Monday, September 29, 2014

If Preppies Are This Boring, I'm Glad I'm Not A WASP

A review of Mating Habits of the North American Wasp by Lauren Lipton



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.

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