by Jessica Schneider

Created on: July 02, 2009

I admit that I don't always match the color of my purse with that of my shoes. No big deal, right? But in a Chick-Lit novel, this is a travesty. I used to think that literarily, we were standing on the precipice of a very large abyss. But after familiarizing myself with the genre known as Chick-Lit, I realize that we are actually at the bottom, and have been for some time.

In Lynn Messina's Chick-Lit novel Fashionistas, published by Red Dress Ink, her lead character comments while having a drink with her friend at the bar, "Writing genre fiction is easy: You follow a formula, do your best and in the end if you're not one-tenth as good as the people you adored growing up- E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf- it doesn't really matter. No one expected anything from you anyway... It's taking yourself seriously as a writer that's hard."

When I think of great novelists, few women come to mind. Yes there is Betty Smith, Pearl Buck, Daphne du Maurier, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch just to name a few, but for every one of those names, there is a thousand or more women writers, lumped beneath the umbrella of "women's fiction writers" amid the slog of their own mediocrity.

Virtually all the novels published today are geared for your average soccer mom, and if that's not the case, then it's for female twentysomethings or thirtysomethings with short attention spans who like reading about people who work for the glossy magazines they like to read (as it is in the case of Fashionistas). The problem, though, resides in the two kinds of Chick-Lit: Chick-Lit that is fluff and knows it and Chick-Lit that is fluff and doesn't.

Criticizing this first group of novels is like ripping on a soap opera. These books are self-aware and don't take themselves seriously. The thing that people don't realize is that pretense plays the biggest role in how much something deserves to be ripped. One does not criticize the daytime show All My Children for not being Othello, because nothing is expected from it, other than mindless entertainment. So Messina is right in what she says- genre writers have it easy.

Some of these Chick-Lit titles include Apocalipstic, Getting Over Jack Wagner, Good In Bed, Diary of a Mad Bride, Confessions of a Shopaholic, See Jane Date, Engaging Men, and The Thin Pink Line, (referring specifically to the line seen from taking a pregnancy test: a spin off of the great war film title The Thin Red Line, as I'm sure Terrence Malick would be pleased). Equipped

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