While Maureen Dowd has already moved on to probing Barack Obama’s insecurities about where he stands on the smart-vs-pretty spectrum, chick lit writers have enjoyed picking apart her lame attack on their field during the early part of the week. British novelist Hester Browne (right) happened to be in town promoting her second book, Little Lady, Big Apple, so we met for a quick drink around the corner from the Simon & Schuster building. “I can’t recall a time in the UK when people haven’t been slagging chick lit,” Browne said about Dowd’s lack of timeliness, “and it’s very sad that it tends to be other women who write these articles.” She emphasized that chick lit novels were being read by women from all walks of life and all levels of sophistication, and that the books spoke to real issues that affect their personal and professional lives. “I believe these novels will prove to be historically interesting over time,” she says regarding their cultural relevance, and if they happen to be witty and engaging in doing so, why should that be a problem? After all, nobody accuses Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons of being frivolous. (We also got into a fascinating digression about why British chick lit is often zanier than its American counterpart, invoking the legacy of P.G. Wodehouse and observing that British readers are much more willing to accept eccentric character traits or bizarre plot twists that come with little or no explanation, while Americans seem to want a psychological motivation for everything so it’ll feel more realistic.)
After coming home from that interview, I found an email from Rachel Pine, author of The Twins of Tribeca, who missed our first round of reactions from chick lit writers because she’s away on vacation. “It seems as if it is the very alphabet that is the offending party here,” Pine writes of Dowd’s phobic reaction to girly books mixed in with her Dead White Male classics. “Those 26 capricious letters! I once saw a copy of my book shelved three titles away from The Bell Jar—thrilling, yes, but I didn’t leave the bookstore thinking I was the next Sylvia Plath.” But for Pine the coincidence of alphabetical order has actually been a more happy experience: “I’ve gotten email from people who said they found my book because it was on the same shelf as Jodi Picoult‘s books,” she reports. “I’m delighted to hear that, and I’m currently vacationing with some of the works of another P lady, Ann Patchett.”