Divided into sections titled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering," Changing My Mind is a book of "occasional essays," which Smith describes as "written for particular occasions, particular editors." Because of this structure, the collection doesn't feel particularly unified, but that isn't necessarily a weakness. Different readers will likely find different essays to love, but even those that don't grab the heart tend to engage the brain. Not having read any George Eliot, I found "Middlemarch and Everybody" hard going at first, and all the essays in "Reading" are pretty unapologetic about the specialized knowledge they require for full enjoyment. On the other hand, Smith's writing usually had the effect of making me really want to read the book she was talking about, especially Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Smith writes,

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...

Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

A more evocative description of literary identification I've never read, and Smith's examination of the ways her blackness does and doesn't influence the way she reads Hurston will resonate with anyone who's ever found a "sister" on the page, of any race. It also provides a corrective to the opposite but equally restrictive notions that we can only enjoy books whose writers we identify with culturally, and that cultural identification has no place in the literary experience.

There was a strain of nastiness in Smith's novel On Beauty — characters who lacked physical self-confidence sometimes seemed like the novel's whipping boys (or girls) — and that nastiness occasionally resurges in Changing My Mind. In "Two Directions for the Novel," it's pretty clear that Smith thinks writer Joseph O'Neill has chosen the wrong direction. Of a passage from his novel Netherland, she writes, "an interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing." "Two Directions" makes an interesting argument for Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder as a model for fiction that gains new flexibility by breaking through the restrictions not just of attractive language but of human psychology. But can't fiction writers learn to praise one kind of writing without denigrating another? Is literature really a zero-sum game?

In a way, though, Smith's meanness just added to the growing conviction I had as I read Changing My Mind: that I was being granted a peek into the idiosyncratic brain of a very, very interesting person. This conviction reached its apex with Smith's film reviews. Smith claims in the very moving "Dead Man Laughing" that at her audition for a comedy troupe at Cambridge, "I wasn't funny. Not even slightly." She appears to have rectified this. Here she is on Get Rich or Die Tryin', addressing Fiddy directly:

I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: "I'm in it for the money." "For what?" "Sneakers." "Anything else?" "A gun." "What you need that for?" "I don't know." I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voiceover: "Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war." I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: "So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid."

And sometimes Smith is just bizarre. In her review of The Weather Man, she writes,

I think I found the film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, the film's central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in the film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It's an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagine Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years. I don't want to tell you any more about it — it's best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind.

This is basically an anti-review, and Smith's general approach to film reviewing is so funny and ad hoc and fucking weird — yet so frequently spot on — that it made mean wish she hadn't quit doing it in 2006. More than that, it made me wish I still wrote film reviews. Changing My Mind may be most inspiring to other writers — I don't know of anyone else who actually likes essays on writing, even ones as smart as Smith's "That Crafty Feeling." But anybody who appreciates frank and well-informed and slightly off-center thinking will likely find what I did — that Smith makes one want to read more, think more, and generally be smarter, which is about the best thing a writer can do.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Amazon]

Some of the offending passages, excerpted on BBC News, are pretty poorly written. Paul Theroux's line, "Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four," recalls a scene from one of the Naked Gun movies, which is not usually something you want from serious literature. But really the only laugh-out-loud example is from Philip Roth's The Humbling:

It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.

It's possible that Roth's actually trying to be funny with his vadge-mask image (is this like a cock bib?), and none of the other nominees is really all that terrible. But neither are they hot. As Booker Prize judge Lucasta Miller points out, it's not so hard to write about sex in a silly or funny way. But why is it so tough, at least in capital-L Literature, to make sex actually erotic? Miller offers a clue:

A trap people fall into is an earnest anatomical description of sex. The difficulty with the anatomical is that it can read like a bit of a textbook. To stop it doing so, they will put in flowery metaphors from the animal kingdom, but you don't need that detail. When people use similes and metaphors in their anatomical depictions of the sexual organs, it's toe-curling and embarrassing.

So penis is out, but so is pork-sword? Miller's words sound pretty restrictive, but she also has a point — it's easy for sex writing to sound too clinical, but the farther it veers from straight-up health-class vocabulary, the more it risks being silly. Book critic Melissa Katsoulis says the solution is to avoid writing about sex entirely. She tells the BBC's Tom Geoghegan,

If I was writing a novel, I wouldn't attempt to write it except in the most Victorian and prim way, because it's awful. It's a cliche, but the moments of genuine frisson in books are when hardly anything happens. When you have a dream about someone you fancy, it's because they sat down next to you on the bus or something, not because you were at it, hammer and tongs. Either be suggestive or funny, but trying to do the nuts and bolts isn't going to work.

I'm not sure what kind of sex Katsoulis is having (hammer and tongs?), and I also can't cosign her statement about dreams (a bus?). And in a larger sense, it's a shame that people shy away from sex writing just because it's difficult. Miller says literary sex should focus on "the characters and their emotional state," because "that's the difference between porn and art." But I'm not so sure there's really a clear-cut difference, and I think that if literature is allowed to manipulate our emotions, it should be able to turn us on too.

This is not to say, however, that I have any concrete answers regarding sex writing. I tend to prefer the cheerfully vulgar to both the metaphorical and the clinical, but these are obviously matters of taste. As with actual sex, no sex writing is going to please all the people all the time. But — also as with actual sex — that's no excuse for not doing it.

Is It Difficult To Write Well About Sex? [BBC News]
2009 Bad Sex In Fiction Award Nominees Announced [Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Book Patrol Blog]

Tucker describes Bruno Bettelheim's take on Grimm's tales: "the horrors of wicked witches and candy houses allow children to process their darkest fears and greatest desires. Here, Freud's theories take center stage: Cinderella's shoe transforms into a symbol of female sexuality that, when lost, spells the end of virginity." Author Maria Tatar, meanwhile, has a feminist perspective on the fairy tale from the 16th century to the present. Tucker says,

She argues that the fairy-tale fear factor is less about cautioning children and more about the need to control the young adults that they become. Women in particular are meant to take notice. Gluttony, infidelity and arrogance are, she charges, all part of a "pantheon of female sins" that must be reined in at all costs. Fairy tales, according to Tatar, teach girls to accept their miserable fate so that they will become docile wives and mothers.

Jack Zipes, meanwhile, makes the hard-to-dispute claim "that fairy tales are above all products of specific cultural moments and have always been used to reinforce social norms as well as to subvert them." As these dueling analyses make clear, fairy tales have become something of an interpretive football in the past few decades, and remain so today — especially around Halloween. I've always been amused by the Freudian angle. The little mermaid's loss of her voice, for instance, is supposed to be a metaphor for castration, and when I lost my voice earlier this week, that felt pretty accurate (I also lost my keys, so I was doubly impotent). Of course, that very same tale is in a way a caution against female overreaching, since in the Hans Christian Andersen version she has to turn into a "spirit" while somebody else marries the prince. But neither Bettelheim's nor Tatar's interpretive lens quite jibes with my experience of fairy tales.

As a kid, I was obsessed with both Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre and Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. The former, for the unfamiliar, was a series of slightly wacked-out takes on popular Grimm and non-Grimm stories. One favorite of mine was "The Princess Who Never Laughed," which included a minor character named "Phlegmatic Jack." Another was the incredibly creepy "Rapunzel," starring Duvall herself, and, I'm pretty sure, a horrifying screaming radish. The Fairy Books, meanwhile, contained all the standard tales, but my favorites were somewhat off the beaten path. I remember trying to convince my dad that it was a Christmas "tradition" that he read me a story called "The Castle Kerglass," which was extremely long and involved (if memory serves) a mysterious gatekeeper holding a giant shot-put. Yelling vegetables and mystical shot-putters pretty much exemplify what fairy tales are about for me: how fucking weird the world is.

Yes, sometimes fairy tales reinforce social norms — but they almost always do it in a way that's bizarre. Outsized punishments are meted out for small sins. Fruits and vegetables are both weapons and vehicles. Lovers turn monsters and frogs into lovers. In their original versions, many fairy tales are downright terrifying, but I like them that way. Too often, contemporary children's books are meant to reassure or to teach kids an orderly view of the universe. But if there's anything I learned from Shelley Duvall and her demon-radishes, it's that the universe is disorderly and often batshit insane. No story can fully prepare you for life's disasters, heartbreaks, swine flu epidemics, and gradual pileup of family secrets and broken glassware, but fairy tales do a better job than most. So go ahead, scare your kids with the Grimms' Cinderella this Halloween. There's more where that came from.

Academic Studies Of Fairy Tales [Wall Street Journal]

I'd never gone into a movie knowing as much about it, shot for shot, as I did Antichrist. And yet, I was still shocked. Or at least grossed out enough that I had to bury my face in my hands at strategic moments. Despite its moments of beauty (you may have heard a little something about the others?) I couldn't get past the movie's essential misanthropy - although if the experience did indeed prove a therapeutic fever-dream for the director, well, good on him. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane remarked,

At Cannes, the film received two prizes: one for Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Best Actress, and a scornful anti-trophy for von Trier, awarded for misogyny by the Ecumenical Jury. How the two should be squared I am unsure. The movie certainly shudders with a terror of female power, and the last thing we see is a monstrous regiment of women, their faces blanked out, streaming up a hillside, like the nightmare of a Puritan preacher. Yet so plain is Gainsbourg's dramatic dominance, as opposed to her place in von Trier's mad ideological scheme, that she carries the tale with a conviction barely hinted at in the script.

Last month, a British writer and critic, Jessica Mann, hit on these same issues when she declared in an essay that she could no longer review increasingly brutal crime fiction, filled with violence against women. This set off a small tempest, especially when she clarified that her objection wasn't to do with straightforward sexism, since the most extreme examples were by female writers. Rather, she just didn't want to read it. While the two can definitely start a discussion of the role of gaze, intent and control, my basic feeling was one of. well, agreement. Because that's what I felt watching - or rather, not watching - Antichrist. My objection wasn't intellectual but visceral. And if no one's looking, how effective is the lesson?

Trouble In Eden [New Yorker]
Sexist Violence Sickens Crime Critic [Guardian]
"Feminists" Love Mutilated Women? [New Yorker]

The novel follows four moms: Rebecca, who's self-absorbed and nasty; Melora, who's self-absorbed and a Hollywood actress; Lizzie, who's lost and sad; and Karen, who's straight-up crazy. Doree Shafrir wrote that the book heralded a "new narrative of the New York woman," and Sohn herself commented, "There's so much anxiety around finding a mate that no one really thinks about the actual marriage when they're trying to find someone." But if her book is about "the actual marriage," I'm joining a nunnery.

Few of the couples in the book seem to have married because they actually liked each other. Rebecca married Theo because "she had slept with every smart artistic cutie south of Fourteenth St and was beginning to wonder how she was going to meet anyone new," while Karen wed Matty so she could move to Park Slope. Lizzie does seem to feel love and lust for her husband Jay, but she took up with him only after finding out her long-term girlfriend didn't want children. Marriage in Prospect Park West seems largely a vehicle for procreation — but procreation isn't all that much fun either. Rebecca's jealous of her kid, Lizzie doesn't know what to do with hers, Melora's son is raised by nannies, and Karen just wants more.

It's no accident that having children in Prospect Park West, like buying real estate, often seems more about status than about love. Sohn is clearly aiming to create a biting comedy of manners, a beach-read version of Edith Wharton. And the novel does succeed in sending up a competitive culture of upper-middle-class mothering. The characters' ambivalence about their kids and their stay-at-home lives feels authentic, as does the atmosphere of anxiety and overprotection that pervades Park Slope. I didn't believe any mom would make her kid play in kneepads, like Karen does — until I saw it in Prospect Park.

But "new narrative?" Is it really new to say that middle-class parents overprotect their children? That parents in general don't have enough sex? That yuppies are self-absorbed and obsessed with real estate? Sohn seems confident that her characters reflect the real Park Slope — she told Shafrir "It's a very undersexed neighborhood" — but this observation too feels like a stereotype. To give us a new narrative of Park Slope you'd have to show us parents fucking wildly while their toddlers drink real Coke and watch television. Which might actually be more satisfying than Prospect Park West.

The novel is an absorbing read, thanks mainly to the totally batshit Karen, who basically blackmails Melora into being her famous friend. And it's true that Sohn seems to be tapping into a vein of ennui and insecurity that may darken the lives of even the most privileged moms. But I still got the feeling that Prospect Park West was a book written to make its readers feel superior to its characters. Their marriages are so bad, their values so screwed up, their gestures at liberalism so laughable in light of their venality, that I felt like I'd been invited to a party just to make fun of the guests.

Early in the novel, Rebecca and Lizzie are sitting in Park Slope's Tea Lounge making fun of the other mothers:

"God, they're old," said Rebecca, pointing to the mothers arranged in a circle around a coffee table [...]
"They spent their lives making an effort," Lizzie said, "and now they have the kid so they don't have to."
"It's not like this in Tribeca," Rebecca said. "I once took Abbie to the Washington Market playground, and I saw a hot woman pushing her kid on the swings. She turned out to be Christy Turlington. I felt so bad for the normal mothers in Tribeca. They must have such low self-esteem."
"In Park slope we're Christy Turlington," Lizzie said.

Prospect Park West feels like one long "we're Christy Turlington," a fun but empty fuck-you to a bunch of people we don't really know.

Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update [Publisher's Weekly]
Prospect Park West [Amazon]

Apparently undeterred by the creepiness and tragedy of Emily Brontë's love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff (who at one point hangs another girl's dog), Twilight author Stephenie Meyer even has Bella quote Brontë at one point to describe her feelings for Edward. Taking Wuthering Heights as a model for your love is a little like walking down the aisle, to, say, "Heart-Shaped Box," but that doesn't seem to bother Twihards. They're gobbling up a new edition of the book, complete with a very Twilighty cover and the tagline "love never dies." However, some readers are annoyed with the content. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website,

I was really disappointed when reading this book, it's made to believe to be one of the greatest love stories ever told and I found only five pages out of the whole book about there love and the rest filled with bitterness and pain and other peoples stories.

People were such downers in 1847. Also, they talked funny. Another reviewer asked if the book was "in old english or mordern understandable english?" Public service message: people stopped speaking Old English in the 12th century. Still, classics like Wuthering Heights may seem inaccessible to "mordern" readers. What better way to make them new again than to have today's books endorse them? And why stop with Twilight? We thought of a few more glossy bestsellers that could be shilling dusty tomes:

How Not To Look Old: The Picture Of Dorian Grey
Harry Potter: David Copperfield
Eat This, Not That!: Alice in Wonderland
Jim Cramer's Mad Money: The Grapes Of Wrath
Confessions of a Shopaholic: Madame Bovary
Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover: The Metamorphosis
The Berenstein Bears: The Bear
What Not To Wear: The Scarlet Letter
Anything by Rush Limbaugh: Heart of Darkness
Eat, Pray, Love: Titus Andronicus
Lauren Conrad's LA Candy: The Portrait of a Lady

We're sure you can think of more.

Vampire Endorsement Turns Brontë Into Bestseller [Guardian]

Earlier: Heathcliff Didn't Sparkle, Though

Moore came on the scene in 1985 with the collection Self-Help, and readers familiar with her later collections, Like Life and Birds of America, and her novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? will recall her dark wit and often acerbic view of human relationships. According to Elle's Louisa Kamps, New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman has said that Moore deals with "female" topics but that no one would "dismiss her work as chick lit." Moore does often write from the point of view of women, but the assumption that women's lives are "female topics" (translation: private, soft, and not of interest to men) is one of the publishing industry's biggest canards. The idea that calling something "chick lit" is the same as dismissing it may be the other side of that coin. In fact, Moore's stories often make women's lives sound hard — kids get cancer, babies die, relationships are unsatisfying or just plain infuriating, and the idea that one finds oneself in others is generally disproved. The fact that these "topics" need apology, a not-chick-lit stamp of approval, just makes the problems of Moore's characters seem that much graver — life is tough, and people aren't necessarily taking them seriously.

Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, is set in a Midwestern university town much like Madison, where Moore lives and teaches, and Kamps spends a lot of time trying to figure out whether it is autobiographical. Moore doesn't seem very interested in this question — when asked if a particular Madison restaurant found its way into the novel, she says, "sure, I thought a little bit of this place." She's more interested in discussing how one writes and becomes a writer than in her own divorce or its impact on her fiction. At times she sounds like a terrifying teacher: she once told her students to "satirize the tics and tendencies" of the classmate seated next to them, which sounds like a pretty good recipe for shame, especially for the student satirized by Moore. But her teaching philosophy also displays a tough-mindedness that is as refreshing as it is unsettling. She says,

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

She's commenting on the close relationship young people today often have with their parents, but this closeness can breathe an eagerness to please not only the parents themselves, but authority in general. Moore's writing sometimes conveys a nasty view of humanity, one that would surely sadden any mother or father, but the nastiest parts are often the most funny and true. Insofar as it encourages students to stop trying to make people happy, Moore's advice is great — readers, like all humans, don't necessarily know what they want, and trying to please isn't a very good way of actually doing so.

On the writing life, Moore says,

The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. [...] if you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'This is just who I am, and if I'm going to do.' There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.

The idea of the writer as ill-mannered hermit going against the grain of society can seem a little self-aggrandizing — after all, there are more "unsafe" forms of rebellion than writing. But Moore's vision of the writer seems more troll-under-the-bridge than Che Guevara. And if her anti-communal view of writing sounds a little lonely (really? Writers only get four friends?), it's also a good antidote to the idea that the purpose of fiction is to uplift readers. This idea seems to be particularly foremost in publishers' minds when they market books to women, and it does us a disservice, assuming that we have to like the characters, their lives, and also their reflection on our own lives if we're going to buy a book. But it's not so easy to predict what will bring us joy — what writers can do, as Moore suggests, is detach themselves from what they think will please, and free themselves up to be a little rude.

Elle [Official Site]

In her essay on Double X, author Sarah Bliston says, "like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself - fast - if it's going to survive." And in a way it's doing so. In a slightly annoying article ("contrition is the new black") for the Times, Ruth La Ferla describes new books like The Penny Pinchers Club, in which a woman resorts to dumpster-diving when she fears her husband is about to divorce her, and The Summer Kitchen, whose heroine goes back to work after her husband's arrest. And in Publisher's Weekly, Doree Shafrir mentions Mercury in Retrograde, which features a character forced to fend for herself after a lifetime of relying on her parents.

On the one hand, these books would seem to champion a new self-reliance not present in more traditional, catch-the-man novels. Shafrir quotes Greer Hendricks, editor of Mercury in Retrograde, who says,

These women were really getting a life. It's really about friendship and self-acceptance and getting your act together. It's about the life, not the guy.

These tales of women overcoming obstacles to live independently of men and their bank accounts certainly sound inspiring — except that the obstacles aren't really that big. In fact, it seems that divorce and financial devastation usually cause the heroines to do something fun and hip that they really wanted to do anyway. When her parents take away her credit cards, Mercury in Retrograde's Lena "Lipstick" Lippencrass "discovers a talent for fashion design" — that noted path to financial security. The heroine of The Summer Kitchen is "forced to open a bakery," also usually a capital-intensive and uncertain enterprise, at least in the real world. And Jill Kargman's The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund, has its heroine, post-divorce, "picking up the threads of a career built on her first love, rock 'n' roll." These women don't have to scrimp and save in menial jobs — instead, they embark on glamorous careers, with the implication that their lives are now more fulfilling than they were in the days of easy marital money.

This idea of salvation through reduced circumstances — the concept that having less disposable income will help us focus on what's really important and perhaps even become better people — has been around since at least the beginning of the recession, and probably long before. But the key word is disposable. Describing the post-recession edits she made to her book Sleepless Nights, Bliston says,

Whereas before, if I'm going to be completely honest, my characters' motivations to change were somewhat murky and self-centered, now they have a splash of excitement and energy about them. Somehow, the changes I'd made to try to keep up with the changing economy had actually made the novel better.

And author Sarah Strohmeyer tells the Times about curbing her own overspending. "I mean," she says, "how many more napkin rings can you buy?" The new, recession-era chick lit may tell the stories of women who pare away the fat in their lives to find true happiness, but this is a lot easier if there's some fat to begin with. Broadsheet's Amy Benfer writes that the heroines' newer, leaner lives still "reflect the kinds of decisions that those of us who spent the boom years wondering if we could ever afford a mortgage on an average professional salary before our 65th birthdays might still find a bit out of touch with reality." After all, "one can lose the home in Aspen and the five-tiered cakes and still be a good long way from foreclosure on one's primary residence and clipping coupons for Kraft macaroni and cheese."

And while "losing a home in Aspen" might indeed force someone to focus on what's truly valuable in life, getting laid off and losing health insurance don't usually give people "a splash of excitement and energy." For women outside the hedge fund set, especially those who've been out of the workforce for a while, divorce can mean a plunge into poverty, not a launch into a new and exciting career. Benfer writes that chick lit about wealthy women might "appeal to the aspirational fantasies" of readers (that word again), and that these fantasies may have helped get us into this financial mess in the first place. And Amy Sohn, author of the new novel Prospect Park West, says, "The book is really about the perils of aspiration," and of a life that is "always about the next thing, trading up." Not every woman is able to trade up, but chick lit may be, in part, about wanting to, and this may not be such a good thing.

The chick lit genre doesn't deserve across-the-board opprobrium — at their best, these novels can be witty and wise, and their popularity supports many a female writer. But chick lit writers may be unconsciously buying into women's magazine culture, with its idea that reading should inspire desire — for more stuff, or, in the new, recession-era formulation, for a life that is glamorous even in fallback mode. It's neither realistic nor necessary to ask that writers produce only what Benfer calls "Great and Difficult works of art," or that all chick lit novels be about unmitigated pain and suffering. But, as author Gigi Levangie Grazer says, "the idea that having the right bag buys you happiness-now that's dark." And there's something dark, too, about the notion that even in a recession, heroines need to be better off than their readers. Do chick lit consumers want to read about working-class families dealing with layoffs, or women who find fulfillment in jobs that aren't traditionally "cool"? We don't know, because those books aren't being written — yet.

More Gumption, Less Gucci [New York Times]
Chick-literati [Financial Times]
Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update [Publishers Weekly]
The Death Of Chick Lit [Double X]
The Devil Wears Old Navy [Broadsheet]

Trouble is the story of two women in their forties who take a trip to Mexico to escape their lives. One of them, Josie, embarks on a sort of sexual renaissance. Christensen tells Salon,

She experiences sex in her 40s as being about her own desire for a man rather than the thrill of her power over him, his desire for her — which defined sex in her 20s. She knows what she wants now, isn't afraid to want, and can allow herself the pleasure of desiring a man. Part of this comes from comfort in her own skin, and part of it comes from the fact that this affair isn't about power or marriage-and-babies, it's mutual lust without expectations or pressure.

This travel-to-a-warm-climate-for-mutual-lust trope sounds a little familiar, but Christensen resists the popular idea that hot sex is a path towards self-actualization, a way to reinvent oneself and become a better person. As Josie enjoys her adventures in Mexico, Christensen says, she suffers from "selective myopia. She sees what she needs to see and what she wants to see, but she is increasingly self-involved as she gets happier and happier. When you're unhappy, you're more compassionate on some level." And while her friend Raquel "becomes more and more self-aware as the novel goes on, [...] Josie becomes more and more clueless."

Vanderbilt's view of sex [that's her above] is a lot sillier than Christensen's. Obsession includes a carrot and an expensive hairbrush used as sex toys, a brothel where the whores go commando under their Fortuny tea gowns and elaborate feathered masks, "scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps," and a unicorn. The book also offers this beauty ritual: scrub your breasts with sea salt, douse them in gardenia oil, and then "let loose shaking onto the breasts a goodly amount of chocolate sprinkles, which will adhere prettily." Yum?

Vanderbilt's son Anderson Cooper is supportive, saying, "at 85, whatever she wants to write is fine with me." But he has to be a little disturbed by her assertion that "I do think all art is autobiographical." Whether or not Vanderbilt's still-vibrant sex life ("I'm always in love," she says, "that's one of my secrets.") includes carrots or unicorns, she may be speaking more metaphorically than literally. She says the character of Bee, a "highly sensual" orphan, is based on her experiences growing up without parents. "If you've never had a mother or a father," she elaborates, "you grow up seeking something you're never going to find, ever. You seek it in love and in people and in beauty."

It's not necessarily a prescription for a psychologically healthy life, but constant, insatiable seeking does sound like a pretty good premise for an erotic novel. Both Vanderbilt and Christensen seem to understand that what is sexy is not necessarily what is good for us. This is especially true in fiction and fantasy, but it has some application in real life too. In her 20s, Josie saw sex as a means to an end, and this mindset — whether the end is "marriage and babies," self-esteem, psychological or even physical health — is pretty common in American culture today. Try, for instance, to get through a whole women's magazine without finding something about how boning is good for your weight, sleep, or skin. Maybe what some women learn in their 40s and beyond is that sex is best enjoyed as an end in itself, without ulterior motives.

Sex and the (fortysomething) single girl [Salon]
At 85, a Brahmin in Blue Jeans Writes of Sex, Masks and Veggies [New York Times]

Some of the most measured responses to the question came from men. One said women's fiction is "anything that women write, and that appeals to women." While one woman said she considers Virginia Woolf "women's fiction," many seemed to think the term implied a therapeutic or unrealistic bent. Women's fiction is "anything that touches your soul and makes you feel better about life," said a female interviewee. A man said women's fiction is "anything they want to read" (also Barbara Vey's definition), but then added that it's what they read "for escapism."

On the other side, another man defined the genre as fiction "dealing with women and the sorts of things they're facing in all aspects of their social and cultural lives [...] things that take women's lives seriously and aren't afraid to show them to other people, sometimes warts and all."

Is it true that women want to escape into books more than men do? Aren't traditionally masculine genres, like the spy novel, escapist too? For that matter, plenty of women enjoy Michael Crichton and Ian Fleming — does that make them women's fiction too?

The distinction seems a little artificial, but the fact remains that many women, even serious readers, continue to make it. While I'm always angry when a man refuses to read Alice Munro or Charlotte Brontë on the grounds that they're too feminine, I also have to confess to avoiding a few authors (Philip Roth is an example) because they think of them as being "for men." Usually I've gotten the idea that these writers are misogynist, but sometimes I've accepted this idea without actually reading their work. And when I think about it, I'm not convinced that a misogynist book — while obviously deserving of criticism — isn't worthwhile reading in other ways. In my reading life, the distinction between women's and men's fiction may simply be limiting. What about in yours? Are there ways this distinction can be liberating?

What Is Women's Fiction? [Publisher's Weekly]

[London, June 3. Image via Getty]

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 03: Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, poses with her award at the Royal Festival Hall on June 3, 2009 in London, England. (Photo by Frantzesco Kangaris/Getty Images)

A single mom whose life was once "all work and graft and paying bills," Cole doesn't apologize for the commercial nature of her books. She's proud of both her boat and her "Malibu luxury caravan" — "it's one of the most expensive in the world, it's got a viewing tower and everything" — and she doesn't feel self-conscious for not writing more "literary" fiction. "The Booker prize money," she says, "wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes." She's neither bashful about her success nor regretful of a harder time — when a friend expressed pity over her difficult life, she fired back, "'Actually I felt like that about you at times."

On men, she says,

I can't live with anyone except my children, these days, do you know what I mean? Men get on my fucking nerves after a while, they drive me up the wall, if you'll excuse my French. I always say, 'I like a man, I just couldn't eat a whole one.' I think I'm too independent now, I've been on my own too long.

She's equally eloquent on her struggle to be taken seriously as a female crime writer:

You know what? I've always had critics right from day one. They go on about the violence but you know someone once said to me, if you was a man you'd have been the Irvine Welsh of the south-east. But I'm not. I'm a blonde. Worst of all I'm a blonde Essex girl. Do you know what I mean? And I don't just mean that there's still prejudice against Essex girls. I think there's prejudice against most women. I think there always will be and always has been.

I don't care what nobody says, you still have to do better. If you're in a job, it's a male-orientated world, and my job is very male-orientated. Statistically, women buy more books. But statistically men get paid more money. You tell me if you think there's something wrong with that?

Plenty of women have said all these things before — that a man is not a prerequisite for a happy life and can even be a hindrance, that women have to work twice as hard for the same respect as men, that money is useful and boats and cars are cool. But a woman who discusses her success without false modesty, her acquisitiveness without guilt, and her independence without reservation is still pretty shocking. And awesome.

'The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes' [Guardian]

According to Salon's Laura Miller, author Brian Boyd gives a two-pronged explanation of the influence of fiction on human evolution:

First, fiction — like all art — is a form of play, the enjoyable means by which we practice and hone certain abilities likely to come in handy in more serious situations. When kittens pounce on and wrestle with their litter mates, they're developing skills that will help them hunt, even though as far as they're concerned they're just larking around. Second, when we create and share stories with each other, we build and reinforce the cooperative bonds within groups of people (families, tribes, towns, nations), making those groups more cohesive and in time allowing human beings to lord it over the rest of creation.

The second part is more convincing than the first (Madame Bovary showed us what happens to people who learn how to behave from books), and Miller expands on it in a sensitive and thought-provoking way:

The affection we feel toward fictional characters like Dorothy Gale or Tom Sawyer is akin to the warm belonging we seek among friends and family, drawing us into the kind of group affiliation that can spell the difference between life and death. The late novelist David Foster Wallace once told me that reading fiction made him "feel unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness." That profound sense of comfort he described is, as he correctly perceived, quintessentially human, an incentive to keep connecting with each other despite our inevitable conflicts and tensions.

The idea that fiction reinforces human community seems like an interesting one, but it has its limits. When Boyd tries to expand his theories into "evocriticism," a way of looking at works of literature through an evolutionary lens, he goes astray. In his analysis of the Odyssey, he writes that Homer uses narrative techniques like "focusing on a larger-than-life yet sympathetic protagonist with a distinct goal" because he "understands that he must seize and hold his audience's attention." "But come on," writes Miller, "who doesn't know that?"

Looking at fiction as a vehicle for communal values may encourage this kind of simplistic criticism. Homer (if there even was one single Homer who composed the Odyssey, which is far from certain) likely knew that he had to be entertaining in order to get people to pay attention to his story, but the story itself is far more than a particularly effective social-togetherness machine. And literary criticism, at its best, is far more than an explanation of why art is useful. Really good writing about writing is an art in itself, a practice that adds to our enjoyment of words and the world in a way that has nothing to do with our ability to hunt or share food. It's interesting to think about how art might influence our evolution and vice versa, but this thinking is no substitute for the complex and joyful examination of literature that great criticism can provide. Boyd's ideas are interesting as anthropology, but anyone who's really interested in literature would do better to pick up a copy of Mimesis or Helene Cixous's Coming to Writing and Other Essays — they're a lot more fun, and, in the end, they might be truer.

The Evolutionary Argument For Dr. Seuss [Salon]
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction [Amazon]

Earlier: Is Art Adaptive? The Evolution of Creativity
Science Discovers What Books Are For: Evolution

In an extremely, ahem, thorough discussion of the recent "Love as the Practice of Freedom" conference - devoted to romance fiction and American culture - author Hillary Rettig stakes a claim for romance novels as a force for revolution! Romance writers have long fought for respect in a world and an industry that frequently ignores the genre's leaps in quality, in commitment to female empowerment, and progressive sentiments. But the fact is, that romance increasingly demands to be taken seriously: a quarter of all books sold are romantic fiction, a number that's not dropping with the Dow. It is, as the author puts it, not merely a reflector of the times, but "an important transmitter of values." As such, Romance Writers of America's decision to recognize GLBT-themed romance fiction is significant. Rettig would suggest that the fight for legitimacy really comes down to an ingrained sexism that sees the genre's focus on women, and on emotion, as fundamentally opposed to the masculine logic that characterizes good writing - those "emotionally-satisfying and optimistic endings" that bring so much comfort are offensive to a pragmatic sensibility.

But just recognizing romance as a legit genre's not enough, says Rettig: romance is revolutionary! As she puts it,

Perhaps it's because romance, love and sex are among our most potent avenues for self-knowledge, self-expression, self-liberation, and societal liberation. Done right, these activities erode barriers and boundaries, both within us and between ourselves and others, and therefore pose a direct threat to the fear-based, control-obsessed "strict father" model.

Basically, what she's saying is, love is the answer. And people are threatened by it.

While the rhetoric seems a leetle overblown, we're not quite ready to embrace the genre as a whole as a force for revolution - there's a lot to be said for sheer escapism, especially in trying times, and not all authors want the burden of revolution foisted upon them - it's clear that this conference was onto something. A lot of serious people dismiss romance as trashy and prurient, and they're invested in that idea. But it's not a coincidence that I and plenty of smart, well-read women I know turn to a romance on occasion for escapism - and check out the supremely awesome "Smart Bitches, Trashy Books" if you don't believe me. No, that doesn't mean bodice-ripping and "sexy abduction" or even saintly single dads. But it does mean a happy ending. Some people assume that because an ending is a forgone conclusion, there's no point in the journey. But anyone who's ever seen a cliche-ridden needlepoint pillow can tell you that's crazy talk. Says the author,

Now, if progressives and radicals would only incorporate more of the ideals and values of romance in their lives and work. It shouldn't be that hard: after all, the romantic revolutionary meme is ancient and powerful.

Cue Rahm Emmanuel in pirate shirt.

The Eroticization of Equality And Social Justice [HuffPo]
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books [Official Site]

Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls is the first-person account of a young girl suffering from anorexia. It's well-researched and true-to-life, and the author names pro-ana websites and other resources that the characters uses as "thinspiration" by name. It's realistic and powerful and disturbing. And, as such, the Times asks, "In writing about eating disorders, are authors, unwittingly, creating an alluring guidebook to the disease?"

The concern, of course, is that the novel's audience is the very group most at risk for eating disorders, and as such, might take suggestion from the book. But, as one doctor quoted says, "Yes, the book is going to trigger people. Turning on the television triggers people - looking at billboards, going to the computer, walking past a magazine rack." In short, people who are ill are going to feed their illness, and the sad truth is that there are far more direct and compelling resources available for those looking for hints or encouragement. An intelligent book that shows one of the most jarring portraits we've seen of the physical and psychological consequences of ED is unlikely to make a healthy young woman sick, and may well prove salutary and sobering to quite a few.

While obviously educators or librarians have a responsibility to acquaint themselves with the materials kids are accessing on their watch, it seems ironic that we should be troubled by the appearance of a smart, uncondescending book for young women. It is not good books, however realistic their subject matter, that are causing problems of image and self-esteem. It is not intelligenced, nuanced discussions that are provoking distortion. I'm guessing Go Ask Alice didn't turn a generation into drug addicts, but did provide a lot of people with comfort and even more with information and cautionary wisdom. E.D. is a very real issue for teens, thankfully one being discussed, and would we prefer that YA authors, in a position to speak to young people, didn't address it? Kids are impressionable, but they also don't need to be patronized, and no one needs to be protected from intelligent, sensitive work. Whatever our concerns, to target a smart book by a proven YA author seems to me disingenuous, and as any of those conscientiously-compiled banned books lists will shows, censorship of any kind is a very slippery slope.

The Troubling Allure of Eating Disorder Books [NY Times]
Wintergirls [Amazon]