Sermonetta

It's Sunday morning and I'm feeling slightly sermonish having been reading various blogs and websites for the last hour or so.

Today's homily is a reflection on what I've been reading and I'd like to being by quoting Lisa Tucker, author of The Song Reader & Shout Down the Moon. This is a post of hers I found at Readerville.com:

"The line between high art and low art in this country seems to be poorly drawn yet rigorously maintained."

So it seems to me also. And surprisingly (to me) lately it seems even more so among more female authors than male authors.

Personally, now that I think about it, I am aware that I have been insulted far worse by female authors than by male authors. Made to feel excluded more often by female authors than by male authors.

I remember the first time I met Betsy (name changed to protect the guilty) - an author who the New York Times considers "literary" who told me she envied me because "at least every time you have a new novel out you don't have to spend any sleepless nights worrying about whether or not the NYT will review it."

I didn't know what was more amazing - that she'd actually said that to me - or that she read the NYTBR and didn't realize they certainly did review suspense.

And then there was the writer who told me she was going to Yaddo for the third time and how wonderful it was and how much I'd get out of it… "Except…" she said… "the other writers there probably wouldn't accept someone who doesn't write seriously."

Nice, huh?

So I'm not really all that amazed by what's happening on line these days but I'm still dismayed. It started two weeks ago when the following deal was announced in Publisher's Lunch :

THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT: A Collection of Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers, selected and introduced by Elizabeth Merrick, founder of the Cupcake Reading Series and blog, created to support women writers of literary fiction, including stories by Francine Prose, Myla Goldberg, Vendela Vida, Aimee Bender, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan, and Samantha Hunt, to Julia Cheiffetz at the Random House publishing group (NA).

The reaction was swift and fierce.

On blogs like Jennifer Weiner's and Beatrice. com to online communities like Readerville, to conversations over drinks and coffee, female authors are slugging it out.

And it's ludicrous.

We are expending all this effort arguing about whether a Hebrew National hot dog cooked over the fire on a camping trip does or does not taste better than the roasted chicken at Chez Amis Louis in Paris. Depending on who you are, and what you like, and what kind of mood you are in, and what happened that day, one tastes fucking fabulous. And one doesn't. Or they both are mediocre.

It's the Myth of Sisyphus all over again. He never got anywhere with that rock. And we're not going to get anywhere with ours either.

The book that will entertain my Gucci shoe clad sister when she goes on vacation will never be the same book that will provoke and absorb my friend Randi who sometimes works Saturdays at Diane's Books in CT.

Ladies, take the damn gloves off. There are bigger problems out there that need the attention and the energy we're wasting on this.

The bigger problem - the one that needs all that passion and verve we have is that people are not reading enough. Not enough books are getting attention. We need creative solutions to these problems. We do not need women punching each other's lights out over whose work is more important.

Take every minute that you are going to spend blogging or talking or arguing about whether Chick Lit is crap or is Jane Austen Circa 2005 or whether or not literary fiction is too elitist and exclusionary and focus them on something that actually deserves our vehemence and attention:

How to get more readers.

More readers for Chick Lit. Literary Fiction. Romance. Hen lit. Mommy lit. Po mo fiction. Erotic lit. Mysteries. Thrillers. Suspense.

More readers for books.

Amen.

Comments

[Jozef Imrich]

I am feeling rather sermonish in obscurity ;-)

Today's reading comes from The Long Tail Chapter: www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

[Jozef Imrich]

Ach - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

[kitty]

I couldn't agree with you more! Most people read to be entertained, so who's to say what is and what isn't entertaining? My son's 2nd grade teacher told me that, as a teacher, she didn't care what students read as long as they read. She said her son would read the cereal box as he was eating his breakfast, which was fine with her.

[Jane Guill]

We toil for fame,
We live on crusts,
We make a name,
Then we are busts.
--L.H. Robbins

Now, where's my damned beret?

[Leora Skolkin-Smith]

Amen! I will drink to that! Very wonderfully said, MJ and I couldn't agree more.

[amber]

Preach on, please!!!!

I've never understood why one thing is better than the other, as I read everything.

[Pam]

Great post. I think what annoys me the most about that book is that it both looks down on chick lit, yet uses it in the title to generate attention and sales. Pathetic.

Why does there have to be a line? Why can't there just be good books?

:)

[Susan]

They had the same argument across the pond at The Guardian. Take a look at "Belittled Women", AL Kennedy's essay on the topic: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1444493,00.html!

[Shalanna Collins]

Well, perhaps the title is meant to be intriguing. Maybe the stuff reads like chick lit, but is more "literary" in tone or in some sense. I think that my book (and the novel "Carrie Pilby," which was published as chick lit by RDI), might be classified as "smart chick lit" and/or just plain "a novel." Something that has the edgy, contemporary voice and tone but does not deal solely with shopping, shoes, and being rescued by getting a man (which seems to be the perception of what most chick lit is about--in fact, in Bridget Jones, she is rescued by a man and does not rescue herself, which I understood was cause for rejection as a novel before the chick lit world coalesced around our heads). Or it could just be a teaser-title. We can't assume that this editor doesn't like chick lit. Maybe she is just saying that women can write various types of styles and voices. Which is true.

"Chick lit" is a marketing category. It's for feeding the marketing juggernaut. It gets your book picked up by more people than would otherwise pick it up. I think that's all there is to it.

I have always read cereal boxes and the backs of those little cards that come in the mail . . . whenever there's nothing around to read.