Love in the Time of Cheapening Chick-Lit

A few months ago, I was comparing current reading material with a friend. He was halfway through Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and couldn’t stop raving about the book. Finally, after singing the novel’s praises, he paused. “How about you?” he asked. I was more than ready to match his enthusiasm.

“I’m reading this incredible collection of stories from the New Yorker,” I replied. “It’s one of those anthologies by David Remnick, and I can’t put it down.”

“I love those,” he said. “I just picked up their anthology of profiles. What’s this one called?”

“Nothing But You,” I answered. “It’s a collection of love stories.”

“Oh,” he said. A look that fell somewhere between condescending and contemptuous came over his face: “Oh. Love stories. Huh.” Literary tail between my legs, I backed off. My taste and I had been put in our respective places.

Later that night, reopening my much-maligned anthology, I started to wonder what was so wrong with my book—and, indeed, with the genre as a whole. Why was it so embarrassing to enjoy romantic stories? Why was it such a taboo to read love poems?

As I pondered the issue, I began to realize that the shame of romantic literature was a firmly established trend. Pablo Neruda fans proudly display their copies of Canto general, but hide Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair behind more impressive volumes. There’s a stigma surrounding certain Shakespeare sonnets—poems that a friend once described as “soppy.” In short, the self-made snobs of the collegiate literary world have gravitated away from romance—and frankly, I think it’s a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating for the dime-store bodice-ripper style of romantic lit. It’s a form that has been parodied everywhere from South Park to 10 Things I Hate About You, and rightfully so.

Nor am I a fan of “chick lit,” a genre that has exploded into being with the rise of fluff novelists like Jane Green and Sophie Kinsella. These authors, the perpetrators of a much-devolved sort of British Invasion, have flooded the literary market with inane stories of brainless women and their sordid love affairs. My issue with this genre comes down to this: chick lit cheapens the emotions on which it’s ostensibly based. The soap-opera-style feelings dominate the plot and the reflection, making the books so shallow as to be unbearable.

Yet as much as these books frustrate me, it’s almost worse when readers try to defend them by comparing chick lit authors to Jane Austen, who is completely unlike Green, Kinsella, and their sort. Austen, whose deft handling of romance and relationships gives her books depth and makes readers care deeply about her characters, demonstrates romantic writing as it should be. In Austen’s work, romance is a motivating factor for characters, not an excuse for namedrop-heavy descriptions of lavish weddings or for smutty sex scenes that read more like soft-core than story.

What it comes down to, in the end, is how authors choose to use romance in their work. It can be exploited as an excuse to indulge in content that’s inappropriate for literature. It can also be treated as a major force that is capable of shaping human lives and inspiring complex mental and physical activity.

Furthermore, when we start to condemn “love poetry” and the like, we have to remember that love is often a motivation for the poetry itself. I can’t help but think back to the movie Dead Poets Society, in which professor John Keating, played by Robin Williams, asks his students why we write poetry. They offer up dutiful (and true) academic answers. Keating, shaking his head, corrects them: “To woo women.”

This is, of course, only partially true. Love can motivate the subject of a sonnet or short story, but it’s craft that makes it readable, and depth of content that makes it worth reading.

Nonetheless, Keating makes a good, if wry, point: romance can be a legitimate inspiration for great literary efforts. Romance doesn’t have to imply cheapness or tawdry, subpar quality. And good romantic work—the kind written by poets from Keats to Northern California writer Kim Addonizio, the kind in my New Yorker anthology—uses love as a literary force as it should. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, perhaps it’s time for the holier-than-thou attitude toward romantic writing to cease.

Rebecca Evans is a Columbia College
sophomore.
One for the Books runs alternate Mondays.