Over the weekend, I read Ann Packer’s excellent collection Mendocino and Other Stories, which I was inspired to pick up after reading (and loving) an advance copy of her forthcoming novel Songs Without Words. Songs Without Words is about women; Mendocino is about relationships; both are remarkable in Packer’s ability to realistically evoke the perspectives of any number of characters, and her willingness to allow those perspectives to clash.
Reading Packer made me think of Anne Tyler, a brilliant and stylistically similar writer whose books are criminally underread by my so-called literary friends, probably in large part because of book jackets like these:

(yuck)

All this was on my mind when I picked up the Times’ Book Review, in which:

Amy Finnterty tells us that “Jill Bialosky’s novel ‘The Life Room’ isn’t chick lit.”

Ann Hodgman worries that [Patricia Volk’s] “To My Dearest Friends” would turn out to be a “You go, girl!” book.”

And writing about Timothy Shaffert’s Devils in the Sugar Shop, Jeff Turrentine wonders if “a novel [can] still be called chick lit if (a) it’s written by a guy, and (b) most of the chicks in question are in their late 30s to early 40s and not especially interested in shoes?”

My conception of "chick lit" is pretty specifically limited to those frank, chatty novels that always seem to be about young women trying to get ahead in the publishing world. And I have no real objections to those books, though I don't generally read them (my craving for trashy entertainment is usually better served by reality TV). What I do object to is the impression that I got from reading the Book Review this week: That there is some litmus test for chick litery, presumably involving shoes and Cosmos and cattiness, to which books about women are now subjected. It's easy to imagine reviews of both Packer and Tyler including similiar phrases; as though the reviewer must defend liking a book about women by insisting that it is "literature" instead of the diminutive "chick literature."

Or perhaps I'm just being oversensitive. Either way, Ann Packer is really good. Look for Songs Without Words when it hits the stores next month.