Pretty in Pink

Kate points to a truly goofy Maureen Dowd column (and a nice response to it), the gist of which is, “Good heavens, upon entering a bookstore I discovered
a plethora of low-brow, so-called ‘chick lit’ on the bookshelves, truly a sign of the End Times and the utter stupefaction of American culture in general, and the literary world in particular. Gads.”

Or, in Dowd’s own words on her visit to a Borders:

Suddenly I was swimming in pink. I turned frantically from display table to display table, but I couldn’t find a novel without a pink cover. I was accosted by a sisterhood of cartoon women, sexy string beans in minis and stilettos, fashionably dashing about book covers with the requisite urban props — lattes, books, purses, shopping bags, guns and, most critically, a diamond ring.

Was it a Valentine’s Day special?

No, I realized with growing alarm, chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham. The store was possessed with the devil spawn of “The Devil Wears Prada.” The blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.

Or, to quote fellow lit snob who was accompanying her, Leon Wieseltier:

“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ ”

Because, of course, if only all those girly-girl pink-bound slightly-more-respectable-than-bodice-rippers were to be cast upon a bonfire somewhere, all those insular, escapist, girly-girl women buying the stuff would instead turn to true literary classics, like The Red Batdge of Courage or Nostromo.

Riiiiiight.

The fact is, 99% of women (and men) have either never read The Red Badge of Courage, or were required to read it in high school and never want to read it again. The presence of “chick lit” in its various incarnations, breaking out of the genre ghetto, isn’t a sign of decline in anything (indeed, it actually indicates that folks may be going into bookstores and buying books, surely not a bad thing). And the reason that Borders is giving as much space to it as “Conrad, Faulkner and
Maugham” is that, really, the audience for those authors isn’t getting smaller, it just was never that large to begin with.

Should folks read the classics? Probably, though I’d probably worry about someone who only read them and eschewed any lighter-weight entertainment. But shoulds and oughts and I-say-rathers are a different proposition than asking “Is chick lit evil and intellectually degrading?”

Escapist, fluffy, entertaining fare has been a staple of literature since the the printing press (and, of course, long before). For every Shakespeare (himself accused of low-brow masses-pandering) there were hundreds of playwrights who simply gave the “hoi-polloi” what they wanted — simple tales of good and evil and bawdiness and laughter and escapism. For Dowd and Wieseltier to pooh-pooh such things is snobbery of the highest water, and to comment that in a time of war and threat folks really ought to
be reading tales that take serious looks at such things flies in the face of reality (cf. the vast majority of motion pictures made during WWII). And, of course, there have always been plenty of folks — “critics,” we often call them — who have turned up their noses at such things, feigning horror and gleefully noting how plebeian the plebes are.

I am not, myself, an aficionado of “chick lit” (if I understand the term correctly), but I do enjoy other genre fare, much of which would seem “not particularly demanding” to the NY Times or New Republic literary audience.

Gee, sorry about that. Guess I should break out the Hardy and Hemingway and Homer and feel properly put in my place.