A couple weeks ago, novelist Katherine Taylor talked some smack about Ben Kunkel to the New York Observer. She wasn’t nice — she called his much-hyped book Indecision “ridiculously simple” — but she also wasn’t wrong when she said that if Kunkel was a woman, his book would have been branded chick lit and dismissed.
Kunkel responded in today’s NYO with a super-catty letter saying, in essence, “Looks like someone’s pissed that I refused to blurb her book.” Gawker pretty much nailed it on this one by calling him a little bitch (scroll down to the comments section, which for the first time in weeks actually contains some smart stuff among all the detritus about whether the person being discussed in the post is attractive/well-dressed.)
End of story, I guess, unless Taylor retaliates. But I think this resonates beyond the realm of literary sniping. “Chick lit” is one of those identity-driven categories into which unsuspecting authors often get dragooned simply by fitting the low entrance criteria. “Jewish writer” is another one, and the last time Kunkel’s name appeared on this particular site, it was in a debate about whether he can join the club. Both groupings seem equally useless to me, but the former is much more insidious. Get branded a Jewish writer, and you’ll suddenly be taken seriously by synagogue book groups; get branded an author of chick lit, and you’ll suddenly be taken seriously by absolutely no one.
This is a shame for good books like Curtis Sittenfeld’s heartfelt, honest Prep, which would look very different without that J.Crew belt on the cover. Pace Taylor, it would be equally sad if Indecision had been written by a woman and then relegated into the pink-shoe ghetto: Kunkel captures the angst of a narcissistic, directionless twenty-something with such painful realism that any narcissistic, directionless twentysomething reading the book will immediately want to go jump off a bridge.
I don’t think it’s misogynistic to admit that some chick lit books are trash, though. That’s why the designation is problematic: because Curtis Sittenfeld is a thousand times better than Sophie Kinsella. If Prep were not about a crushingly alienated teenager but instead about, say, the rags-to-riches story of a cute young cosmopolite who sets out to find love—and a good pair of strappy sandals!—with her hilariously gay best friend in tow…well, that book would suck, and would deserve ghettoization. It would also probably net the author a much bigger advance and be read by many more people, because the world is unfair.
Speaking of which, what’s Taylor’s novel like?
“Years in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school will introduce [Kath] to a razor-sharp sense of social distinction … and an indispensable best friend—all that she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan. There will be fourteen-dollar”—cough, cough—“cocktails but no money for groceries; unsuitable men with enormous charm and unsuitable jobs with no charm at all; and a wistful yearning for a transformation from someone of promise to someone of genius.”
I’ll reserve judgment until it’s out. But in the meantime, one last ranty thought about the difference between Ben Kunkel and your average author of genuine chick lit: Kunkel’s Indecision made me hate myself, whereas chick lit novels make me hate everyone else. One of these reactions requires a great deal more skill to provoke than the other.