When Bridget Jones’s Diary was first published in 1996, the voice was fresh. With its self-effacing catalogue of sins prefacing every entry, the novel acknowledged: ‘Everyone thinks that contemporary young women obsess over boys and shoes, shopping and food, fags and booze, to the exclusion of everything else. Well, you’re right. That is all they think about.’ I might have been glad that every book published wasn’t quite so lightweight, as I was also glad that women in fiction weren’t all portrayed as quite so dizzy. But Bridget’s honesty was a relief to readers whose own minds were often cluttered with guilt over eating too many biscuits, and who, like her, ruefully aspired to be ‘complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend’. The novel was perky, madcap and clever, and I liked it.
Little did Helen Fielding realize that her unexpectedly best-selling fluff would spawn not just a genre, but an industry. Nay, a monster. The slightly shame-faced pettiness of Bridget Jones has given way to unabashed pettiness. While not every book published these days is devoted to brandishing just how small-minded and self-obsessed modern urban womanhood is, it sure seems that way. Out in April, Imogen Lloyd Webber’s The Single Girl’s Guide is the latest non-fiction.
contribution to what we are no longer, I gather, supposed to call ‘chick-lit’. (Post-chick-lit? How about pre-literature? With no evidence that Bridget Jones has grown up – although she may have got sluttier – last decade’s term will do for me.) Webber begins with a glossary of terms. AS means ‘Accidental Sex’. BF: ‘Best Friend. Even more precious than your shoe collection.’ (Quite a concession.) Squeaky is ‘a small, stupid female who is a man’s woman, rather than a girly girl’ – a designation that probably applies to me.
Webber trumpets the ethos of ‘Superficial Bint and Proud of It’: ‘As SGs [Single Girls], we have the advantage of being able to devote more time to the body beautiful: from medicals to manicures, this is your moment to focus on you… from diet to gym etiquette to shopping. When single, you have the benefit of never being made to feel that clothes and shoes are a luxury, or that there are more necessary purchases to be made.’ But then, so mighty is the competition that there’s no need to only pick on Ms Webber. Just a sampling from this season’s book releases: The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis, about ‘a woman on a quest for an unattainable pair of shoes, who subsequently realizes that she is really searching for something deeper’. Boots, perhaps? Diamonds and Daisies by Bernadette Strachan, about a romance novelist who ‘feels life has come to a standstill until she meets a handsome stranger. Could he be the one?’ I’m on the edge of my chair.
There’s no need to go on. But suffice it to say that Chick-Lit Books is not merely a classification, but the name of a whole UK publishing house. Granted, we’ve always had romance fiction, and we’ve always had crap. But so tidal has this chick-lit business become that it is swamping slots that might otherwise be reserved for more rewarding books, some of which might portray women who thought about more than nail polish. For Bridget’s charming self-deprecation has morphed into an orgy of self-humiliation. Publishing has seized on the fact that women are the primary buyers of fiction with a vengeance. Hence, in rewriting the flap copy of my own upcoming novel, my editor very carefully recast the text so that the woman in the book was thrust to the fore; my earlier version had dared to suggest that it also concerned the characters of two men. The initial cover design for one of my backlist titles released this summer featured, to my dismay, a woman pining winsomely in a field – despite the fact that the main character is a man. Indeed, when I recently mooted that my next book will be told from the point of view of a male protagonist, my agent got the willies, and urged me to reconsider.
Thus word in the industry is that your customers are women, who only want to read about women in books by women. These assumptions are condescending, and cynically so – since publishing is increasingly controlled by women themselves. Statistically, those assumptions are plain wrong. Women readers – unlike the male variety – indiscriminately purchase books both by and about the opposite gender. With chick-lit’s cheerful self-degradation, female authors and publishers collude in the trivialising of their own gender to make a few quid. Not only is the ceaseless celebration of shoes, shopping and shagging dull, but it collectively confirms the worst suspicions of male Neanderthals: that girls – and that is the operative term, girls – are as shallow, silly and stupid as they were portrayed in the 1950s, and the only thing that’s changed is how easy it is to get the flibbertigibbets into bed. For I do not believe this melee of make-up qualifies as ‘post-feminist’. It is retrograde. It is depressing confirmation that all social progress entails one step forward, two steps back.
Am I being humourless? You bet. Because we could use more humourlessness. The topics that these slick, breezy novels and how-to books so glancingly address all have undersides in all-too-real life. Sophie Kinsella may have put out her fifth comedy about a ‘shopaholic’, but credit card debt in this country is the highest in Europe, resulting in skyrocketing bankruptcies and foreclosures. Bridget Jones’s calorie counting was cute, but there are more than a million people in the UK – most of them women – with eating disorders. Chick-lit may make light of casual sex, but only six per cent of rape cases in this country result in a conviction, and venereal disease is sky high. None of this stuff is funny, and young women up to their eyeballs in hock, compulsively puking up their dinners and just diagnosed with the clap surely have more on their minds than their nails.
Lionel Shriver’s next novel, The Post-Birthday World, is published by HarperCollins in May