Sassy yet klutzy women with high-powered jobs and a love for Jimmy Choo _ this can pretty much sum up the protagonists in most, if not all, of Sophie Kinsella's books. But for this reviewer, every new novel by the Brit author seems to edge away from the wide misconceptions of chick lit as a mere breezy, hollow read.
For detractors, the genre is defined by cringe-worthy pastel-coloured covers, with Beverly Hills heavies in flowers, cutesy tinted fonts and generic titles as a stamp on the forehead screaming, "I'm not meant for you Suzy-good-student readers!" But behind the champagne and sex-fuelled plotlines, the cliched love crises and chocolate Magnums as the new therapeutic form, Kinsella burrows into her characters as if she was an anthropologist of the female urban middle-class. Her latest standalone novels Wedding Night, which came out in April and landed in The Sunday Times bestseller chart, and I've Got Your Number, from last year, continue her exploration of the psyche of shopaholic, somewhat neurotic office women.
Wedding Night follows Lottie's relationship fiasco with her long-term boyfriend and his fear of commitment, until an old high school flame whisks her away for a hasty marriage that leaves friends and family appalled and determined to intervene.
I've Got Your Number is not much different in tone. A female protagonist, Poppy Wyatt, is embroiled in a series of comical episodes after she loses her engagement ring from her picture-perfect fiancee, along with her phone. Panic follows until she finds the abandoned phone, which leads her to a meet a business consultant and more unexpected events.
Kinsella, a former financial journalist, can't be accused of setting up the common plot denominator in which an Hermes bag can constitute a life crisis, or that her female characters are wholly dependent on their male counterparts in the eternal quest for happiness.
But both books here have a tender femininity, they silently denote an underlying outlook into real-life issues commonly faced by women: financial fears, divorce, anxiety over lost possessions, even rivalries over a boy.
Feminist critics may look in distaste at chick lit for its docile representation of women. This may be partially true in the normative structural sense of most chick literature novels where the story starts with a female protagonist bawling over "the most downright pathetic boyfriend ever", and an all-American happy ending with her finally finding Mr Right. This is the case with Poppy in I've Got Your Number, who starts off with a Scrabble-fanatic boyfriend and links arms with a new (better) beau towards the end.
This is the very line that Kinsella plays along, except in reverse: it's not the men who fulfil the women's lives and happiness but the female characters who represent the main source of happiness for her needy male characters.
In fact, Poppy and Lottie are independent, successful bachelorettes with stable jobs _ the former as a physical therapist and the latter working for a pharmaceutical company. Both lead comfortable lives under their own income and savvy business suits. Kinsella, an Oxford graduate, directly addresses the notion that pretty, materialistic women can be smart and sophisticated; her portrayals of females steer us away from the stereotypical image of ditzy "blonde" women. Rather than running away with the glamour of the shoe closet, Kinsella portrays life in all its forms of chaos and hardships.
As for the series of comical elements? They are meant purely for enjoyment and are what we have come to expect from Kinsella: a well-timed condom flying into someone's glass of tonic, seven-year-old Noah quizzing about putting the "sausage in the muffin" and Poppy unwrapping her in-laws' presents of knickers.
Surely a genre that addresses the issues faced by its fellow readers should be appraised _ taking into consideration that other genres such as crime, fantasy, or even the most literate of all fiction works often fail to offer realistic insight for women today. We don't rush to buy Dan Brown's Inferno with the thought of reading history's most riveting literary masterpiece.
Of course, in every genre there are the occasional truly dreadful books.
Chick lit can't be wholly generalised as poorly written works for readers who only care about sunscreen and chocolate titbits. Kinsella is a good writer _ with a record 11 top-selling novels and the film Confessions Of A Shopaholic based on her work. Her humorous tone, coupled with her references to quirky everyday ordeals, can be traced back to The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic in 2000. That was the first novel published under the name Sophie Kinsella, contrary to her seven previous novels released under her other pen name Madeleine Wickham. Those, not deemed chick lit, are more serious in tone and didn't receive as much recognition or popularity as her later novels.
For readers seeking a new perspective on chick lit and all that it has to offer, Wedding Night and I've Got Your Number are must-reads.
