Culture Blues

Concerning The New York Times Ignoring Chick Lit: Suck It, Weiner.

Twenty bucks says she's reading Eat Pray Love

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the praise and the subsequent backlash of the praise of Jonathan Franzen's recently dropped book, Freedom, has been sending my brain into a tizzy. I don't enjoy books by Jennifer Weiner, but I don't think the New York Times reviews can be trusted, so I'm getting really confused about who to be pissed off with.

I certainly get sick of repeatedly being exposed to literary darlings like Franzen, Chabon and Lethem, but do Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner actually believe that they deserve to be on the cover of Time? I wasn't a huge fan of The Corrections, but Frazen's writing style blasts Weiner and Picoult out of the water. I haven't read Freedom yet, but I bet it's pretty good. I hope it is, anyway. I hope that all this incredibly positive feedback isn't due solely to the fact that reviewers are hypnotized into thinking it's good, or swayed by advertisers, or trapped in a white-male-author-laudatory vacuum.

If women want male readers, why not write a book about chainsaw-wielding hot chicks?

Both Picoult and Weiner women churn out books faster than I churn out crappy blog posts, and both women sell millions of these books. Jonathan Franzen has written six books since 1988. Weiner has written 8 since 2001. Go cry in your big pile of money, Weiner. You knew what you were getting yourself into when you started this. Did you honestly think that President Obama would read In Her Shoes? He's too busy reading Freedom.

We don't need The New York Times to introduce people to Jennifer Weiner's new novel on relationships and family -- you'll see it in every bookstore, on the subway, on sale racks at the airport. And the whole reason people like to read these books in the first place is because they want a break from thinking. A book like Freedom needs more help being dissected than a book called The Guy Not Taken.

Weiner and Picoult have complained that their books are called "beach books" and "chick lit", while male authors who write commercial fiction are treated with more seriousness. But this isn't about dicks and vaginas, it's about good writing. There are female commercial authors taken seriously by the New York Times because of their writing skills, like Anne Tyler and Jhumpa Lahiri, just off the top of my head. And even His Royal Highness Jonathan Lethem was lambasted in a review for his most likely shitty novel Chronic City (God, I hate that guy).

Technically, Weiner and Picoult write books that people like to read on the beach or worse -- waiting in line at the supermarket. But they're still buying the books, right? The Weiner twins seem blind to their audience when they (correctly) claim that women read books written by men but men do not read books written by women. It's true, but what kind of dude is going to buy a pink book called Certain Girls? If you want men to read your books, girlies, please meet them half way.

I hope for Franzen's sake it's all it's cracked up to be

Men, if you're looking for books written by girls that aren't embarrassing to carry around, try stuff by Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, or Virginia Woolf. Jezebel has compiled a list with Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Porochista Khakpour, Mary Gaitskill, and Alice Munro.

But we need female readers to step it up, too. Barnes and Noble and Borders have "Women's Reading" sections with crap like Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele, and it's not without reason. Women are actually going there to buy their books in mass quantities.

And when they aren't writing vapid crap, they're writing agenda-heavy stuff. I will probably get my apartment TPed for saying this, but I often tend to sort of maybe skew to liking male authors more, anyway. Too often women write trying to really say something, when really all I want is a good story. Where are the great female storytellers or journalists? There are some, but not enough. (And go ahead and TP my apartment, if you can figure out how to do that. I am really mad at my landlord right now.)

I'm going to continue with my original plan of not reading the NYT reviews and not reading Jennifer Weiner. And if the NYT were actually to review a Jennifer Weiner book, my head would probably explode.