This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, an anthology of short stories, opens with a resounding introduction by the book’s editor Elizabeth Merrick. Recalling the birth of the chick lit genre with the triumph of Bidget Jones’ Diary in 1996, Merrick recounts the commercial success that is the woman swinging the designer handbag down a busy metropolis street:

“Chick lit is the daughter of the romance novel and the stepsister of the fashion magazine. Details about race and class are almost always absent except, of course, for the protagonist’s relentless pursuit of Money, a Makeover, and Mr. Right.”

Merrick goes on to recall her own flirtation with chick lit in the mid-90s, pleased with the success of women writers. However, when the genre soon exploded to the point of eclipsing literary fiction, Merrick began to question the commercial aspect:

“The problem is, rather, that the chick lit deluge has helped to obscure the literary fiction being written by some of our country’s most gifted women — many of whom you’ve never even heard of. […] For every stock protagonist with an Hermès Birkin bag and a bead on an investment banker, there is a woman writer pushing the envelope of serious fiction with depth and humor. […] Where chick lit reduces the complexity of the human experience, literature increases our awareness of other perspectives and paths. […] Chick lit as a genre presents one very narrow representation of women’s lives, a vision that is ‘the literary equivalent of a tract-house development,’ as novelist Whitney Otto recently wrote in The New York Times.”

This Is Not Chick Lit is true to Merrick’s promise of multifariousness, providing a range of subject matter, distinctive voices, and literary styles by women writers. Unfortunately, this variation is also applicable to the quality of the stories, some more memorable than others. Aimee Bender’s “Two Days” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around your Neck” are among the strongest, delivering compelling narration and reflective prose.

In “Two Days,” a nameless female narrator ponders her connection with a male suitor, examining the cultural fixation on “the one.” Her infatuation with her date eventually transitions into noticing minute details about their days together, ending in a wonderful literary ambiguity. In “The Thing Around Your Neck,” the Nigerian protagonist misses her family and culture after she moves to New England. When she begins dating a wealthy white student, her feelings about home and identity become even more complex.

Many of the other stories in the collection are somewhat lackluster in voice and, placed along side Bender and Adichie, mediocre. Although a bit disappointing given Merrick’s resonating forward, these short stories do provide a peek into some different styles of fiction writing and can perhaps serve as a jumping-off point from which to explore other writers. Alone, though, This Is Not Chick Lit is a lukewarm anthology with its heart in the right place.

To read more about Elizabeth Merrick, click here.

The Last of Her Kind, an incredibly rich and moving story by Sigrid Nunez, is narrated by Georgette George, a middle-class freshman at Barnard College in 1968. Her roommate, the privileged and Connecticut-born Dooley Ann Drayton, mourns not having been paired with a black roommate but befriends Georgette just the same. Out of bourgeois guilt, Dooley drops her first name and decides to go by Ann; her reputation as smart, socially aware, and unrelenting quickly begins to precede her, her pre-college accomplishments intimidating Georgette. The two girls smoke together between poetry classes and late at night, Ann complaining about the white entitlement of her parents and the snobbery of their class. Georgette struggles with being away from her family and feels very out of place at Barnard, particularly in her poetry workshop.

Beautifully paced, the novel floats many years into the future, after both girls have dropped out of Barnard and assumed different lives in New York City. Over the years, the two loose touch and Georgette begins working at a beauty and lifestyle magazine in the city. But when Ann is suddenly the subject of media attention and scrutiny for a violent crime, Georgette reflects again on her friendship with Ann and their first couple of years together at Barnard.

A reflective look at the youth of the 1970s and of turbulent, racially-charged times in America, The Last of Her Kind achieves so much with its introspective narrator, Georgette. Nunez offers a careful look into the complex friendship of Georgette and Ann, exploring strained moments in their Barnard dormitory with an artful balance. Georgette’s jealousy and envy are tempered with compassion as the two girls share a very unique and unconventional attachment.

Ann Drayton is a powerful character who speaks loudly from The Last of Her Kind with unshakable ideals. Uncompromising and quick-witted, Ann’s presence on the page is palpable and, at times, frightening. Perhaps inspired by Patricia Hearst, Ann functions not only as a finely constructed fictional character but as a study of a particular 1970s revolutionary girl of privilege, greatly affected by the current affairs of her era.

To read more about Sigrid Nunez, click here.

When I went this past fall to see Lorrie Moore read from A Gate at the Stairs, her much-anticipated first novel, the Barnes & Noble employee who introduced her made a bold assertion. “Obviously,” she proclaimed proudly from the podium, “literary fiction is not dead.” Indeed, the expansive reading room on the second floor was packed: Moore’s fans filled row upon row of chairs and crowded all additional standing space in anticipation of hearing the author read from her new, critically-acclaimed novel.

Yet despite this impressive turnout, Lorrie Moore is one of only a few literary fiction authors whose work you might find on a current “Bestsellers” table in a mainstream bookstore. Such books will surely be outnumbered by a string of memoirs with themes running the usual gamut from drug abuse to failed relationships to dysfunctional childhood, or, to truly break the bank, some amalgamation of the three. Skirting the other side of table is the usual assortment of chick lit, featuring familiar archetypes like the woman with severely frenzied spending habits and a love of Prada, or the single magazine writer who, for myriad reasons (body image, low self-esteem, take your pick), can’t seem to “snag the guy.”

These two genres, whose sales exploded to massive figures somewhere in the early 2000s, now overshadow literary fiction in the publishing market. Striking, then, is the lamentable quality of writing of some of the best-selling memoirs and chick lit books: Jane Green, Lauren Weisberger, and Elizabeth Gilbert clearly are not Lorrie Moore, nor are they trying to be. With books like I’m So Happy for You and Mr. Maybe being marketed––cynically so, some might argue––as kick-back reads to enjoy at the beach or on your daily commute, even the publishers do not overstate the caliber of the writing. But the sheer numbers in which readers flock to these easy reads greatly detracts from the sales of literary fiction, so much so that publishers are quickly beginning to view literary fiction as unprofitable.

Shortly after the Lorrie Moore reading, I was sitting in an editorial meeting for a magazine to which I contributed, throwing around ideas for the fall issue. Shyly, I raised my hand and suggested a piece on chick lit, proposing not a critique of the literary merits of the genre itself but a sociological look into what the popularity of these books says about contemporary women. The editor-in-chief smiled and, in his English accent, asked me what was so wrong with chick lit. “If even one of those books gets someone to pick up a book and read,” he laughed, “is that so bad?”

‘If even one of those [chick lit] books gets someone to pick up a book and read,’ he laughed, ‘is that so bad?’

When I returned to my desk about an hour later, I was still grappling with the question, and it stayed with me on my subway ride home. By the time I had collected my mail and collapsed onto my sofa, I had concluded that yes, it was bad. A flip through Jeff Herman’s Guide to Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents or the yearly Writer’s Market, which lists the current interests of the hundreds of publishing houses to which writers can send their work, reveals a startling trend: the margin for literary fiction has become smaller and smaller each year, with many houses choosing to dedicate only five to ten percent of their interest to the genre. Commercial fiction, meanwhile, has never done better.

In my own literary pursuits, I remember coming across a listing for a literary agency in New York. The head agent had compiled a detailed list of the types of projects that he accepted yearly. In big bold letters he had written, “NO LITERARY FICTION.” By now I’m accustomed to seeing such interdictions, but this particular agent had included his reasoning: “If you’re going to have little to nothing happen in a book, the writing has to be top notch.” He concluded that in his experience, most of the attempts at literary fiction that he received simply were not strong enough, and that that was why the genre was flailing.

He concluded that in his experience, most of the attempts at literary fiction that he received simply were not strong enough, and that that was why the genre was flailing.

If that agent’s observation is correct, and there just aren’t very many strong literary fiction writers, why is that?

When I was reading Sigrid Nunez’s fantastic novel A Feather on the Breath of God, I remember flipping back to the front of the book repeatedly to be certain that I was not reading a memoir. Written in the first person and drafted fiercely from Nunez’s own experience growing up as a mixed-race child in a Brooklyn housing project, A Feather on the Breath of God contains very little fiction per se. The narrator’s parents are of the same races as Nunez’s own parents, and her experiences are strikingly similar to those of the author. It seems that the only reason this book is labeled a work of fiction is that it was written in 1996, prior to the memoir boom.

If Nunez had deferred publication and strolled into her publisher’s office today with the same manuscript, would they still accept it as fiction, or would they attempt to coerce her into aligning herself completely with her narrator for the sake of sales? Would A Feather on the Breath of God: A Memoir sell more? Less? The notion that literary fiction must now fight for a place beside memoir and chick lit is troubling, as there don’t seem to be as many up-and-coming Lorrie Moores as there are Sophia Kinsellas. What will this swing away from quality fiction actually cost us in terms of the writing we choose to consume and participate in? And will we swing back?

Lorrie Moore’s long-awaited fourth novel tackles grief, racism, terrorism, and post 9/11 America through the eyes of young Tassie Kiltjen, the collegiate daughter of Midwestern potato farmer. The novel begins with Tassie visiting the homes of various pregnant women in hopes of obtaining a babysitting position. Although she is only twenty, her descriptions of the women are sharply observant as she notes the absence of a “pregnancy glow” and remarks on their swollen faces and ankles. Tassie eventually procures a position from Sarah Brink, an ambitious restaurant owner who tells Tassie not to bother taking her shoes off when entering the house because “[there’s] too much of that prissy Japanese stuff going on in this town. Bring in the mud.”

The “pin thin” Sarah confirms that she and her husband are adopting and Tassie proceeds to accompany the family on trips to meet birth mothers and sign documents. Their endeavors culminate in the adoption of two-year-old biracial Mary-Emma, or Emmie, Moore’s vehicle for introducing the issue of race into the life an upscale, white, suburban family.

What ensues is a string of well-crafted, perfectly humorous scenes in which Sarah wrangles together a support group for adoptive parents of non-white children and becomes obsessed with racist lullabies that Tassie may or may not be singing to Emmie. Moore continually captures uncomfortable and tense moments, cornering the market on “awkward” and making her characters fidget with their own insecurities.

In working as a nanny for the Brink-Thornwood family, Tassie finds that her glorified understanding of femininity and motherhood is repeatedly challenged as she is confronted with the harsh realities of stress, aging, dysfunctional marriages, and love. Although she admires Sarah as the hard-working, yet chic restaurantrice, wife, and mother, Tassie spends many moments in the novel dreading becoming just like her. The juxtaposition of the young college girl and career-oriented mother creates a meditation on female roles in American culture that persists throughout A Gate at the Stairs.

Tassie’s return home for the holidays is marked by indifference as she dutifully lights a menorah and makes latkes with her mother. Her younger brother, the darling of the novel, confesses that he is considering joining the army after graduation to ease the financial burden of college. The moments in which brother and sister wander the woods together are of the most touching in the entire novel; the emotional distance between them is hard and honest as Tassie remembers their lost intimacy, as well as the many ways her brother may have been overlooked as a child.

The solid contemporary voice of A Gate at the Stairs is cleverly off-set with slight touches of the plot of Jane Eyre, which Brontë fans will surely appreciate. In addition to paying an homage to the archetypal nanny role, Moore has fashioned an ever-so-subtle tribute to the classic English tale , but with a modern outcome. Enough said.

Moore remains faithful to her emotionally difficult themes, but presents them with wit and humor. This marriage of grief and sadness with Moore’s signature self-deprecating tone has produced a book of spectacular depth and societal insight. A Gate at the Stairs can suffice as an intimate portrait of one girl’s second year at college (first classes, first boyfriend, first job)–but it offers so much more than that.