Monthly Archives: May 2008

“Chick-lit ruined my life,” writes my friend, the writer Rebecca Rosenblum on her blog. “It used to be that clumsiness and ineptitude was just embarrassing, and best kept to yourself… Then there came the strange cultishness of chick-lit… Women engaged in subtle self-deprecating one-downsmanship at parties, and it seemed that there was always a more glamourous way to fall off a chair than the way I was doing it.”

I think of this now because I’ve just finished reading The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. A fabulously funny novel published in 1958, and last year when it was reprinted in the US, critic Terry Teachout (in his introduction to the novel) was willing to “bet money that some dewy-eyed young critic is going to read it for the first time and write an essay about how Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy’s adorably scatty heroine, was the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones.” Which I almost almost will not do. (Further, I am neither overtly dewy-eyed, nor a critic).

Teachout says we’d best look back to Daisy Miller if we wish to place The Dud Avocado “in the grand scheme of things”. Perhaps in an effort not to denigrate the title by chick-lit association, which is fair enough because such denigration happens, and often to very good books, some of which are themselves decidedly “chick-lit” but I digress. I already know that chick-lit doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “Chick-lit” anyway is not even what I’m talking about– I’m talking about comic fiction, more specifically that written about and/or by young women.

“[I]t was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times,” reflects Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce. “I said it then, and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.” Just set loose in 1950s Paris, her hair newly dyed pink and she’s wearing an evening gown in the afternoon, “but it’s all I’ve got to wear,” she says. “My laundry hasn’t come back yet.”

Encountering dubious comrades, and most corrupt characters, Sally Jay is determined to live amongst them, to have her wits sharpened. “I want them so sharp that I’m always able to guess right. Not be right– that’s much different– that means you’re going to do something about it. No. Just guessing. You know, more on the wing.”

But before Sally Jay can learn to guess right, she guesses wrong aplenty. “Poor life choices” we might call them, as she falls into bed with the wrong men, into questionable occupations, and into love at the skip of a heartbeat. Her wits being sharpened all the while, and here is where the comedy comes. Not only in the gap between her perception and reality as we, the readers, see it, but also in her very own voice, her own reaction to her foibles and calamities.

In this way Dundy’s Sally Jay is similar to comic heroines who’ve before and after. Nancy Mitford’s Linda Radlett, for example, in The Pursuit of Love (though her chance for being fully sharpened comes much too late). Bridget Jones, of The Diary, of course, Clara Hutt in India Knight’s most hilarious My Life on a Plate. Even Harriet the Spy, for that matter, with ever-inevitable blundering.

My quandary is this: The Dud Avocado is a damn fine book, as are the others I’ve just mentioned, but what does it mean to have our women forever falling off their chairs?

There are other kinds of comedy, I realize. I even combed my bookshelf looking for it, but then I decided to exempt those books whose comedy has an undercurrent of tragedy (and thus I exempted Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Kate Atkinson, and a new novel Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish). I exempted tragedy because I’d love a comic heroine to have a choice beyond falling off her chair or dying in childbirth (though poor Linda Radlett, she managed both).

But perhaps the issue is the nature of comedy, though, and not about gender at all. When Kate Christensen (who also writes funny novels) published In the Drink in 1997, she was dismissive of its Bridget Jones comparisons, explaining she’d actually been figuring herself as “consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre”.

She explained, “I trace Claudia’s lineage through an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan, three of the books which have inspired me most. Other exemplars of Loser Lit (and there are many) include The Ginger Man, A Confederacy of Dunces, Bright Lights, Big City, Wonder Boys, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Fine Madness, and, most recently, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-up.”

The moral being that anyone can fall off a chair with aplomb, then, and perhaps I’m just being sensitive. But I’m still troubled a bit: are only losers funny? Is idiot synonymous with clown? As women have had historical difficulties being taken seriously at all, how are such literary characters detrimental to perceptions of women in general?

This underlined by the fact of how much women identify with these characters, their foibles and their blunders. Which in turn becomes almost a competition between real women, the “one-downsmanship” Rosenblum mentions. Which is partly liberating, actually, because this all involves sharing hilarious stories. Certainly most women I’ve ever known would have something delicious to contribute, and those who didn’t were probably boring anyway. But do such stories do womankind-in-general any real favours? Is scattered really what we all think we are, or what we aspire to be?

In short (and about time too), I wonder, is there such thing as a young comic heroine whose wits are sharp already?