Me and Chick-Lit

I consider myself a literary omnivore, consuming just about any kind of book unless it’s horror or science fiction (although I do want to read John Wyndham and Octavia Butler). And chick-lit has made its jaunty entry into my reading stacks, even if it’s a genre I don’t read very often. Mostly this has to do with being past the stage of life those books represent. When I read about some young women working herself up into a tizzy about whether or not a toothsome hunk of muscle-bound manhood might lead her down the aisle, I just want to advise her to pay close attention to the cleanliness or otherwise of his apartment and his relationship to his mother. Because those things really count. But alas the heroines never do, preferring to squeeze every last ambiguous nuance out of a phrase like: ‘Would you ensure that xeroxing gets done by five o’clock tonight, Petunia? I have to leave the office early.’ The thing that bugs me, looking at chick-lit through the eyes of the women unbound challenge, is that it is quite possible that it does bring to life with a certain accuracy some of the less admirable traits of women, but because I don’t want to believe that women behave in these ways, I tend to blame the genre. Here’s a little list of classic chick-lit heroine quirks that irk and annoy me:

Cripplingly low self-esteem, coupled with endless virtues
It seems that all heroines are obliged to live this contradiction. Excessive humility being marked down as a hugely desirable feminine trait, these women spend huge amounts of time fretting and worrying over their personal appearance and their sense of inadequacy, whilst being described as possessing a Jessica Rabbit-style figure and a cornucopia of organizational, creative or unusual talents. The reader is so often forced to read something along the lines of: ‘Tiffany stared in frustrated outrage at the image her antique, gold-frosted chevalier mirror reflected back to her. It was true that she had a tiny nipped-in waist, above which her glorious décolletage billowed in a riot of soft, creamy flesh but oh if only she could lose that stubborn ten pounds off her hips. She was so fat! Her green-flecked eyes, surrounded by ridiculously thick, curling lashes, snapped with impatience.’ I suppose you could read this as an attempt to awaken women to their own assets, but it equally endorses women’s compulsion to put themselves down and consider themselves through a haze of negativity.

Superwoman tendencies
Chronic fatiguers should not, perhaps, judge fictional characters, but where do these women get their energy? To combat the low self-esteem and to feel that they are Doing Something With Their Lives, they all start to run businesses or commit to huge charity projects and all this has to be coupled with saving their friends’ lives as well as chasing after Mister Right. They regularly rise at dawn, throwing off a hangover, survive a series of events of exhausting emotional turmoil, sew, cook, organize or create something utterly spectacular and still have the oomph to go out on the town in the evening. Whatever it is they are taking, I’d like some of it.

They must possess and help horrible friends
Another key set of chick-lit virtues is to be gullible, hopelessly loyal, and endlessly open to be taken advantage of. Hence the need for the Evil Friend, who is always hanging out at the heroine’s flat, eating her food, demanding her emotional support and subjecting the heroine to a steady flow of bitchy put-downs and criticisms. If the heroine were to boot this person out, as is quite obviously the right decision, she would cross a dangerous ideological line into aggressive activity. So the infuriating friend remains, with her hand in the cookie jar and her eyes on the platonic male flatmate who may or may not be The One for our heroine.

Not to mention horrible families also
It’s de rigueur for a heroine to come from a madcap background that is humorously presented but which, if real, would be of clear concern to social services. The old soak of a mother whose persistent phone calls drip with thinly disguised venom or emotional blackmail, the fierce, cold, demanding father who ignores his little girl or berates her lack of ambition. I suppose it makes sense that women from such a background would have a hard time forming and keeping relationships. But I think they would also have real problems and spend a great deal of their time in therapy. You don’t get chick-lit heroines in the consulting room much; they prefer to bake their way out of their troubles, which sounds wonderful but I don’t believe a word of it.

Outstanding obtuseness
Why are women not permitted to be intelligent in these novels? Why? Oh I suppose it’s related to the low self-esteem issue. But I do get grouchy when I have to read the following kind of description: ‘He gazed intently into her eyes in a way that sent a delicious chill down her spine. For what possible reason could he be looking at her in this unusual fashion? ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you something for so long,’ he murmured huskily. ‘I should tell you that someone, someone very close to me right now, has become important to me in a way I never dreamed would happen…’ With those few words he destroyed her every chance of happiness. She had noticed Miranda, the blond bombshell from accounts, standing at the top of the stairs and his unmistakable words shattered her every hope.’

I mean, come on.

Maybe someday an author will write a novel about a perfectly ordinary woman, with a sensible assessment of herself, the intelligence to know when a man likes her, pleasant friends and a good, regular job who STILL has trouble with romance. It can happen, you know.

In the meantime, there’s the usual chick-lit out there, and when I’m in the mood for it, and it doesn’t grate too much for the reasons above, I can find it most enjoyable. The one great redeeming feature of such novels nowadays is that the heroines are permitted to be extremely witty. They wisecrack their way through their disasters and ill-considered romantic interludes, and even if the ideology is a bit dodgy, the comic turn makes it all very palatable and charming. Just the other weekend, I read The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne, and whilst it sailed pretty close to the wind with a low-self-esteemed heroine, dogged by her unpleasant family but buoyed up by the kind of high-octane energy hardened crack cocaine users can only dream of, I actually enjoyed it tremendously. The heroine, Melissa, is a paragon of organizational talents but can’t quite hold down a temping job. So she ends up starting her own agency which aims to help helpless males with any number of thorny issues, from personal grooming to Christmas shopping to platonic escort services designed to stymie interfering friends and family determined to set a hopeless male up with an unwanted girlfriend. And it all works very well, except that to give herself a bit of a boost, Melissa casts her own imperfect self aside and dons a wig and a persona, running the agency as Honey, a woman with more confidence and chutzpah than she would otherwise naturally possess. And of course the problems start when she falls in love with one of her clients and has to face the consequences of her deception. But don’t let that put you off; it’s a very funny and entertaining romp. I’d love to think women were as amusingly resilient as chick-lit makes them out to be, but I expect they are not quite so witty in reality; but by the same token, not quite so lacking in common sense, either.

The Prisoner’s Return

Waiting is an important element in stories about women. They are often obliged to demonstrate their patience in the way that men in stories are called upon to demonstrate their physical or mental strength. Women must wait until men are finally able to declare themselves romantically, they must wait for the sick to heal, and for children to grow, putting their own cares and concerns in second place. One of the most powerful waiting narratives is the story of the woman who waits for her man to return from war. Penelope in the Greek myths rather sets the bar high on this one. For ten years she waited faithfully for Odysseus to return from his wanderings, each day working on her tapestry, each night unpicking it so that there should be no leverage on her to marry one of the many suitors piling up at court. Penelope’s fate was joined to her husband, and it was unthinkable and unethical that she should move on in his absence; the story frames her as remarkable, admirable, but not as productive for her own sake. It would have got in the way of her genius for waiting.

The story I want to tell you about today is another example of a woman waiting for her man to return, but it is a much more unsettling tale than Penelope’s. It’s 1945 and the French author Marguerite Duras is waiting to hear whether her husband is dead or alive. He has been a prisoner of war in Germany and all she knows is that the camps are finally being liberated as the Allied Forces sweep through the land. Finally a little news is beginning to trickle back home and it is most disquieting. Duras spends most of her days at a government repatriation center in Paris, questioning men as they are deposited from the convoys in the hope of sending news to their families and enacting reunions. It’s a way of keeping in the frontline of information herself, but some of the men who return, emaciated, on the brink of death, only terrify her. To say that she is in a bit of a state is a wild understatement. She can’t eat or sleep and knows not a moment’s peace. Her friend, D., comes to visit her regularly and help pass a few hours. They pool their information, what little it is. It’s a visceral account of the near-madness of waiting, with Duras detailing the half-hallucinations that take over her mind, showing her all the ways her husband, Robert L., might have died.

Finally, she has some ambiguous news. Other prisoners from the same camp have made it back but not Robert L. He broke out of the line he was marching in, in a bid for escape (not realizing that they were headed for freedom at last). No one knows what became of him. It turns out he was returned to the camp and left there, effectively to die. Duras’s friend D, steps in. He and another friend drive over to Germany and find Robert and bring him home. When he gets back, Duras runs away, screaming. To have an outcome after all those dreadful months is almost as bad as not having one. And Robert is so ill and destroyed by his experience that he is almost unrecognizable to her; against all the odds, however, he continues to survive. There follows a remarkable testimony to the extraordinary strength of the human spirit (even if it is gruesome one) as Robert is coaxed from the brink of starvation and back to life.

And then, unobtrusively slid into the narrative, as part of a list of things that Robert gradually regains sufficient strength to hear, Duras tells him their marriage is over. She wants to leave him for D., with whom she desires a child.

This is, as you might have guessed, a story that we often teach as part of the course on twentieth century French literature. My friend, Kathryn, has been teaching it just recently and we discussed it on the phone. ‘That part has the most enormous impact on my students,’ she said. ‘They all loathe Duras from then on in. Never mind the Holocaust, that ceases to be the source of all evil. They simply can’t get over the fact that she wants to leave him.’ The events detailed in the diary have a counterpart in reality, too. Duras was married to Robert Antelme, who was rescued from Dachau by François Mitterand, and she left him for their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo with whom she went on to have her son. It all actually happened.

What are we to make of this most un-Penelope-like behaviour? The shock, I think, comes from the emotional temperature of the narrative, which is mostly hysterical. Duras is lost to Robert’s sufferings, she cannot eat when he cannot eat, almost starves herself in an act of what looks like self-negating loyalty. The reader is in no way prepared for the outcome. Is this, then, an act that we can judge? Has Duras betrayed her husband in the most despicable way, or has she fulfilled every possible duty towards him by being part of his rescue and nursing him back to health? Are we morally obliged to be overjoyed to have our loved ones returned to us, even if they have caused us unimaginable suffering? Are women allowed to move on, make changes, follow their own desires, or is the ability to wait trauma out, to display saintlike patience one of the prime virtues that is far more valuable?

I haven’t told you the name of this because it is only available in French, and if I’d told you that up at the start, chances are you might not have kept reading. But the story is in a volume entitled La Douleur (Pain), and is preceded by another strange yet seemingly authentic statement. Duras writes that she discovered her diary in a cupboard in a house that regularly floods in the springtime, and that she had no recollection of having written it, although it was indeed in her handwriting and recounting events she had lived. It is a text steeped in ambiguity and that challenges the reader on any number of levels, asking us to read what is intolerable, to question what is ethical and to believe what is incredible.  It is a remarkable 80 pages.