There have been quite a few articles online about chick lit and not chick lit. In fact, even here in the Huffington Post there have been three.
I'm not going to enter into the Chick Lit versus Literary debate. Everyone else is doing just fine at it without me. I don't agree with either side. I think everyone is fighting about the wrong damn thing.
I want to say something about the argument itself.
We're living in an era when every other week another book reviewer gets cut from a newspaper's roster. (The most recent was yesterday's announcement that The Village Voice cut its reviewer loose.)
There is a bigger issue here than chick lit versus not chick lit.
The issue is a book culture versus not a book culture. And guess which one we are living in.
Chick lit is no more the enemy to our book culture than hot dogs have ever been the enemy to our food culture. The co-existence of fast food and fine food prove that the world can cater to different tastes without losing its flavor for excellence. (I know I'm now going to get comments that I'm being unfair comparing chick lit to hot dogs. I can hear it now. But hold on, don't beat me with your Manolo Blaniks. I read Sophie Kinsella as well as Paul Auster. I've read garbage chick lit where I couldn't get past page two and self-important literary novels that put me to sleep.) Back to the point. What I really want to know is, why does the existence of a certain type of book strike so much fear in the hearts of so many people? Maybe chick lit is dangerous. I'm not a sociologist. I can't tell you. But if it is, then so was Sex and the City. So are about twenty romantic comedies that are released on the big screen every year.
But I don't hear the same hue and cry in the TV world or the film world.
Maybe because the real reason everyone is now taking up this argument is because it's actually about something else that no one even can figure out how to address, no less fight.
To moi, the real issue, the real crime is that books as a whole are a losing proposition.
We are living in an age where the average adult buys less than two books a year. When 20% of all new fiction accounts for 80% of all fiction sales. (And it's not chick lit that's at the front of the list. It's a big, mixed book bag of fiction. The Memory Keeper's Daughter alongside James Patterson alongside Nora Roberts.)
So if the average reader is only going to buy two books a year, the fight over which two books gets fiercer and fiercer.
The Da Vinci Code was the single title that more than 50% of the people who bought books in the last three years bought.
Does that say more about The Da Vinci Code or the publishers or the book climate?
To me it says more about the book climate.
Chick lit is not taking readers away from literary fiction any more than romance does or ever did, or than mystery/suspense does or ever did. Yes, chick lit is taking a certain subset of women away from romances and a certain group of women who might have gravitated to romance are reading chick lit instead. (An aside -- I don't see romance readers up in arms over chick lit. And I wonder why not?)
The issue is there are not enough readers to go around.
Part of the reason for that is there is not enough media to go around.
Books are more and more delegated to the back pages or no pages. Authors of fiction aren't celebrities and don't get to show up on any late-night TV unless they are celebrities. God bless the producers of Jon Stewart's show for at least having authors on. (Even if they are nonfiction authors.)
The fight that ex-editors and authors should be having is how the hell do we reinvigorate the idea of reading.
We need to be fearless. Bold. Brave. Take crazy initiatives. Do audacious things. We need to shake up everything and get people thinking about reading.
Because reading X leads to reading Y.
I used to do focus groups among readers when I was in advertising. And just like very few people exist on a diet made entirely of filet mignon and pate or a diet of hot dogs and coke, very few readers read one kind of book and one kind of book only.
Maybe they start out that way but they don't usually continue that way. They branch out. Booksellers help them. Other readers help them. Reviewers used to help them. Book review sections in the few newspapers that still have them could help them.
And the Internet helps them. And it seems lately that it may wind up that the Internet is the only thing that can help them.
The fight we need to take up is how to make fiction more relevant. It would be a worthwhile cause if anyone wanted to get off their respective soap boxes long enough to take it on.
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