimes, 'real' literature can be such a downer.
I'm sure it would irk Dowd to know that I plan to study and write about romance novels for my senior thesis. Fun ;)
I'm not really a chick lit type at all (I'm more of a 'slightly metatextual novels that deconstruct the cliches and conventions of the writer and the novel'), but I don't go on about how novels that don't construct the notion of fiction and generally will never be nominated for Booker Prizes are teh lame and ruining literature.
Maureen Dowd must be hepped up on goofballs or something, if I were to rant about how chick lit is near literary fiction in the alphabet, I'd be shot down. But she's a famous journalist and has the clout to do such a thing, tsk.
Bridgey xxx
What about Islam's treatment of women. TALK about that, Ms. Dowd. It's frightening how silent the feminist are on this issue. Still griping about white males, glass ceilings and feminine woman who like pink book covers?
Get over yourself. Cry out for women who are being oppressed, whipped, denied rights, treated as 1/2 a man via the dictates of a "religion."
Cry for all women to be free, EVERYWHERE!
Ms.Dowd, use your power to advance woman's liberty and rights. Do something useful.
Then read a good chick lit. ;)