Month / August 2006

by Edward Champion

More On Merrick

I must quibble with Elizabeth Merrick’s Huffington Post article, which states this point:

But one more realist, formulaic novel about a girl in a low-level media job shopping for a man? Exactly how does that lift our spirits the same way an elaborately choreographed musical number with headdresses and a fountain can?

A formulaic chick lit title may be trite, but I’m pretty certain that it can lift one’s spirits better than a book which leaves the reader exhausted. Here’s the question I put forth to Ms. Merrick: Without taking away the literary merits of hard fiction, how does a gloomy novel which leaves one depressed and, in manic cases, suicidal lift one’s spirits? Maybe Merrick has an odd reader reaction when she finishes up a book (in which case, kudos to her), but, as much as I love Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, I think it can be safely said that one’s spirits aren’t lifted at all when reading a sad tale about a dying woman whose life is falling apart. Unless, of course, you’re the kind of person who categorizes The Killing Fields as a great comedy classic.

by Edward Champion

Books Banned on Flights: An Inconsistent Policy

Booksquare points to this LA Times article about LAX passengers traveling to London having to check in their laptops and shifting to reading books in the process. But the folks in Southern California are a hell of a lot luckier than those flying from SFO to London, who were forced to check in all books before the ten hour flight to Heathrow.

In fact, books are being banned at a number of airports:

In that last article, a traveler named Allison Yearsley remarks, “The thought of 10 hours without a book is awful.” And I have to agree. Short of a terrorist explosion (statistically improbable), I can’t think of anything much worse when flying. What a stupendous waste of time!

The folks at Heathrow have gone overboard with their security paranoia. This was, after all, a foiled plot. Banning liquids is one thing, but have they not considered that permitting books might allow passengers to remain calmer and more relaxed, thus causing less of a burden to both security and passengers? They’ve banned matches and lighters from security. What exactly are the passengers going to do? Rip out pages and fold them into paper airplanes? Wow, weapons of mass paper construction!

Further, why do Angelenos flying into Heathrow get books and those up the coastline don’t? Like any madness, there’s no consistent method here. Or perhaps those flying out of LAX are more likely to cause a scene. Or maybe it’s all designed to facilitate Paris Hilton.

Whatever the reasoning behind book banning, these new flight restrictions have transformed the act of flying into something resembling a mobile solitary confinement cell.

* — Even worse, a couple was forced to pack away their kid’s coloring books.

by Edward Champion

Merrick Hysterics

Elizabeth Merrick: “We all need light reading, light entertainment from time to time–I’m certainly not against that. You will see me at the gym with Us Weekly now and then. But there is an amazing flourishing of women literary writers at the moment that is being obscured by a huge pile of pink books with purses and shoes on the cover. Women readers are having a hard time finding substantive reading material because of the dominance of these narratives.”

So let me get this straight. The minute that copies of the latest Zadie Smith or Monica Ali book appear at a bookstore, a blancmange-like entity made up of pink books wanders from the back of the stacks and blocks literary visibility with its slick flagstone epidermis?

Aside from the sweeping generalization that all chick lit is worthless, this is just as absurd as claiming that penny dreadfuls stopped Elizabeth Gaskell or the Bronte sisters from writing, much less capitalizing, upon their respective audiences. So long as there are women writers with literary ambitions and publishers looking for the next Sue Monk Kidd, the system will continue to produce its steady share of women writing literary fiction. I agree with Merrick that there’s a definite gender disparity in literary fiction (there is, as of yet, no estrogen answer to the Jonathans) which needs to be rectified, but if chick lit permits women to work their way to authors like Mary Gaitskill and Kelly Link, then what’s the problem here?

Could it just be possible that readers are more likely to purchase The Devil Wears Prada than Girly? Again, we have a situation here that comes back to this very obvious dichotomy. Literary fiction has consistently undersold popular fiction. But this is a commercial factor, not a literary one. And that’s just the way it is. Most book geeks (like myself) prefer the former, but to occlude the latter from one’s view, or to dismiss popular fiction without sampling is highly ignorant. (And isn’t it interesting that Merrick fails to cite a single example of books that she considers “much more poorly written [sic]” than Bridget Jones’ Diary?)