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Books

These women writers are no powder puffs

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published August 6, 2006

Bridget Jones has a lot to answer for.

Eight years ago, Helen Fielding's v.v. successful novel about a wittily self-involved young single woman tapped its stiletto heels up the bestseller lists. Ever since, bookstores have been awash in lightweight novels with perky pastel covers and casts of characters who wear all the latest labels and aspire to the most old-fashioned of feminine goals.

You can argue that chick lit is brain candy, just harmless fun, or that it's an ironic postmodern exercise of female empowerment. But to a lot of women who are serious about fiction writing, it looks like a rose-colored ghetto.

So the only question about the fine new fiction anthology This Is Not Chick Lit is why it took so long to hit the shelves.

The women whose stories are collected here are not the party-girl likes of Plum Sykes (Bergdorf Blonde) and Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), who got their starts writing fashion copy and sex columns.

Instead, these women have studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop, taught at Princeton and Sarah Lawrence, published in Granta and McSweeney's. They're about short lists, not A-lists.

They range from long-established, accomplished writers like Francine Prose (Blue Angel) and Roxana Robinson (A Perfect Stranger) to this-minute hot names like Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams) and Jennifer Egan (The Keep).

Egan's contribution to the book, Selling the General, could be read as a dark parody of chick lit. Its protagonist, blessed with the Bond-girl name Dolly Peale, has a classic chick lit job as a publicist.

She's struggling to come back from a career error, but it's not a cute, ready-for-the-movie mistake. It got her six months in jail for criminal negligence and left hundreds of celebrity party guests scarred by burning oil.

We're clearly outside pink-book-jacket territory when Dolly, desperate for a way to support her spoiled daughter, takes on rehabbing the reputation of a military dictator: "The general wanted an exclusive retainer. He wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy, an end to the CIA's assassination attempts. If Qaddafi could do it, why not he?"

Dolly's plan, involving Pia Arten, a washed-up American actor, results in a chilling version of a happy ending.

Dika Lam's story takes up another chick lit staple, eating habits. But The Seventy-two Ounce Steak Challenge turns the usual obsession with eating as little as possible on its head, as a pair of Chinese-American sisters act out their good girl/bad girl issues at a Western steakhouse.

Curtis Sittenfeld's Volunteers Are Shining Stars gives a creepy twist to the baby hunger that strikes some childless women. In The Matthew Effect, Binnie Kirshenbaum rewrites Cinderella in a story about a middle-aged college professor who meets an uncharming prince.

And several of the stories revolve around romance, although not of the conventional kind. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck is a fresh, poignant take on the mismatched couple romance, while Roxana Robinson's Embrace is a searing tale of unlikely lifelong love.

None of the anthology's 18 stories follows a formula; every one is a surprise. They address women's lives without condescension, and with plenty of intelligence, style and wit. This isn't chick lit, but maybe it's what chick lit should aspire to.

But the pink jackets won't fade anytime soon, and two chick lit veterans, novelist Sarah Mlynowski (Milkrun, Frogs & French Kisses) and editor Farrin Jacobs, happily fuel it with their new book, See Jane Write: A Girl's Guide to Writing Chick Lit.

Printed in pink, red and teal, it features chapters that compare writing fiction to dating and therapy, tips on how to use your friends as fodder for your book without alienating them, and suggestions on how to create characters that fit the chick lit formula without being wooden stereotypes. The index includes entries for "cattiness," "commitment" and "grammar mistakes, common."

The authors don't get around to discussing royalties and advances until four pages before the end of the book. Apparently, See Jane Write is aimed at girls who have already found their Mr. Darcy and don't have to cover their own credit card bills.

[Last modified August 6, 2006, 06:42:15]