Over at the Huffington Post yesterday, This Is Not Chick Lit editor Elizabeth Merrick traded rhetorical blows with This Is Chick Lit contributor Rachel Pine. Merrick strikes the first low blow by remarking that chick lit writers were “miffed enough” at the announcement of her collection of contemporary women writers “to publish a retaliatory anthology… Meow.” Seriously: If a male reporter tried to classify this debate as a catfight, even as a joke, the shitstorm would be enormous, and for good reason. So why does Merrick—not that we don’t love you, Elizabeth—get a free pass on that one? Or its followup declaration, “The claws have come out”?
Pine, meanwhile, tends to stick to the high road, merely observing that Merrick’s remarks about chick lit in the introduction to her own book indicate how little of it she’s actually read, even as she acknowledges Merrick’s reputation in New York literary circles as “a real champion for parity for women in magazine and book publishing.” To hear Merrick tell it, the commercially successful women of chick lit are practically in collaboration with The Man in keeping “serious women literary writers” down. Pine, on the other hand, believes that if literary women are having a problem competing with more commercially inclined women, well, that’s how commercial markets work. “When it comes to review attention,” she adds, “literary novels receive much more ink.”
She has a point: Counting this weekend’s upcoming issue, two of the last three NYTBR covers have been devoted to novels by Jennifer Egan, who turns up in Merrick’s posse, and Marisha Pessl, who probably would’ve fit right in if she’d been active early enough to be included. Chick lit, on the other hand, hasn’t made an appearance in the Review pages since Plum Sykes wound up in the “summer reading” issue, where her novel was dismissed as “what you read on the jitney after Vogue and before Us Weekly.”
UPDATE: Pine also takes note of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “exceptionally nasty” take on Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot in last year’s NYTBR: “Reading that left me reeling from the idea that someone whose first novel was a wonderfully reviewed bestseller could choose to metaphorically kneecap another writer, Tonya Harding style.” Jessa Crispin quickly challenges Pine by pointedly asking, “Have you noticed that the chick lit writers keep bringing up this particular review, which was really not that nasty?” Um, really? Let’s refresh our memories:
[Sittenfeld wrote:] “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.”
Granted, it’s not as nasty as the stuff Leon Wieseltier writes for the Times, but for Crispin to suggest that “the main complaint with the Sittenfeld review appears to be that Sittenfeld is a woman and a writer, so she should therefore not say anything bad about other women writers,” is completely disngenuous. I didn’t think The Wonder Spot was all that spectacular, either, but you didn’t see me twirling about in the national spotlight calling Melissa Banks a slut for writing it. For that matter, the criticism I saw of Sittenfeld’s review wasn’t about her lack of female solidarity, but for her lazy reviewing tactics. It hurts to say so, but Crispin’s argument about chick-lit writers seems about as credible as Liesl Schillinger’s about bloggers.