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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
These four new novels by and about women (and one not-so-new one) may be riding the chick-lit publishing craze. But they're also good enough to bust that dismissive genre label wide open.
Aug 12, 2004 | Is there a bigger buzz-kill in chick lit than babies? I mean, mewling infants, soiled diapers, endless nights at home: Miranda was never the same again. Nevertheless, motherhood is an endless source of fascination and provocation in a new crop of women-driven books, several of which might qualify as chick lit simply for their vivid depictions of privileged lives, story lines that combine finding oneself with getting the guy, and characters that aren't asked to do much in the way of introspection. Even the insular ladies of these titles are outer-directed; in this, they provide enough action to satisfy the most intense need for feminine theatrics. At their best they do what so-called chick lit can do: open a window onto women's lives and propel uniquely female concerns to center stage.
In these titles, we get glimpses of a posh set of Greenwich-style grandmothers, narcissistic neuroscientists, a professional woman with two husbands, and the mother of a teenage monster who holds herself (and is held) partially responsible for his horrific acts. The getting, having and grappling with children might end up making chick lit, as it is narrowly defined, defunct. It might also push out the boundaries of the category, which, despite its brash and dismissive appellation (see also "chick flick"), could grow to include new and interesting material such as found in the following works. Wouldn't that be ironic: If the fluffiest of current genres spawned the latest in Big Ideas?
"Our Kind: A Novel in Stories"
By Kate Walbert
208 pages
Simon & Schuster
Order from Powells.com
Before we get carried away, Kate Walbert's third book would never be mistaken for chick lit in any world, though "Our Kind" is a literary hen party of sorts. Her "novel in stories" twines together select tales from the lives of a group of older women, with names like Canoe, Bambi, Viv and Esther, in gorgeous but taut lyrical prose. While Woolfian in spirit (the author deliberately drops a few references to Virginia Woolf throughout), the book's sharp, canny social observations are rather more Austenian. But though her characters are finely drawn, they are hard to distinguish from each other by design, as they're ingeniously referred to in the first person plural throughout: "We laughed; we couldn't help it"; "Some of us bit our fingernails."
It's a device that's both inclusive and exclusive. Walbert's vision is that these upper-crust Connecticut ladies are of a piece, a type, a "kind," one or two of whom may have attended Smith or Mount Holyoke yet ultimately dropped academia for marriage. They've stuck together as adults through childbearing and divorce, martinis and cigarettes, country club memberships, and vacations but never known much about each other's inner lives. She beautifully limns their world: "We were once rich, or close enough. Our husbands had good jobs, buying and selling. We left them some years ago in a thundering of hooves, our long faces uncompromised by apology. They would remarry, mostly, younger girls or women not our type. We couldn't have cared less. We kept the house and the pool, occasionally a court. We drew together."
They're bored, so bored they don't even think to ask, Is this all there is? But children begin to fill a void, for a little while. "After their conceptions we've felt our world expanding, bursting out of its previous condition ... With babies we feel oddly contained, rightfully nailed into form. No longer loose boards, a leaky vessel listing in the doldrums with a wildly spinning compass, we head straight into the wind, sails unfurled and bleached white as the diapers soaking in our bathtubs. If nothing else they give us something to do."
