Guy lit

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. ... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

That's Holden Caulfield opening Michael Kimmel's insightful take on guy lit over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. First, what is guy lit? It's Kimmel's term for the male equivalent of that 10-year-ago fad, chick lit. During the genre's halcyon days, I read a lot of chick lit -- enough so that some (e.g., Stella) questioned my orientation: the Bridget Jones books, Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Thirtynothing, even a couple of Sophie Kinsella and Jane Green books.

Seriously, I've got street cred here. I eventually stopped reading chick lit, though, because it got to be really, really bad. The books became impossible to tell apart. The heroine lived in New York (or London), she worked in publishing or fashion or journalism, she'd been recently done wrong by a real heel or she'd never found a man at all, and yet by the end she was in the perfect relationship with matching silver and china. I still think Girls' Guide holds up well (and the 1st Bridget book to a lesser extent), but the books had no staying power.

Now it appears guy lit is going through the same cycle. It's eerie to me just how similar the two genres are. Here's Kimmel's summary of the basic plot:

I may be 30, but I act 15. I am adrift in New York. I'm too clever by half for my own good. I live on puns and snide, sarcastic asides. I don't look too deeply into myself or anyone else — everyone else is boring or a phony anyway. I may be a New Yorker, but I am not in therapy. I have a boring job, for which I am overeducated and underqualified, but I lack the ambition to commit to a serious career. (Usually I have family money.) I hang out with my equally disconnected friends in many of the city's bars. I drink a lot, take recreational drugs, don't care about much except being clever. I recently broke up with my girlfriend, and while I am eager to have sex, which I do often given the zillions of available women in New York, the sex is not especially fulfilling, and emotions rarely enter the picture. I am deeply shallow. And I know it.

I agree almost 100%. Just like chick lit, guy lit got old quickly. Kimmel dates guy lit back to Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, though he notes the movement really took off with the appearance of the more recent Nick Hornby. Further, Kimmel sort of implies that these works are "decent". Again I agree, though I don't think Hornby has done anything better than his first (I think) novel, High Fidelity. I do have one bone to pick with Mr. Kimmel; he omitted the two best works in the genre: Mark Barrowcliffe's Girlfriend 44 and Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- a much better work than his Pulitzer-winning novel.

Still and all, I agree with his thesis -- guy lit is boring and empty and it's going to die with a grand whimper. What I had not thought about, though, is why guy lit never really burned with the same (commercial) fire as chick lit. Here's Kimmel's answer:

And that may be guy lit's biggest problem: Its readers are unlikely to resemble the guys the books are ostensibly about. As long as the antiheroes stay stuck, and the transformative trajectory is either insincere, as in Kunkel's Indecision, or nonexistent, as in Smith's Love Monkey, these writers will miss their largest potential audience. For it is women who buy the most books, and what women seem to want is for men to be capable of changing (and to know that a woman's love can change them).

...

Women won't read these books unless there is some hope of redemption, some effort these guys make to change. And men won't read them because, well, real men don't read.

That last sentiment depressed the hell out of me. See, I've been toying with a guy lit novel of my own. Now I'd like to think mine is different (and better of course) than the rest of the slop in the genre, but I'd never thought of the gender gap in reading as an issue to be dealt with. I think that does explain, though, why so many bad chick lit novels were published while the guy lit phenomenon has been much more limited (though no less bad). I guess there's really no reason for me to work on my novel anymore, huh? Still, Mr. Hornby seems to do okay. Hmm ...

All-in-all, though, I agree that guy lit is not going to leave a mark on literature. There's simply no reason to care about the characters or their fates. In the words of Mr. Kimmel, "I'm not at all sure that Holden — or I, for that matter — would want to be friends with them."