The New Alice Walker Would Probably Drive Her Mad

Anika Lani Haynes writes about the emergence of "black chick lit," and though a lot of the cites I've seen for it frame the article as a decrying of the lack of suitable reading material, it looks to me more like a mix of that plaintive longing for "fiction as a free place for greedily testing the capacity of our emotional range," and optimism for what's out there now and coming soon. Haynes has a very particular type of story in mind:

Even Waiting to Exhale’s female characters, though hip for their time, lacked the glitter and glamour of an ordinary duckling transformed into a fabulous swan, promoted to a fabulous executive position, all while wearing fabulous shoes flanked by a fabulous dude, and ending with her musing on her new fabulous life over martinis in the latest New York or Los Angeles hot spot.

And though she mentions some authors who meet that criteria, she then backtracks: "A troublesome element of these stories is how much they rely on a black bourgie urban scene to carry the reader, though I realize, if we’re not already living it, many of us desire the 'fabulous' life." Well, look, either you want your characters in glamarous settings or you don't. And, apart from the obvious superficial differences, is the "black bourgie urban scene" of these novels functionally different from the hip urban setting of the "white" chick lit she wants black fiction to emulate? From there, her essay degenerates into a complaint about how bad the writing in the genre can get, which is surely to be lamented, but also totally within normal expectations for what is, after all, commercial fiction. It ends on the oddly manifestic (if that's a word) note, "We must enrich our talent by honing our skills and personifying art before we trip and fall flat on our faces in Prada."

While I'm okay with the notion that fiction provides a mental and emotional play space for readers, and all for better wordsmithing in general, I'm less comfortable with the idea that we should have morally enriching fantasy lives and thus only prefer fiction that enables "good" fantasies, and I'm also confused by how she suddenly switched from talking about what readers want to what writers should do all while staying within the first person plural. But for all its problems, the article's still somewhat interesting, and chick lit publishers may want to take note.