Monday, we observed a recent skirmish in the chick lit debate, and the heated rhetoric continued yesterday, as women critics online declared their allegiances. First, Rebecca Traister of Salon deployed the “these novels are recording women’s history” defense, although the opening—which conflates the assault on chick lit with the assault on Lauren Weisberger’s second novel—seems perhaps excessively reductive: I mean, okay, you’ve got examples of people saying the badness of Weisberger’s prose is representative of the genre in which she performs, but surely somebody out there must be saying she’s just a bad writer all on her own? (Come to think of it, this might be a good time to quote a passing comment by my G-Cat partner: “This isn’t chick lit. It’s just stoopid.”)
Traister throws in another popular counterattack: “It is the fear of not being taken seriously that surely undergirds the urge to blast chick lit. Female critics—the genre’s most frequent, and thus its loudest—are understandably afraid of having their entire sex tarred with the same ‘frothy’ brush as their chick-lit writing counterparts… But the urge to condemn chick lit is also born of a shame about our own femininity, a desire to distance ourselves not just from bad writing, but from retailed versions of womanhood that might affect the way we are perceived by men and by each other.” To that, literary blogger Maud Newton replies, hogwash, at least on the Prada-wearing devil front: “To suggest that Weisberger’s some sort of modern-day historian, or a Jane Austen or Edith Wharton… is to do a disservice not only to one’s sisters but to contemporary literature as a whole.” There may be something to that; on the other hand, Traister didn’t appear to be suggesting Weisberger was a good historian, or that she was telling the story of everywoman.