sitt-n-snark

Curtis, Curtis, Curtis... surely after selling all those copies you can afford therapy?*

There are so many things that bug me about this off-base evisceration that I hardly know where to start. Let's start with the term "chick lit," which seems as much an invented marketing category designed to pigeonhole books about young women as anything else. (And which seems to engender scorn primarily because it actually works, the books sell--you can't tell me the attitude is about the quality of the books; like any category there will be excellence and there will be excrement.) Then there's her out of hand dismissal of anything that's in the category of chick lit. As if calling something chick lit is in itself a qualitative judgment. Wake up and smell the hundred-year-old stink on that kind of generalization. (And you see this elsewhere too, mostly from other women writers. Stop attacking each other!)

Without having read Sittenfeld's book Prep--but having seen plenty of reactions to it (from readers and critics) and having seen its disturbing cover with the green and pink pastels--what I suspect is that the review is more about Prep than it is about The Wonder Spot. Or at least more about some of the holes Prep got pigeoned into. I believe it was treated even by those who liked it as a slight sort of novel, dishy, insubstantial, scandalously autobiographical. Sound familiar? Baggage, with a capital B.

And, as Sarah pointed out, all the more ironic for Bank's nice comments about Sittenfeld in this week's EW. Not to mention the fact that these are both young women who hit it big right out of the park and went through the flack that comes with that.

I'm about halfway through The Wonder Spot, which I picked up at the library on a whim, and it's still surprising me. Bank has a distinct authorial voice that's pleasant and funny and natural. She can really turn a phrase or capture a small moment and make it into something bigger. And of the main character Sophie's relationships so far, those with her family--especially her brothers--are way more important than the ones she has with the men she dates. Perhaps it will all fall apart in the second half, but I'm doubtful of that. It seems to me that Sittenfeld, taking careful notes while reading or not, has missed a giant swathe of what the book is about both on the surface and beneath it.

Anyway, it seems apropos to quote Christian Bauman's wonderful essay (the one I linked to the other day from the excellent Bookmark Now):

And although this wasn’t their point, it bothers me, yes it does, let me say here: writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. Worse, some don’t even make their living at it, some do it free of charge.

Actors don’t do this. Painters don’t do it, musicians don’t. It’s weird, it’s cannibalism.

* Here's the snarkback: Or at least get a new head shot.**
** Really, I feel bad about it, I do.