T he triple Venti lattes, Bulgari shades and Yeoward crystal — signifiers of privilege that pepper chick lit’s brand-strewn landscape — could fill a tome of their own. Those totems of excess survive in the current crop of beach reads, if only to point up all that the characters stand to lose as lean times close in.
“The things that were once within reach — the private jet, the home in Aspen or even five-tiered Sylvia Weinstock cakes” are suddenly not, Tatiana Boncompagni writes in her new book, Hedge Fund Wives, whose beleaguered heroine must cope with the fallout from her divorce and shrinking finances.
In Social Lives by Wendy Walker, to be published in the fall by St Martin’s Press, an affluent Connecticut matron contemplates her dwindling resources. “There was little equity in the house after the loan for the new wing they’d put on last year, and the severe drop in the housing market,” she frets. “Nothing remained in the checking account beyond what was needed to pay the bills.”
Bummer.
But misfortune can be a fine muse, as attested by the latest wave of chick lit and its older sister, “hen lit,” intended for the over-40 set. Once unabashedly focused on the perks of wealth and fame, this spate of new fiction is tackling the recession and its attendant woes.
Contrition is the new black in these dark comedies of divorce, scandal and fortunes in free fall. As marital troubles and a faltering economy hoover their bank accounts and wreck their self-esteem, these heroines — fictional sisters in sorrow — pare down, reorder their priorities and struggle to wring some form of redemption out of straightened circumstances.
In The Penny Pinchers Club, a farce by Sarah Strohmeyer, published last month by Dutton, an aspiring decorator, suspecting that her husband of 20 years is about to leave her, curbs her spendthrift ways — to the point of pumping gasoline at dawn (when it is said to be thicker) and repurposing the food she retrieves from the supermarket trash bin.
But Not for Long, by Michelle Wildgen, out in October from St Martin’s, follows the members of a co-op residence in a Midwestern university town as they confront gasoline shortages and abandoned shops. The Summer Kitchen, by Karen Weinreb (St Martin’s), chronicles the trials of a well-heeled heroine who is forced to open a bakery after her husband is arrested for a white-collar crime.
Such plotlines seem counterintuitive, given chick lit’s first imperative: to titillate, entertain and, in the tradition of bubbly predecessors like The Devil Wears Prada, Bergdorf Blondes or Confessions of a Shopaholic, cater to a fascination with the bad behavior of the rich.
And yet, even the most lurid accounts of conspicuous consumption have never been entirely escapist, said Mallory Young, the editor, with Suzanne Ferriss, of Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (Routledge, 2005). “Chick lit usually responds through comedy to real situations confronting real women,” Young maintains. Unlike romance novels, chick lit “recognizes and responds to the world outside,” she said.
In fact, these new narratives seem steeped in an aura of inevitability. They reflect “the biggest story of the last two years,” said Jonathan Segura, a deputy editor at Publishers Weekly. “It would be impossible to write contemporary glitzy women’s fiction without taking the recession into account.”
Publishers have yet to explore fully the consequences of a hobbled economy, but Segura spies a trend in the making. “By next spring, publishing will have fully caught up,” he predicted. “And by summer, you’re going to see a flood of new fiction dealing specifically with the big meltdown.”
Many months ago, when Jill Kargman conceived The Ex-Mrs Hedgefund (Dutton), the recession had yet to take its ruinous toll. Published in the spring, the book is set against a backdrop described by its heroine as “a bacchanal of the rich and obnoxious, a Falstaffian brew of hedonism and material excess.” Kargman’s characters, the wives of New York’s hedge-fund elite, are indeed perched on the edge of a volcano, prancing oblivious, on their Vivier heels.
Kargman herself is a stranger to high finance, but it didn’t take a Wharton degree to alert her that disaster loomed. Her tale was inspired by a birthday party for the child of an acquaintance. “They had sherpas carry in the child in a Cleopatra tent,” she recalled. “It was so over the top.”
She told her husband: “This is crazy. Something’s got to give.”
Her narrative follows the arc of denial, anger, bargaining and depression that has come to characterize the new recession lit. Holly Talbott, her morally ambivalent heroine, more a J. Crew than a J. Mendel sort, feels a gnawing disenchantment with her pampered milieu, which turns to shock and rue when her ex-husband, about to remarry, cuts off her credit at Clyde’s, the upscale Madison Avenue chemist. With “the spigot turned off,” she learns to fend for herself, picking up the threads of a career built on her first love, rock ’n’ roll.
“One of the big motifs in these books is a sort of empowerment,” Segura said. “Swathed in Gucci, Prada and what not, their protagonists realign their priorities and realize, ‘Oh, I don’t need that Givenchy gown. I can look great in Eileen Fisher, too.’”
They can also do without that banker in the Brioni suit. Directly or obliquely, most of these books take a feminist stance. “The woman doesn’t always end up with the guy at the end, but she ends up with a better sense of self,” said Liate Stehlik, the senior vice president and publisher at Avon, which released Hedge Fund Wives. Recovering from divorce, its heroine pulls up her socks and embarks on an indie career in the world of private banking.
Framed as cautionary tales, these books introduce female characters compelled to “face facts, raise funds and watch out for themselves,” said Elizabeth Beier, who edited The Summer Kitchen. “They’re not just vicariously experiencing other women’s getting and spending,” she said. “They are taking charge of their own identities; they are actually doing something, and that always makes more involving fiction.”
Readers appear to be responding. Based on letters and comments on author Web sites, many identify with the novel’s cosseted heroine, Nora, who learns with a jolt, Beier said, that “she actually has to make money to feed her kids and figure out how they’re going to be educated in a public school system.” Readers, Beier added, “feel that richer connection you have with a character who is more like you.”
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