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I guess I shouldn't have been surprised last week when people started sending me links to an article called "The Death of Chick-lit" and then they started sending me links to the reactions about the article. After all, I read chick-lit and I'm not afraid to say it. Chick-lit is dying? Really? I've been listening to people proclaim chick-lit's death since 2007. Call me skeptical.
In The Death of Chick-lit, chick-lit author Sarah Bilston states that the recession is transforming the genre.
In the next months and years, expect to see plots that turn on overcoming repossession and job-loss, not shopping and sex. The frothiest novels must respond to a more sober age. Like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself—fast—if it’s going to survive.
Ok, that isn't exactly death of the genre, no matter what the title says, though it depends on what you classify as "chick-lit." I mean, chick lit is way more than just shopping and sex. There are books that fall into the chick-lit category that are about shopping and sex and yep, I've read some of them. But chick-lit is many, many different kinds of books. In the post where I declared that read chick-lit and wasn't afraid to say I posted a definition of chick-lit that I found. It was a good one but I've continued to hunt around for definitions for it and I've decided I like Maureen Johnson's conclusion - chick-lit is a completely arbitrary term.
If established literary terms are stable as jello molds, then Chick Lit is a soufflé sitting on a fault line. It only means whatever the latest and most effective argument says it means. Or whatever you guess it means. Or whatever Wikipedia says it means. Whether the books under the banner are in any way similar (except for the sex of their authors) . . . well, that’s another question. I’ve seen all kinds of weird and wonderful books that have gotten stuck with the label. It’s very arbitrary.
Is the recession the death of a certain kind of chick-lit? Maybe. Linda Holmes on the NPR blog said that it isn't the death of chick-lit, but it might be hurting "shoe fiction."
The basic problem with Bilston's notion — which is, remember, that the recession is fundamentally altering the landscape of women's fiction — is that her starting point is an incredibly tiny slice of what that genre ever included in the first place.
By which I mean that when she talks about Confessions Of A Shopaholic and the Plum Sykes books, she's not talking about women's fiction. She's talking about what I call "shoe fiction.
Notice that Holmes said the recession may be "hurting" those books, not killing them. Honestly, most of us read to escape and chick-lit offers us many ways to escape. Some people like shoes and handbags and shopping. Just because they can't do it themselves right now (assuming they ever did) doesn't mean they can't enjoy reading about other people do it. I mean, people don't stop reading about other countries or about people's travels to other countries because they can't afford to travel themselves.
It wasn't Bilston's article that got to Heretic Loremaster, though she doesn't agree. It was the comments. It's the kind of comments that anyone who has ever read anything about chick-lit has seen many times before, as havefantasty , science-fiction, fantasy and mystery writers. Yep, it's the age old, "if it's not literary fiction than it's clearly crap" argument, but specifically aimed at chick-lit because it's "women's fiction". Yet again, someone had to point out that men write plenty of fiction that doesn't fall under the "literary
Yet I don’t see Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Dean Koontz being berated by literati who wish these authors would just get their darned heads out of the clouds and focus on reality and people (as they are in reality, of course) and “things bigger than your everyday troubles,” to quote on of the commenters on Ms. Bilston’s article.
As the Heretic Loremaster says in her post no one is telling men to stop writing or reading the literature they enjoy. And as Maureen Johnson says in her post, the worst critics of chick-lit are women. No, I don't think chick-lit is dying. I think we might be seeing some rearranging of popular topics within the genre. What I'd like to see is us not talking about the death of chick-lit or what it is and just embrace it.
