No such thing as chick lit with a brain

30 September 2006

Celia Walden finds the Los Angeles chattering classes obsessed by a book which tries to give a much-mocked genre a cerebral makeover. Too bad it fails utterly

You see what too much Tolstoy can do to a girl. Though an amusing project written with journalistic polish, Literacy and Longing in LA would have worked better if it were firmly tongue-in-cheek. The problem is that the all-American earnestness shows through, the heroine is too self-consciously bookish for this literary experiment to be enjoyed without prickles of annoyance throughout. In real life one rather hopes that women are perfectly able to reconcile the two sides of their character: reading Proust while having a pedicure. But in anti-elitist cultures like America or Britain, writing about an all-consuming love of literature can only come across as pretentious. ‘I’m really just another boring bibliomaniac,’ sighs Dora with audible pleasure. And since the Americans tend to regard good writing as morally improving, one might have hoped that the knowledge accrued by ploughing through the world’s great authors would endow Dora with a more mature and responsible approach to life. Which in most people’s eyes would, of course, finally destroy her as a plausible chick-lit heroine. We are even treated to Thomas Carlyle saying, ‘The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.’ So why does Dora remain so obstinately flaccid, and resolutely blind to the fact that she is still in love with her ex-husband until the very end of the book?

When the epiphany does happen, the books are ditched with the same self-loathing as an empty tub of Ben and Jerry’s. ‘I start grabbing the books one by one and pitching them like hardballs against the wall. John Updike. Slam! Henry Miller. Slam! Edith Wharton. Slam! Missed the wall and hit the lamp. The lightbulb explodes like a firecracker. Books with broken spines are now heaped on top of each other like a literary junkyard.’

The authors cement their point with a little help from Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.’ Kaufman and Mack seem purblind too — to the obvious fact that you cannot write to order, and that if you mix low-brow and high-brow, you have a pretty good chance of coming up with something vapidly in-between. And what you gain in virtuous intent you lose in character.

Chick lit has the single merit of being what it is, and fine writing makes no apologies for itself either. But this highly contrived middle-brow stuff is not just neither one thing nor the other — it’s a kind of nothing. The American satirist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote: ‘Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.’ The problem with Literacy and Longing in LA is not just that it could leave you looking bad. It could hasten your departure.

Celia Walden edits the Daily Telegraph’s Spy column.