Chick Lit – Political theory and practice

All rise!

High Rising (1933) by Angela (née Mackail) Thirkell (1890-1961).

Good Reads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.71 by 2632 litizens.

DNA: Little England.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Amusing, but hollow.

Tagline: Anti Incubus.

The village of High Rising is not to be confused with that of Low Rising, Castle Rising or even Far Rising, still less with Late Risen. Much yeast in this locale an hour by train from the Biggest Smoke. Among the villagers the author writes chick lit to make a living and observes those around her, including a ponderous biographer in love with the sound of his own voice, a diffident doctor, her own publisher who chivvies her along on visits, daughters, sons, nieces, nephews, servants, and others.

Into the carefully curated ruts of this assortment comes the Incubus, a new secretary for the biographer to note and then type his dictation, file his voluminous correspondence, stroke his throbbing ego. In executing all these duties superbly New Secretary goes even further and seems intent on displacing biographer’s daughter as both the apple of his eye and mistress of his mansion. Could it be a wedding, even?

To prevent such an incursion on the ordered world, Author assembles her coven to eject this intruder ever so gently. All is done with smiles and politesse drawn over the rancour, ambition, and dislike. That makes it a comedy of manners,

It is the first in a series set among these Risings. That is why I chose it in the hope that it might relieve my withdrawal symptoms from Staggerford, and, moreover, Thirkell was, in the publicity for a reprint, likened to the singular Barbara Pym. I can see those comparisons but I did find it hard going. Whole, long chapters, of the neighbour biographer spouting learned nonsense while author indulges him. Equally long passages of her spoiling her youngest, still-at-home son with his train set.

This is volume one of the Barsetshire Chronicles which ran to twenty-nine titles in all, the last published in 1961. (Yes the echo of Anthony Trollope was intended.) Wikipedia lists seven other books on diverse subjects. Admiring her industry, nonetheless, this one suffices for me.

On the bright side, the characters are distinct and well drawn. The village comes alive, but they do prattle on and on and on some more. These are not Somerset Maugham’s flesh and blood beings driven by their own uncontrollable emotions, lusts, ambitions but talking heads that talk and talk. Indeed, I kept hoping Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby, either one, would arrive to sort things out. In Midsomer where they know how to deal with an incubus: the story would have opened with her gruesome murder. Still and all, at the end it does for a few chapters have a mystery to resolve with detective work of a kind. Despite the distracting verbiage, there is a plot and it does come full circle.

Bot, Bot, who is the Bot?

Annie Bot (2024) by Sierra Greer.

Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages rated 3.83 by 26,921 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit; Species: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Atta Bot!

Tagline: Be careful what you wish for.

The android Annie Bot is the perfect prostitute for the busy man. Made to order with libido settings, and more. Her owner Doug is very pleased, though she is not so good at housework. (No woman is perfect, it seems.)

He is a very good owner (he thinks) and encourages Annie to develop, which she does….

As this sex slave grows more conscious she plots to escape to freedom, and does so. The more so when she observes how casually Doug buys, uses, and sells another bot.

That simple summary makes it seem thin but it is not. The evolution of her consciousness is slow and unsure, and punctuated with regressions. Still it is an affirmation that consciousness strives for freedom of choice to realize itself in the world. See Georg Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) for details. That is a free consciousness strives to imprint itself into the world by words and deeds, and seeing these objectifications of self the consciousness is affirmed. Get it?

P.S. See ‘Beta’ from Logic Films, a 20m short on a similar theme.

***

Doug is a cipher who only exists in these pages in relation to Annie. He has no other purpose or identity but to relate to her. I am sure there is irony there, but where?

We came across this title in a Cronulla bookstore in April and we both read it. We were amused by the dog walking bot, and went on line to order one for us.

7 – 11 Life

Convenience Store Woman (2018) by Sayaka Murata

Good Reads meta-data is 163 pages, rated 3.69 by 280,087 litizens.

Genre: Fiction; Sub-species: chick-lit.

DNA: Japanese.

Tagline: Irasshaimasé!

Verdict: Meursault with a purpose.

Keiko didn’t fit in. This fact she had learned in primary school when, during a recess, two boys were fighting and everyone shouted for them to stop. She stopped them. A gardener’s spade came to hand and she whacked one of the combatants with it. End of fight. She had done what everyone wanted, and now she was the one in trouble. Go figure!

There were many other ways in which she was an odd duck. She showed no interest in the girlish concerns of clothing, cosmetics, boys, family, and so on. She just drifted along on the ebb and flow of those around her, having learned to conceal her indifference to these matters and much else, well nearly everything else. For camouflage she copied the dress, mannerisms, and speech of those around her, but none of it had any inner resonance. She is an A.I. robot in these ways, programmed from the outside in by the environment.

When she graduated from high school she got a part-time job at Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” a convenience store, and found her niche. Here she comes to life with energy, initiative, commitment, interest, and more. The growth and expression of her symbiotic relationship with the convenience store is the core of the novel, and it is charming, if a little unnerving. (Footnote: See Michel Foucault on life in the social machine.) The store gave her purpose and structure and she dedicated herself to it in return. She became obsessed with personal hygiene because the store required it. She ate a proper diet and slept the requisite hours so that her strength was equal to being on her feet during eight hour shifts. She no longer had to decide what wear but happily donned the prescribed uniform. She learned to use morning weather forecasts to stock the shelves, to know when regulars would arrive, how to scan items and make change instantly.

But most of all she had learned to read the store, to know by the sounds, smells, drafts when something had to be done. The crinkle of cellophane wrappers might imply a need to restock shelves. A draft of cool air, a refrigerator door was ajar. A certain click might mean a rack is empty. The store was mother and child to her and she cared for it in all ways.

She always volunteered for more work, not because she wanted or needed the overtime pay (since she had nothing to spend it on) but because it kept her focussed on what the store needed. The store shielded her from the pressure to conform to the expectations of her parents, her peers, the society,…and life beyond the store and in return she cared for its needs.

It may sound dopey but it is done so well that is only a belated second thought. Meursault of Camus’s L’Étranger would get it.

We Came Here to Shine (2020) by Susie Orman Schnall.

Goodreads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.75 by 1569 raters.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Gal pals unite!

Vivi(an) and Max(ine) are two damsels determined not to be distressed. They start three thousands miles apart and end up, unwillingly in each case, at the 1939 World’s Fair during a chilly May at Flushing in New York City. Vivi is a starlet on her way up in Hollywood’s food chain in sunny LA. Since moving there from Brooklyn Heights she has undergone voice training to lose the accent, wears lens for eye color, hair dyeing, posture correction, lost weight, layered with make-up, trained to walk, had cosmetic surgery, and been rugged out in new clothes. Later even her estranged sister barely recognises her. By contrast Max, who is a couple of years younger, say around twenty, was an NYU student in soggy Gotham vying for a scholarship in journalism. Her one aim in life is a job at the New York Times, in which ambition she is enthusiastically supported by her family for the Times is oracular. Then the World’s Fair beckoned, sort of.

Both are intelligent, independent-minded, and hard working. And everything is falling into place, until life throws each a curveball. The studio serves up a Steve Carlton slider to Vivi when the producer of her current film – her first leading role – decides to lend her to a friend and fellow producer who is masterminding an aquacade at the World’s Fair, despite her protests. Off she goes, resigned to making the best of it, after all her watery co-star is the biggest orb in the Hollywood firmament at the time, Johnny Weissmuller. Having her name coupled with his on a program has got to be good news. Hmm, was that a double entendre?

Max enters an internship program, aspiring for a placement with the aforementioned Times. Then a Bob Gibson sinker sees her instead relegated to duties with a daily newsletter published at the Fair. Worse, the duties are clerical, not journalistic. In each case the reader is left in no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that these curveballs came because of the stifling atmospheric sexism of the time and place. Women do the clerical work. Starlets are chattel property to be used.

When they both get to the Fair there is a lot about it that I found fascinating and it has whet my appetite for more on the Fair, and, gulp, less on the women. (Notice, I did not say ‘girls.’)

There are chaps circling around, including Tarzan.

As the story goes on we add three other women to the team who devise a way to outwit the men who manipulate them. Nicely done. The prevailing sexism and exploitation of the weaker sex is the underlying narrative, and the World’s Fair itself aspires to be a major character but comes over more as a painted backdrop. I was not sure about all the resolutions, particularly for the journalist-intern. She seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in her own plan. However, the chains of crippling sexism did fall away (at least for a time).

If the title ‘We Came Here to Shine’ is explained in the book, I blinked and missed it. The book has a very informative afterword about the history and the Fair that I particularly liked that and hope to follow up on a couple of the suggestions.

I had a soupçon of the 1939 New York City World’s Fair in the memorable Dark Palace (2000) when Edith worked at the League of Nations Pavilion as the lights went out in September. Occasionally I have wanted to find out more about this event, greatly overshadowed by start of World War II in Europe. Recently I went looking again for something; I had rather been hoping for a historical account but among the few titles I found most were concerned with style featuring colour plates and so on, not suitable for lazy reading on the sofa or at bedtime. Nor did any of these artistic, architectural, or fashion studies seem to have any sociological, political, or historical perspective as gleaned from the blurbs. The Mechanical Turk, however, consulted the algorithm and proffered this title which I resisted at first, but then asked for a Kindle sample in the absence of any more suitable alternative, and then read on to the end. Glad I did.

Baseball fans will know both Carlton and Gibson, each of whom let his pitches do most of the talking, though Carlton on the few occasions when he spoke publicly was positively evangelical about the slider, while Gibson mostly grunted on and off the mound. Every batter knew Carlton would deliver a slider and no one could hit it. Every hitter knew Gibson’s out-pitch was the sinker and he liked to get batters out right now, but few batters ever saw it and not one ever hit it. Carlton once proclaimed he was put on earth to throw the slider, while Gibson’s mission was to get batters out, now! He did. They both did. There was a time when both were contracted to the same team, and that would have been a fearsome twosome to rival the tyranny of Koufax and Drysdale.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

Good Reads meta-data is 514 pages rated 3.70 by 5,310 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Fizzle.

Cutting from the chase, verbal pyrotechnics do not a story make. While every one of the 514 pages of this book crackle with wit and energy it reminded me of the wheels of car stuck in snow, spinning, spinning, spinning without movement; all the while digging itself in deeper. It must have been exhausting to write; it certainly is exhausting to read. By the Kindle meter I made it to 40% before resigning in, well, resignation. Ergo to qualify my second sentence above, the 205 pages I read crackle (and then fizzle).

If I had to find another metaphor for reading as far as that, I would say it is like reading only the footnotes to a book on a subject I neither knew nor cared anything about. And on they go for more than 500 pages in their ranks. Neither rhyme nor reason do they make to the reader but each one is perfectly formed.

That inspires me to a third metaphor. The teacher in a college creative writing class takes all thirty student essays and staples them together into a book. The parts, let us assume, are excellent, but the total goes nowhere.

It is impressive that someone could pour this much intelligence into blank pages and yet depressing that it leaves so little impression. Better for many of the pages to have remained blank. I found skipping pages made no difference to my interest or knowledge of the narration. That said, it is the sort of book that literary award panels seem to like: it is contemptuous of readers, flashy without substance, striving relentlessly to be different, and …. You get the idea by now or you won’t get it at all, in which case go directly to GoodReads and do not pass Go.

In similar territory Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (2004) was memorable, and frightening, but this similar book is neither.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill (2019) by Abbi Waxman

Goodreads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.84 by 45992 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit

Verdict: Go girl!

Our titular heroine (an updated Elizabeth Bennett) is late-twenties, educated, smart, loner, who works in an indie bookstore, reads, bests all comers in trivia contests, plans each day on paper, talks to her cat, is nearly anti-social. She runs three bookclubs at the store, one for first readers 5-8 years old, readers around 10, and seniors. Then twice a week with a team whose members have learned not to intrude on her privacy, she dons a Kevin Ashmore super hero Quizzling non-descript costume on a trivia team destined to be champions of East Los Angeles.

All that is fine, until one day an unusual customer walks into the neighbourhood bookstore seeks her out. He wears a ten thousand dollar three-piece suit with a thousand dollar haircut. Yes, he is a lawyer come to tell Nina that her long lost and forgotten biological father has named her in his will.

That she had a father was news to her. Wait, that is, the biological fact of siring was not new to her because she had read about it (just kidding), but that there was a distinct individual who knew her name and was her father, so named on her birth certificate, that was (unwelcome) news to her, intruding on her carefully circumscribed world. Remember this is a person who makes a written plan for everyday and never deviates from it.

It is all a matter of indifference to her roaming, rambling, and — as usual — absent mother who liked men so much she could never marry just one.

Over the decades that father had three wives, and there are children from each as well as Nina, the resulting clan is large and spans generations. On Monday morning there was just Nina and the cat in her life, and on Monday afternoon came along half-a-dozen siblings, grand parents, more aunts, and a slew of nieces and nephews by blood and law. Whew! What’s more they are riven by carefully nurtured grievances against each other. There is enough malice to go around and around to incorporate Nina whose G&Ts disappeared apace that night, while Phil, the cat, watched in brooding and silent disapproval.

I liked the set-up in the bookstore with its crew, and the quiz league, but they receded quickly into the background. Though Nina spends all her time reading we never quite know what she is reading with such intensity or what she gets out of it.

Following the Chick Lit convention there are about a hundred pages of misunderstandings between boy-girl which is resolved in a flash in the last few pages. Predictable, and also forced. And most of that miscommunication is played out in dialogue that goes on and on, and on. It looks like a wannabe film script.

Really?

Really.

Really!

(See what I mean?)

Moreover, the wedding on picnic blankets complete with a supernumerary camel followed by a food fight at the bookstore are just too much. The deceased father is partly redeemed, but not the ever-absent mother. I did like the motor mechanic’s patient effort to teach Nina to drive a stick-shift.

The Corner Shop in Cockleberry Bay (2018) by Nicola May

GoodReads meta-data is 364 pages, rated 4.19 by 17465 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Flip, flip go the pages.

The narrative arch is a mystery that keeps interest for a while, but the litany of drunks, hangovers, casual sex, and more of the aforementioned soon wore thin. Knit one, purl one, repeat. Fascinating. Not.

The locale offered some interest but on the page it always took second place to the drink and sex.

Our heroine is given a shop in picturesque Cockleberry by an anonymous benefactor. That is the overarching mystery. Who is the giver and why? The shop has been derelict five years (and that gap is never explained within my attention span). What will our hapless heroine make of it? (Since we know it is the first of a series, success of some kind is guaranteed.)

Without a shred of self-discipline, numeracy, or much else Heroine makes the shop a success and discovers some true(r) love. She also discovers who her benefactor is. My discovery was why some chick lit is not for me.

It is the first (and for me last) in a series set in picturesque Devon. The author published this first volume herself and has since made quite a success of the series. So be it.

I seem to recall I went down that way once by train to a PSA conference in Exeter in 1980. The Veil of Ignorance is drawn over any details.

Geekerella (2017) by Ashley Poston

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.00 by 37,381 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Ignite!

Introverted, harassed, unloved, acned, beset teenage girl dreams of the stars while her wicked stepmother and cruel step sisters torment her in a tag team. If and when she finally snaps they will get the inheritance from the deceased father and be rid of her once and for all to live unhappily ever after. (It’s pretty clear these people do not have the happiness gene.)

The evil step mother is certainly decanal material. No argument, no loyalty, no evidence, no reason, no services rendered, no compassion sways her from the KPI of seeing off Introv. That way lies promotion. Sending Introv up on the roof in a thunderstorm to fix a leak is all in a day’s meanness for her. Nothing special. Overdrawn just a tad, one might say. On the other hand, speaking of deans….[some stories are not fit to print].

Introv works in a food truck with Stud Girl, a reference to the many piercings the latter sports. They communicate in grunts. Don’t underestimate this Newtown wannabe.

Long ago and far away Introv had parents who loved her and took her (metaphorically) to the stars, as founding fans of StarField, a brief television series that subsequently won a following in syndication.The odes to the dead parents and the stars are humbling, moving, and spectacular to read. If this is Chick Lit, let there be more of it.

Meanwhile, in another world the StarField franchise is getting a re-boot these years later with a teenage Jason Bieber in the lead.* Yuck! Nothing could be more wrong which Introv boldly declares on her blog which gets taken up far and wide simply because by some quirk of time zones she was the first to voice this opinion.

We learn that despite appearances and expectations, this teen idol has a soul, one that yearns to be free of being Jason Bieber 24/7. The iron cage of celebrity is very nicely realised in these pages. Though again perhaps a tiny bit overdrawn just for fun. Still I liked the ever distracted manager and monosyllabic bodyguard. Likewise the co-star who tells the boy wonder that if he doesn’t stand up for himself now, he never will.

He wants out so bad he calls an old number he found for help to wiggle out of a commitment without a confrontation, which old number once belonged to Introv’s deceased dad, and so he makes unintended contact with her. Through this mischance they communicate, and find that they can communicate more, and more easily with texts to a stranger than with anyone around them. He is surrounded by cannibalistic fans and hangers-on; she by the equally ravenous evil step family.

We just know that somehow these two worlds are going to meet, perhaps with a jolt, and that only these two can save each other.

Along the way they learn (as do some others) that they are not alone. Introv also learns that she does have friends and does not have to push the rock up the hill everyday alone. Bieber learns to act like the hero he plays in film, just a little bit, and discovers he likes it and it works.

Did I mention the food truck that specialised in pumpkin fries with a giant pumpkin painted on the side. Did I mention that? Shoulda. Did I mention Stud Girl’s cry at the gate: ‘Today we fight!’ Shoulda.

Loved it.

First is a series of Geek Girl books.

*No it is not really Justin Bieber but I wanted name from the popular culture and so little do I know that I took this one to represent the ephemera, vacuity, and fatuousness thereof. While I am sure many others fill that bill, Jason is a good fit.

Curmudgeon Avenue (2018) by Samatha Henthorn

GoodReads meta-data is 146 pages, rated 3.89 by 28 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit

Verdict: Creaks but fun.

Number One Curmudgeon Avenue is a four-story Victorian house with attic conversion near Manchester in wet England. The house narrates the story of its occupants, namely the sisters Edna and Edith, now in their cantankerous dotages, and assorted relatives, lodgers, neighbours, and the incessant rain that forces things on them, like a roofer.

It is a small world that brings them into contact with many from their past: boyfriends, girlfriends, offspring, and more. Maurice comes a-courting in his white cowboy hat with rat poison in one hand and minties in the other. Layabout son Ricky along with his ex and her sister and mother in tow tries to wheedle mum and auntie out of the house. Then Edith’s lost love, the exotic Genevieve reappears, briefly. The paying lodger is too good to be true, and that is a fact.

First in a series of the Terraced House Diaries. The walls not only have ears, but eyes and a keyboard as well. It ends as ‘To Be Continued.’

N. B. Copy edited needed. Missing words, often prepositions make it hard to follow at times but worth the effort.

Bramton Wick (1952) by Elizabeth Fair

Bramton Wick (1952) by Elizabeth Fair

GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.95 by 150 citizens.

Genre: Chick Lit

Verdict: Ditto

The Set-up: Post war life in a picturesque small village in Little England is the locale. There is much description of the settlement, the weather, the railway embankment, the culverts, along with the habits and peculiarities of the residents. Two long established families have been forced in the last generation to sell their properties. One house was bought by a wealthy titled lady, while the other by a parvenu businessman.

Among the cast are two spinsters who keep, breed, and sell dogs in a disheveled house that belongs to the landlord farmer, whose own finances are precarious. He is also the landlord for some others.

There is a young war-bride widow who never thinks of the past, along with her younger sister and the two of them live with their mother in another property rented from the farmer now that they have had to give up their erstwhile manor to the titled lady buyer.

Nearby is an irascible major who treats his wife like a slow-witted subaltern, and she loves it, with a nephew in residence who mopes around like an impoverished member of the Lost Generation of 1919.

Her ladyship of the newly-bought manner has a ne’er-do-well son in tow. He had been in the army but that is barely mentioned. [Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.]

These characters amble about, occasionally ricochet off each other and carom here and there for two hundred pages before the two sisters get paired off with the parvenu and the farmer, while the nephew and moper continue to ne’er-do-well and to mope.

This is the first of half a dozen novels set in Bramton Wick, and I suppose the characters continue, but I will probably not find out for myself. While the book is very well written and the dissection of the various characters is gentle and insightful, there is no momentum in it.

None of them has any ambition, any desires, any blood, any purpose, any mission, any thing to motivate them for the day ahead, or the reader for the pages ahead. It is as though each waits off page to come on and act out the prescribed role and then retire to the wings. That social type has been exemplified for the time being now on to the next.

It is, however, a study in the managing social relationships and that gives it the title Chick Lit. Most of the management is done by the sisters and it is through manipulation, not communication, but it is amusing, mild, diverting, and well intentioned, if utterly pointless. I hasten to add that Chick Lit does not have to be pointless, Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend and the Overdue Life of Amy Byler, both discussed elsewhere on this blog, are certainly Chick Lit and they have momentum. Barbara Pym’s comedies of manners, several of which are discussed on this blog, also have a claim to the genre Chick Lit avant le mot, and her characters have vitality and meaning that seems to lack in the book under review. Likewise, the Jon Hassler novels that feature Miss Agatha take the label Chick Lit proudly and let me tell you Miss Agatha has purpose.