We’re Trivializing Literature, Brick by Brick

After Karen Karbo invented “brick lit” yesterday, a term to describe over-long books by “genius” writers who could’ve done with some editorial supervision, I asked if you had any books that fit the category. One reader immediately chimed in with Anna Karenina, and then another invoked Gary Shteyngart‘s Absurdistan—but, come on, no matter what you think of it, a novel of less than 350 pages can’t possibly qualify as an impenetrable brick! This is a category for books on the scale of Thomas Pynchon‘s Against the Day or Vikram Chandra‘s Sacred Games, except that I liked both those novels (actually, I liked the Shteyngart, too). Same with Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle trilogy, which I’d gladly read if its components were twice as long… Damn, I know there must be miserable thick novels being published somewhere!

Matt Patin of the Greenleaf Book Group didn’t have any bricks to lob, but he did want to contribute a few more mock genres, some of which I decline to mention in polite company, like the synonym for “lad lit” that adopts a more vulgar tone. Much safer terms in his lexicon include quit lit (“the recent crop of books about quitting work, adventures in careering, or just bitching about the one you currently have”) and zit lit (“bildungsromans and adventures in the peculiarities of teenage angst”).

“All of this nonsense about chick lit reminds me of a discussion with my spawn,” novelist Marta Acosta emailed yesterday. “We were discussing race and ethnic issues, as we often do, and bias, and I said, ‘You frequently trash women and girls.’ And he said, ‘That’s because it’s popular.’”

“Yes, it is popular to trash women and girls,” Acosta continues. “No one would publicly say, ‘Men writers churn out such trash, even though so many so-called literary novels by men are totally garbage. No would would ever say, “Male crime writers demean all lit by men,’ or ‘Male horror is replacing literature by men in bookstores, and dumbing down men.’ No one talks about the abysmal guns and blood covers on books by men.”

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