The assignment. The other day Veronica posed me a challenge I could not resist. “Join me in writing a post about chick lit,” she suggested. She was planning a post tentatively titled “Why I Hate Chick Lit” and she guessed that I might be in the same camp. In fact — I realized after some discussion — I didn’t even know what chick lit was. I had always assumed “chick lit” referred to crap like The Red Tent and similar pseudo-feminist pseudo-literary drivel. That would have been a fun post, too, but Veronica and Wikipedia soon set me straight. “Well, now that I know what it is,” I emailed back to Veronica, “I realize that I am hopelessly unqualified to write anything about chick lit. I’d sooner read the back of the shampoo bottle than novels about the love lives and business struggles of hip stylish urban twentysomethings. When I was twentysomething my favorite author was Philip K. Dick.”

But I thought it would be fun to test my assertion about the back of the shampoo bottle. When Veronica emailed back to tell me that she had gotten a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary I immediately went to the library and got a copy too.

The book. Overall, it was totally stupid. The whole entire novel was about her attempts to get and keep a boyfriend. And that’s all. It’s a hard life, too, poor thing, still single at age 30. She writes in her diary, “Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation. Being a woman is worse than being a farmer — there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed.” Okay, I admit, the analogy to farming is kinda funny. But jeez, must she be so superficial? Does it all have to be about cellulite and waxing?

Well, I read on, hoping against hope that this would turn out to be a coming-of-age novel. That by the end she would realize there’s more to life than counting calories and that she doesn’t need to tint her eyelashes in order to Catch a Man. No such luck. At the end, not only does she Get Her Man, but what’s worse, she comes to the conclusion that “the secret of happiness with men” is to follow her mother’s advice, which is: “Don’t say ‘what,’ say ‘pardon,’ darling, and do as your mother tells you.” Ick. The “don’t say ‘what,’ say ‘pardon’” thing really gets my goat. What, she needs to fawn apologetically every time he mumbles? Again, ick.

There were a lot of minor annoyances in this book as well. There’s the one-dimensional characters (Studly Philandering Boss, Sympathetic Gay Male Friend, Mid-Life Crisis Mother, etc.). There’s the badly overdone diary gimmick, e.g. her minute-by-minute account of her attempt to record something on her VCR (”8:50 p.m. Ah. Diagram. ‘Buttons for IMC functions.’ But what are IMC functions? 8:55 p.m. Decide to ignore that page.”) There’s the excessive use of abbreviations and telegram-ish lack of first-person pronouns (”Humph. Have woken up v. fed up.”).

To be sure, there were some genuinely funny moments, such as her Christmas lament (”Dread the exchange of presents with friends as, unlike with the family, there is no way of knowing who is and isn’t going to give and whether gifts should be tokens of affection or proper presents, so it all becomes like hideous exchange of sealed bids.”). And oh, how I would love to be invited to a “Tarts & Vicars” party. :)

All in all, though, this book was nothing but a waste of time. Don’t bother.

The genre. The original assignment was not to review Bridget Jones, but to write something about “chick lit.” All right, assuming that Bridget Jones is typical of the genre, I think it’s fair to say that chick lit is superficial, without literary merit, and anti-feminist. But hey, is that really so bad? I mean, shoot, I have read and enjoyed plenty of superficial, meritless, sexist genre fiction in my time: mysteries, Westerns, sci-fi, swords & sorcery, spy thrillers… However, there is a difference. The other genres typically have something going for them above and beyond the superficial, meritless, sexist stuff: suspense, or an interesting thought experiment, or some kind of cool gimmick or plot device. Whereas chick lit has nothing.

And another thing: I don’t even know what bugs me more: chick lit, or the name chick lit. I so despise the word chick used for anything other than a baby chicken.

Am I missing something? Did you like Bridget Jones? Please tell me if you did. I’d love to be wrong in my assessment of an entire genre. :) But for now, the back of the shampoo bottle it is.