soapbox? check.

ahh, the relief of fiber.
...
over at bookslut there's a link to a rather pointless conversation about whether chick lit has value. (the discussion starts out promising then devolves into a weird, meandering junior high wannabe snarkfest, and not in that interesting way, either.)

why link to it? it comes back to issues of value, taste, discernment. i've been writing my own piece of dreck lately (one that i am enjoying) and the other night, when i came home a little wasted from a work function, roomie was watching Wedding Date (the one with Debra Messing and one of the Dermots). what an utterly insipid movie. roomie put her finger on it: there's no conflict and everyone is boring. where's the conflict when the most common rule of chick lit is 'marry the boy who loves you for being you'? and where's the conflict when the heroine's journey to self-discovery follows a simple trajectory - middle class dream almost attained, middle class dream deferred, middle class dream reinforced and used as reward for maintaining the (middle class) status quo. what's discovered when she ends up back where she began, perhaps a little more knowing, but basically still unaware?

the chick-lit lovers (and their authors plum sykes, jennifer weiner, marian keyes and that woman who made my roomie throw the book across the room) defend their genre by comparing their domestic dramas to those of austen but they don't seem to have read austen very well. it's no wonder they choose austen as their guide; she's easy to underestimate. her clean and chatty novels of drawing rooms and marriage plans seem like our romance novels but austen had actual conflict. elizabeth bennet was not trying to 'find herself' in the love of a good man; she was fighting for survival, knowing that her future, and those of her sisters, depended on marriage - and marriage, even if you were gently bred, was not a sure thing especially if your family's class and reputation was...in question. this is the conflict - austen's drama is not about darcy loving elizabeth for herself; it's about class distinctions, money, sexual scandal and the laws of primogeniture that endanger a woman's ability to be free.

that's what Conflict is - the very BIG thing outside of the hero/heroine that endangers the outcome of the narrative. it's not whether someone is fat, or fired, or if someone will read the email that was accidentally sent when someone else was drunk with jealousy and stupidity. it's not a misunderstanding or a misheard conversation. that's called a plot point. conflict points to something monumental and the fact that these stories lack that largeness, that weight, just undercuts their argument that what they write is important.