No such thing as chick lit with a brain

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

If, like me, you are allergic to chick lit, the chances are that the problem has as much to do with the fatuousness of the heroines’ interests as with the quality of the prose. Jimmy Choo? Lovely shoes, but I have no inclination to discuss them over a bottle of wine. Men? Love them too, but I don’t want to talk about them as a category either. So what if someone were to write chick lit that’s intellectual — for birds with brains? Is the very notion an oxymoron that could alienate two opposing armies of female readers at a blow? Or could it be the start of a whole new literary genre?

Literacy and Longing in LA is becoming a talking point of the American literary classes by setting itself the brave task of finding the answer. Written by a Golden Globe Award-winning film producer and a Los Angeles Times journalist, Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, the novel focuses on the life and loves of an out of work journalist named Eudora Welty. Dora is your quintessential chick-lit heroine: thirtysomething, single, with self-esteem issues and acres of time on her hands in which to obsess about the two interlinked questions of supreme importance in her life — cellulite and finding the right man. Except that instead of indulging in Marlboro Lights, magnums of Chardonnay and designer shops to assuage her emotional traumas, Dora binges on books. ‘Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat. ... I do what I have always done: go off on a book bender that can last for days. I fall into this state for different reasons ...it’s symptomatic of my state of mind, ennui up to my ears, my life gone awry, and that feeling of dread when-ever I’m asked what I’m doing. How can anyone sort all this out? All things considered, I’d rather read. It’s the perfect escape.’

Not that our heroine reads indiscriminately. Yet nor does she subscribe to Gertrude Stein’s wise words: ‘You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.’ Dora is an alcoholic who can only drink grand cru. And this little lady reads Flaubert, not just for the story but because ‘I heard a critic say that the book exposes all the hollowness and fragility of youthful ideals and is an insidious devaluation of the power of love....I get a rush these days from the inevitable pitfalls of the human condition.’

In keeping with her less literary counterparts, Dora likes to disconnect the phone and run herself a bubble bath, before getting hopped-up on a killer cocktail of Hemingway and the Brontë sisters. The aftermath of these excesses is described in much the same way as one of Bridget Jones’s hangovers: ‘My eyes are bloodshot and I have bruised circles beneath them. My matted hair is sticking up in clumps and my eyebrows look like someone combed them with a whisk. I am surrounded by the wreckage of my apartment, where heaps of discarded clothes lie.’

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.