Pink Slips

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer


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Published: May 5, 2009

WE'RE ALL FAMILIAR with the story: A young, urban, professional woman, best friend in tow, pluckily endures the humiliations of evil bosses and boorish suitors en route to finding The One.

There are variations on this theme, of course — maybe the friend is gay, or older and therefore wise. We also know exactly how the story's delivered: wrapped in a pastel cover, usually pink, with title and author written in script and a cartoon of a dress or a shoe.

Jane Berentson's Miss Harper Can Do It (Viking, April 30) slips into this formula like a foot into a glass slipper. Annie Harper's a third-grade teacher facing a year alone while her boyfriend serves in Iraq, and she tells her story in a series of rough-draft diary entries she hopes will land her on a couch across from a sympathetic Katie Couric.

Miss Harper is winning and charming and the very definition of pluck, and gets counseled and comforted by sensitive-artist best friend Gus and spunky WWII widow Loretta. Berentson doesn't pack much in the way of surprise into her plot, and Miss Harper is sufficiently self-involved that our best understanding of the home front comes from Loretta, but the book succeeds on Miss Harper's — and her students' — charm.

In the dozen years or so since Bridget Jones's Diary began jumping off shelves, it has become easy to dismiss the whole class of comic romantic novels that get lumped together as chick lit. The welter of pink covers that followed Bridget Jones brought a wave of hand-wringing followed by resignation. They were branded as homogenous and escapist, anti-feminist and consumerist, creating unrealistic expectations and clogging shelf space better reserved for serious fiction. Light, charming Miss Harper becomes symptomatic.

But as the Sophie Kinsellas and Melissa Bankses have been replaced by J.K. Rowling and now Stephenie Meyer as publishing's tent poles, chick lit has become less of an object of scorn. Instead, it's another commercial genre, with franchise series authors and a solid role in filling out a year-end balance sheet.

Despite the whiff of pulp about them, chick lit differs from other genre fiction in important ways. Its origin is one; however much a comic romantic novel may draw from Jane Austen, the relationship is no stronger than Janet Evanovich's debt to Wilkie Collins. It's Helen Fielding's category-defining best seller that tipped off publishers' marketing departments to the potential of a pink cover. A genre was created from the top down, defined more by its demographic than the qualities of its contents.

Even so, the pink covers obscure the distance between chick lit as a genre and chick lit as a marketing strategy. The pink cover, with its aftertaste of formula and focus groups, gets applied so indiscriminately to women writers and books with female leads that a wide swath of novels exists outside of the genre formula but still within a brand identity.

Take, for instance, Maggie Estep's Alice Fantastic (Akashic, May 1). The cover's red, and the shoe's from a horse, but the script is reassuringly swirly. Estep is no stranger to genre fiction — following her heyday as a slam poet, she penned a series of quirky heroine-centered mysteries — but Alice's characters start outside the chick-lit box and get no closer as the book progresses. Alice is a professional gambler, her sister Eloise makes grotesque plush animals with the proceeds of a personal-injury lawsuit, and their mother rescues dogs. Each of Estep's women are prickly and messy, and none finds Mr. Right, making Alice Fantastic a light read that's sharp enough to be a comic romantic novel without being chick lit.

Rosy Barnes' Paula Wocziac, plucky heroine of Sadomasochism for Accountants (Marion Boyars, May 1), doesn't want to escape. At least not initially. Where Estep resists formula with the characters she draws, Barnes embraces the conventions and inflates them with farce.

Moping Paula, recently dumped for being uninteresting, visits a fetish club as a strategy to get her accountant ex back. True to form, she acquires a drag queen with a pipefitter's body for a life coach, and eventually plumps for a new, if rather specialized, wardrobe.

Kink aside, though, Paula fits in well with Miss Harper, and maybe even with Eloise. Stuck somewhere between focus group and formula, between idealized romance and preordained roles, each of these books' characters reaches toward acceptance, especially self-acceptance. And it's when they stop trying to fit in to what they should be, and instead accept what they already are, that their shot at happiness might work.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)