In the catty world of women's fiction, labelling another writer 'chick-lit' can start the fur flying, writes Róisín Ingle
Last year a mini-spat broke out between writers of chick-lit and author Curtis Sittenfield, a young woman desperate to distance herself from that much-derided genre. Sittenfield is the author of Prep, a first novel that details the travails of a young woman in an American private school. The main character, one serious critic gushed, was like a female Holden Caulfield. Chick lit, he might have added, this ain't.
The row began when Sittenfield, a twenty-something Ivy League graduate, reviewed The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, one of the early proponents of the chick lit genre in the US. She began her review in the New York Times by writing that "to suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick-lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut - doesn't the term ultimately bring down all of us?" She proceeded to castigate Bank's book as the worst kind of, yep, chick lit. Catty was exactly the word that sprang to mind when reading this stinker of a review, peeved chick-lit authors were quick to point out.
Sittenfield's obvious disdain for the genre didn't stop publishers packaging her second novel, The Man of My Dreams (a chick-lit title if there ever was one) in a distinctly girly cover - chick lit sells, after all. It's an issue explored next Tuesday in the Arts Lives series on RTÉ 1.
In the programme, Pop Fiction, chick-lit - or popular women's fiction as it's more politely known - is explored by presenter Ann Marie Hourihane. Not surprisingly, Sittenfield doesn't warrant a mention, but the likes of Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern, Cathy Kelly, Patricia Scanlon, Sheila O'Flanagan and newcomer Ruth Gilligan all pop up to ponder the success of the genre and the reasons it is often dismissed as vacant ramblings on such contemporary female concerns as sex, shopping, shoes and the on-again, off-again vagaries of the ever-hopeful singleton's life.
With a third of the Irish book market buoyed by examples of the genre, the attraction should be pretty obvious by now. There are times when a person - OK, a woman - desires a book that entertains, comforts and doesn't require deep thinking. Sometimes nothing but a pastel-coloured book detailing how Ms X ended up with Mr Y and bought lots of stilettos and make-up along the way will satisfy. It must be called Always the Bridesmaid or Size 12 Is Not Fat or Mr Alright for the Night. And did I mention the flowing cursive script on the cover? An essential hint that what you hold in your hand is a truly escapist read.
For this avid reader of chick-lit, there are other demands which should, but rarely are, met. In an ideal world, chick lit would be well-written and witty and not cliché-ridden and dumb, as so many examples are.
The worst of the books are often adverb-laden. People utter words "darkly" and look at each other "meaningfully" and grin "widely". People wander into rooms in "a cloud of expensive perfume", characters sip "fashionable mineral water" and children's hair is "ruffled" to within an inch of their lives. You won't learn anything from them because you aren't meant to. They are also predictable: most of the time you can guess what is going to happen pages before the significant event occurs. No wonder then that, as we see in Pop Fiction, people such as George Hook have tried their hand at chick-lit writing, with mixed, if hilarious, results.
The truth is that many of the books in this genre, a publishing phenomenon dominated by female Irish writers, are sloppy, unoriginal, formulaic and so badly written you'd wonder how they got published in the first place. Others - Keyes's entire back catalogue, for example - are innovative, clever, moving, funny and a joy to read.
So why do even the bad ones sell? The answer is that, as a marketing strategy, chick lit is so powerful that the books don't have to be any good to sell by the lorry-load. And anyway, being skilfully written is not the job of the average chick-lit novel. What is required is that, over 400 or so pages, the author manages to tap into a state of mind found in twenty- and thirty-something female readers - whether single, shoe-loving, job-enslaved, man-hungry, weight-watching or with a ticking biological clock - and sustain their interest by putting forward a version of life that they either recognise or to which they aspire. For the most part, it's about establishing a personal connection with the reader rather than offering them good-quality writing. And, it has to be said, establishing that connection is a skill which many more gifted writers do not possess.
As in any genre, there are good, bad and mediocre chick-lit books, and there are women who want to read them. Even those who don't read them have a view. These days, to criticise the writing of someone such as Cecelia Ahern is to risk being ticked off by her often-unlikely champions who, while they may not ever have read a single word she has written, believe that anyone who does criticise must be jealous of her success. Exploring whether she is a skilled writer, or asking where she stands next to Marian Keyes, Edna O'Brien or Maeve Binchy in terms of talent, is viewed as bad form. Even in Pop Fiction, as definitive and engaging a programme on the subject as you could hope for, the issue of the quality of these books is not really addressed. Ahern and Co sell, seems to be the prevailing wisdom, and that is enough.
And, of course, in commercial terms it is. I don't imagine multi-millionaire Ahern or rolling-in-it Cathy Kelly care much that Curtis Sittenfield wouldn't be caught dead reading their books and neither, I suppose, do their millions of adoring readers.
Arts Lives: Pop Fiction is on Tuesday at 10.15pm on RTÉ1