Chicks Dig It:

       A Guy Reads A Bunch Of 'Chick-Lit'  

                By Alex Nall              

Whenever someone asks me, “Hey, what did you read this summer?” I always become infuriated because my initial response is “Not enough!” That was the case this summer, yet again. I made a vow to myself at the beginning of summer to read the contemporary classics: Hemingway, Kerouac, maybe some Homer if I could squeeze it in. Instead, a friend of mine handed me a book and said, “Read this. You’ll like it”. The name of the book was The Girls’ Guide To Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. I had heard of this short story collection and even excerpts of it in a Creative Writing class back in high school. I looked at the book and rolled my eyes, but not wanting to be rude, said I would “try it out”.            

The book’s protagonist is Jane, who throughout the seven stories in the collection, ages in a non-linear model that would make Leopold Bloom’s head spin. First she’s fourteen observing her brother’s torrid relationship from afar, then she is in her mid-twenties, dealing with the woes of her own relationship issues… while on vacation, and in the last three stories she grows in and out of a decaying relationship with an older man as she ages.            

On first look of the book’s synopsis I only had one phrase in my head: Chick Lit. That fabled genre of pseudo-prose infused with slop dialogue and ridiculous situations (Twilight fans can stop reading now if they wish), or at least that’s the impression I went in with when starting out on this new literary adventure. Soon enough, I was enthralled by Jane’s commitment woes, her scandalous and even saucy relationship with a old friend of her aunt’s, her struggle with saying goodbye to her terminally ill father and the short terse sentences that spoke bluntly to her audience: “That night, alone with all those empty beds, I couldn’t fall asleep. I’d finished Gatsby and I looked out at the lagoon, hoping to see a green light. But nobody’s dock was lit up. Only one house had any lights on, and the light was just the blue of a television set” (43). It was dialogue like this that spoke to me as a person, rather than a male reader. I was able to identify with the anxiety, confusion and bursts of joy in Jane’s sporadic life. So I continued to read more “chick lit” and see what else I could find.            

I returned to a novella I had read in high school only because it’s author, Steve Martin, was a really funny guy who was really funny. The novella was Shopgirl and much like Bank’s story collection, the prose was short, but formulated a deep sense of awareness of the loneliness in all humans. The image of Mirabelle, waiting at the counter at the glove department at Marcus Neiman’s, hoping something will happen that will make her life start, stays instilled in my head for its haunting universal outreach. I wondered, after quickly revisiting Mirabelle and company, if the male reader has completely misinterpreted the definition of “chick lit”. Surely, all these books focused around contemporary women’s lives couldn’t all be about the hardships of loneliness.            

Once again, I found that this seemed to be the cause in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel so emasculating the reader is left haunted by Esther’s total lack of faith or sanity in herself or the figurative “bell jar” world she is trapped in: “I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guiena had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round the world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap or difference to me, because wherever I sat- on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (175). Plath’s novel let me see into the challenges of women suffering from depression, just as Martin’s Mirabelle and Bank’s Jane allowed me to see the fixations and consciousness of women in contemporary literature.            

But none of these characters’ issues could amount to that of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which ended my summer reading tour (By now renamed ‘Contemporary Literature Focused on Women’; professors, take note of a possible Intro Literature class). The heartbreak and loneliness that Sethe suffers arises from the ghosts of her daughter and slavery, which take hold of her during the novel’s climax and almost squeeze every ounce of life out of her. Morrison’s novel brought to bay my newfound theory that the books I had been reading weren’t books about depressed women, but were documents emphasizing the psychological effects of different lifestyles, be it Jane’s get-the-man now agenda, Mirabelle’s post-grad wandering, Esther’s struggle to rise to literary fame, or Sethe’s racially-scorned past.            

After this experiment was over, I found myself revisiting some works of feminine literature, finding things in them that I hadn’t before. It occurred to me as I write this, that Jane Austen satirized the “romance novels” so heavily adored by women of her time in Northanger Abbey. If there is one thing I came out learning from this experience, it’s this: books about women aren’t novelized versions of Sex and The City episodes. Lovers of literature—and male doubters, much like myself—should take note that “chick lit” is thrown around too easily by the seemingly “girly” subject matter and deceptive misinterpretations. The puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet, said it best: “For such despite they cast on female wits: If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance”. The alluring contrivance of “chick lit” is that it isn’t about “chicks” at all, but is instead a unisex form of literature that allows readers to look into the social, historic and modern complications of the conflicts between humans today.