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Chicklit is a difficult category
to judge properly. At its worst chicklit
is formulaic, histrionic, and badly written.
At its best it is heartwarming, funny, and engages the reader with
heroines that are fully fleshed and real.
I must say Helen Fielding has a
great deal to answer for—she is the one that got me interested in chicklit in
the first place. To wit, reading Bridget Jones’ Diary on an overseas trip
with a girlfriend. I was laughing so
much in our shared hotel room that V. demanded that I read it aloud to
her. She too was hooked—we both read the
book twice before we boarded our flight home to Atlanta.
Yes, Bridget Jones I can be
shallow and silly and abysmally stupid when it comes to her dealings with the opposite
sex. Helen Fielding’s comic gifts allow
us to see the ridiculous in her eponymous character but we embrace her
anyway. Bridget Jones is flawed, but she
is authentic with her laddered tights, sloppy apartment, and lack of
willpower. Fielding has a unique ability
to write comedy but allows the humanity to ultimately prevail. The reader likes Bridget because of her shortcomings—not despite them.
Chicklit heroines run the gamut
of feminine tropes. The worst ones are
ridiculous paragons of womanhood. These
main characters are beautiful (but of course they don’t know it—disingenuous tripe);
successful; often have a handsome (if bland) boyfriend; and of course the
obligatory spunky BFF, sometimes with a second pal that is an archetypal gay
man thrown in. Frankly, no one wants to
read about a girl like that, unless it’s to watch her get her comeuppance. The second chicklit protagonist is the plain,
often slightly chubby, feisty–and they are always feisty—heroine who manages to
land the handsome hero. While I love the
idea that a woman can be of any shape, size, or level of pulchritude and still
find true love, the tragedy is that so many of these novels are so poorly
written that the relationship portrayed has no verisimilitude. And does this mean that plain, shy girls can’t
find romance? How about the ordinary,
pretty girls? Perhaps it’s my own fault for continuing to read novels in a
genre in which I know the majority of books are awful. So sue me for wanting a light, fluffy read
with a happy ending. Why do they all
have to be so execrable?
To be fair, Mating Rituals of the American WASP is not terrible. Ms. Lipton’s journalism pieces are clean and
concise with an acerbic wit, so I expected the same from this foray into
fiction. Lauren Lipton can actually
string a sentence together and at least utilizes proper grammar. (Although I
could have done without her terrible poetry. But more on that later.) The main premise of the book is that proper,
prudish Peggy and preppy, stiff Luke throw caution to the winds one debauched
night in Vegas and get married after only knowing each other a few hours. The problem is—Peggy has a boyfriend. After
years of dating and ultimatums, he finally presents her with a ring once she
returns.
Peggy and her girlfriend own a
moderately successful home and personal fragrance emporium. However, their lease is up at the end of the
year and their landlord has raised their rent on the premises so much that they
consider closing. Peggy intends to annul her whirlwind marriage immediately,
but fate intervenes in the form of Luke’s formidable dowager great-aunt,
Abigail Sedgwick. Luke is the scion of a
once-mighty blue-blooded New England family, the Sedgwicks. He is the last of the line. Therefore, his great-aunt offers him a deal—stay
married to Peggy for a year and they will inherit the gorgeous—if dilapidated—Sedgwick
House. Peggy realizes that she can
afford to keep her store if they sell the house and split the profits. Luke is a disgruntled financier and aspiring
poet. He wants to use the profits so
that he can devote his time to writing. Peggy
therefore agrees to spend her weekends in New Nineveh, Connecticut with her
legal-in-name-only husband. They will
pretend to be a happy couple in order to placate Abigail and get the house.
I suppose the author threw the
poetry in there to make the romantic lead more interesting, but if you are
going to make him a poet at least make him a good one. I suggest Ms. Lipton read A.S. Byatt’s Possession for tips. While the poetaster
love interest is annoying, the book’s main fault is that the protagonist, Peggy,
in addition to being an unbearable Mary Sue, is also hypocritical and boring as
hell. Lipton tries to give her some
interest by making her the nervous type.
Unfortunately, she just comes across as a neurotic fusspot. While this trait could be endearing in the
right hands, Peggy just comes across as sanctimonious and bitchy.
She also seems genuinely
surprised by the small town folkways of New Nineveh. Peggy is a transplant to New York and has
moved around her whole life. Surely she
would have encountered small-town living before this; instead Lipton portrays
her as constantly amazed at how open and trusting these small town folks
are. She might as well call them
hayseeds and be done with it. She also
spends far too much time explaining the vagaries of the Yankee—that Bloody-Mary
loving, Ivy-League-educated, J.Crew catalog stereotype bastardized in every
teen movie since the dawn of time. Her portrayals do not give them flesh;
instead it sounds like she read Lisa Birnbach’s satire The Preppy Handbook and just stuck a bunch of the stock characters
in there.
I think Ms. Lipton is trying to write a comedy
of manners in her portrayal of the preppy snobs in the book, but she does not
have Jane Austen’s formidable gifts at portraying the upper class. Jane Austen would ridicule the gentry, but
she also loved her characters; for example, even the Mr. Collins types, while ludicrous,
were real human beings with thoughts and feelings. These were just preppy cardboard
cutouts. (Flask and plaid clothes not
included in this kit.)
There are other problems with
this book—the commitment phobic boyfriend is far too much like a smarmy cartoon
villain to be authentic. I kept
picturing Charming in Shrek, which
made me giggle far too much to take him seriously. The best friend, the hippie parents, the
bosomy, well-meaning outsider who befriends Peggy, and the sexy artist
girlfriend were all stock characters straight out of Central Casting. Even the single love scene is arid and
flat. If Lipton had gone more for a comedy
of manners, this book might have succeeded.
If she had written straight romance, it might have worked. I would have even preferred sappy romantic
comedy to this. The book suffered from a
dizzying jack-of-all-trades mentality; Lipton tried to play with several genres
and like the cliché, succeeded at none of them.
