Saving Chic Lit Through Experimental Fiction

I have recently been reading "All the Single Ladies," a non-fiction work by Rebecca Traister that, among many other things, celebrates cities as the best place for an apparently growing number of unmarried women to live.

"Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual  transactional services, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love," Traister says.


I reference the above because it ties directly into today's main topic: the future of "chic lit," a very significant portion of which is set in large metropolises.  Frequently cited as the most notable example of the genre is "Sex and the City," by Candace Bushnell, which went on to achieve great fame as a television mini series.

According to Wikipedia, chick lit, which came into being as such in the 1990s, is a genre that addresses issues of modern womanhood, often humorously and lightheartedly. Although it sometimes includes romantic elements, chick lit is generally not considered a direct subcategory of the romance novel genre because the heroine's relationship with her family or friends is often just as important as her romantic relationships.

Observing that chic lit has generally been considered an exceptionally trivial category of literature, Harvard PhD student Tess McNulty has just published a lengthy article looking into whether it can be, in effect, rescued by what is known as "experimental fiction" -- writing original in style, often subversive in content and frequently concerned with dystopian themes. Considered the cutting edge of literature as an art form, it has, until recently, often been very difficult for readers to digest.

"The classic chick-lit novel describes a young straight woman in her 20s or 30s, living in the city and spending time with her female friends and the occasional gay male sidekick while navigating a trifecta of concerns: diets, dating, and professional life. Needless to say, authors of chick lit are mostly women," McNulty says.

But with women more serious in the wake of the recent severe economic downturn and experimental writing tending becoming more commercial in nature, conditions have become ripe for the two to cross paths and, indeed, they have, the author of "Chic Lit Meets the Avant-Garde," said, citing several examples.

But results, she continued, have not been altogether satisfactory.

"What all of the books under review here have in common is that they apply experimentalism’s anti-realism to chick lit’s girly topics. All portray 'postmodern dystopian' worlds rendered surreal through the proliferation of technology and conspiratorial networks. ... But all still focus, in classic mid-’90s chick-lit fashion, on city-dwelling young women juggling diets, dating, and jobs, and obsessing over fashion and cosmetics."

One novel, in particular, succeeds where most of the others have come up short, McNulty said. That one is Alexandra Kleeman’s "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine," released in August 2015.

"From a stack of graceless blends of girly themes, formal quirks, and hackneyed styles, her book emerges as the only successful integration of the two genres. Viewed through the refracted lens of her stilted style, 'girl culture' appears as something stranger than most of us had realized," McNulty concludes.