Chicks in the Mix
Just one short mention of this MJ Rose entry on Huffington Post about the relentless chick-lit versus literary debate. (Credit where credit's due: I found the link via Ms. Addled Writer.) It's good reading, and makes a couple of points with which I vigorously agree.
A couple of things I feel like expanding on, though:
1) I disagree with what she says about The DaVinci Code. That book's success had not so much to do with the "book climate" and very much to do with its publishers, and the fact that they funneled a ginormous chunk of their marketing budget into this one idiotic volume. It sold like wildfire because it was marketed all to hell, and the public wasn't being told to buy any other books. (And that part, I'll grant, IS the book climate. It'd be great if there were more people willing to go digging for good books, but there's no book, no matter how awesome, that'll be a bestseller on its own merits these days. You HAVE to market. Which I guess is kind of her main point.)
2) Chick lit takes away from romance? Honey, chick lit these days IS romance. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but that's what it is now. What's all over the book store these days? Shiny pink trade paperbacks bearing pictures of shoes and be-suited cartoonified women carrying shopping bags. What's it displacing? Mass-market paperbacks with embossed covers, depicting flowing-haired hunks with bulging pecs and creamy-bosomed women spilling out of their period garb. But what's the protagonist's main objective in either? Twoo Wuv. The headstrong heroine meets her match. She probably hates him at first, but once they have several pages' worth of steamy sex, they love each other forever. The setting has changed, the physical appearance of the book has changed, but they are the same beast, make no mistake. Harlequin owns Red Dress Ink. Need I say more?
(I should add a disclaimer here that there has been at least one very excellent Red Dress Ink book which I read and enjoyed, and which did not follow this formula, and whose author will probably read this and disagree with my blanket dismissal of latter-day chick lit, but I want her to know that her first novel was awesome in ANY flavor she chooses to categorize it, but I didn't feel like it WAS chick lit. So there.)
A couple of things I feel like expanding on, though:
1) I disagree with what she says about The DaVinci Code. That book's success had not so much to do with the "book climate" and very much to do with its publishers, and the fact that they funneled a ginormous chunk of their marketing budget into this one idiotic volume. It sold like wildfire because it was marketed all to hell, and the public wasn't being told to buy any other books. (And that part, I'll grant, IS the book climate. It'd be great if there were more people willing to go digging for good books, but there's no book, no matter how awesome, that'll be a bestseller on its own merits these days. You HAVE to market. Which I guess is kind of her main point.)
2) Chick lit takes away from romance? Honey, chick lit these days IS romance. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but that's what it is now. What's all over the book store these days? Shiny pink trade paperbacks bearing pictures of shoes and be-suited cartoonified women carrying shopping bags. What's it displacing? Mass-market paperbacks with embossed covers, depicting flowing-haired hunks with bulging pecs and creamy-bosomed women spilling out of their period garb. But what's the protagonist's main objective in either? Twoo Wuv. The headstrong heroine meets her match. She probably hates him at first, but once they have several pages' worth of steamy sex, they love each other forever. The setting has changed, the physical appearance of the book has changed, but they are the same beast, make no mistake. Harlequin owns Red Dress Ink. Need I say more?
(I should add a disclaimer here that there has been at least one very excellent Red Dress Ink book which I read and enjoyed, and which did not follow this formula, and whose author will probably read this and disagree with my blanket dismissal of latter-day chick lit, but I want her to know that her first novel was awesome in ANY flavor she chooses to categorize it, but I didn't feel like it WAS chick lit. So there.)
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