New Adult Lit anyone? Elle Kennedy’s Briar U series

When I was in the eighth standard (grade in American parlance), my bestie Ayesha had a stash of Americana in novel form – the Sweet Valley and Sweet Dreams series – that she used to be super generous about lending. These books were contraband in our convent school, where there were strict rules on what you could or could not bring in, but we did anyway and then read them under our desks, thereby justifying the case for them being banned in the first place.

Apart from the fact that they were generally about teen romance. My favourite was The Trouble With Charlie, which had a redheaded freckled girl on the cover, the eponymous Charlie, who has a crush on her brother’s friend. I didn’t have a brother but I had an elder sister with lots of popular boys circulating around her so I could identify.

All this to say that I think that Elle Kennedy’s Briar U series is like Sweet Valley High updated for millienials, which means lots of sex and drinking. They’re of age so it’s all legal. Apparently, it’s called New Adult Lit.

I know, this is not chick lit, but it’s my blog and I can veer if I want to. Also, I thought I was reading a detective novel when I started The Chase – no fault in the books, I had just saved them in the wrong folder.

The theme running through all three novels – because yes, I binged – is that there’s more to extremely  beautiful privileged party girls and their male counterparts – the jocks (in this case, the sculpted specimens of masculinity on the Briar U hockey team).

Each novel is told from a male/female point of view; these two people unfailingly get together at the end. So the opposite of a detective novel here – the suspense, if any, lies in what obstacle lies in their path and how they will surmount it.

In The Chase, Summer is basically Barbie (“Greenwich Barbie”, her friend Brenna dubs her), your stereotypical blonde bombshell. There’s a twist at the beginning though, a hint of trouble in paradise. Summer turns up at the sorority house she’s supposed to be staying at – and gets turned down by the other women. Then it turns out she’s been expelled from her previous school for basically partying too hard – though there’s again a hint of a deeper explanation to come here.

Summer’s male opposite is (Colin) Fritz aka Fritzy (I know!), a jock with the soul of a nerd, a friend of her brother’s, and a guy she’s been crushing on for a while.

Unsurprisingly, Fritz is attracted to her, but he’s also repelled. Wait, what? Summer is basically every man’s wet dream right?

Yes, and Fritz is far from immune to her charms. But he’s afraid she’s too much, a “total drama llama” (apparently, people of the male persuasion do say this) and also, that she’s shallow and stupid. Also she’s filthy rich, he’s not, he’s rather not get into drama with his friend’s sister yada yada.

So you see, even perfect girls don’t get what they want … for a while.

Also, Fritz’s judgement of Summer is shared by several other people, like her academic advisor. While the books are largely about romance of the steamy Mills and Boon variety – translated into millennial terms so people say things like “I’ve got a semi” and “ my cock twitched” – there’s a fairly sizeable “career” component, just like chick lit.

While Fritz is focussed and knows where he’s going – though he too has some hard choices to make in the end – Summer is unsure. Her talents are fairly Becky Bloomwood – dressing up and dressing people – and she struggles academically. The course she enjoys best is fashion, and there’s a fair bit of discussion of what the coursework entails, which appears in all the novels so that I some places they’re almost like a college programme brochure narrated in the voice of a earnest teen new adult.

The novels are an insight into the world of uni, which it appears involves a lot of sex (having it and talking about it). I read this long form piece once about how on college campuses in the US people are hooking up with abandon (so sexual needs are fulfilled on the same way that food needs are or heck breathing i.e. casually) but relationship are a big.fucking.deal

So a boy (or girl, it’s portrayed as fairly equal opportunity here) may make out or have sec with someone and that’s all par for the course, but asking her to dinner – “dating” – is not a step to be taken lightly and agonized over a fair bit. In our day – because god I feel old – it used to be the other way round.

Blow jobs are almost a given, and women seem eager to give them. What’s expected is a certain amount of decency though, so you’re expected to at least acknowledge that one happened and not totally ghost the person who gave you a blow job.

Also men are expected to pleasure, being “sub par” at oral is a dating flaw and the ultimate expression of compatibility is coming together (which I guess was the case in the M&Bs too or did women not come?). Interestingly, I had read that anal is the new blow job these days about the twenty-something set, but you wouldn’t know it to read these books.

What’s novel (to me) is how casually sex is discussed even among male and female friends. One thing that defines Summer and Brenna (in The Risk) is the easy relationship with men. They are not necessarily one of the boys – they are highly attractive women and the boys openly express their attraction to them, and they reciprocate and there’s all this heavy but harmless flirtation but there’s also playing video games or chatting about the women they’re really into.

While I tend not to be that into novels from a male point of view, I started getting into the male narratives in this series. The boys and their interactions – locker room, frat house etc – tend to be exactly the kind I have zero interest in real life, but I realise there’s a charm (if not depth) to it. This is most clearly evident in The Play (book 3) in which Hunter goes from the apartment he inhabits with three women to one with just bros. Special mention goes to Pablo Eggscobar, the boiled egg the hockey team is supposed to mother to convince their coach they’re capable of graduating to a pig as a team mascot.

I began to see that there is – as the series was clearly trying to convince me –  more to, well, fuckboys. Hunter is a prime example of this. In Book 1, he’s exactly the kind of obnoxious jock that would have my eyes rolling uncontrollably but Book 3 brings out a decent side of him. He is apparently a person, and Demi discovering that is exactly the plot of the novel.

This book surprisingly ended up being my favourite of the series’s far. Brenna and Jake’s dynamic is more my thing, but the repartee between Hunter and Demi was just so well done. Plus Hunter really  grew on me.

And that’s the thing with this series. It’s silly but it’s also very well written. When looking up Kennedy it appears she’s written a fair amount of Adult romance and she definitely does the chemistry well.

In a way, for all their cursing and sleeping around, the morality of these tales is fairly conventional – the good peeps are the ones who can go monogamous and enjoy it. In the good ol’ romance tradition, these novels are about finding The One, with really really good sex being the cherry on the top.

Another throwback to romance traditions is the big, strong male as protector trope. There’s a fair bit of feminism sprinkled through – for example, a mini discussion on slut shaming, a plotline on sexual harassment, another on gender discrimination in the workplace – but I can recall at least two instances of guys physically picking up women – who are of course kicking, screaming, resisting – and putting them in their place. This is quite reminiscent on the Mills and Boon masterful man/fiesty woman convention.

My big quibble is how overwhelmingly white the series is. The class privilege of most of the protagonists is acknowledged, but there is little awareness of racial politics. In The Chase, there are literally two people of colour mentioned – Matt, a black player on the hockey team, and an Indian CEO of a company Fritz wants to join who turns out to be a sleaze. In The Risk, we are introduced to Rupi, a preppy drama queen of (semi?) Indian origin, who while a welcome quirky addition to the plot, is also undeniably strange. Finally, in the play, we have Demi and Nico, of Cuban origin, and passing mentions of Pax Ling, Demi’s (possibly) Chinese friend. But that’s it.

Overall, though, I’m pretty hooked and I had to sternly stop myself from binging on the Off Campus series right away.

Have you read this series? What did you think?

Did the lack of diversity bother you?

Which character made your heart beat a little faster? In my case, it was Jake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My research on Indian chick lit

In 2015, I submitted a paper to a journal. Six months or so later I received the results of the peer review with a lot of feedback. It took me around two months to actually read the feedback properly without a lot of hurt and anger. I realised:

a) A lot of it made sense (one of the reviewers – the notorious reviewer 2? – had even provided me with a list of resources I should be looking at

b) The editor hadn’t outright rejected my submission but left open the possibility that I could revise and resubmit

I decided to give it a shot. I ended up not only rewriting the paper (when I resubmitted, one of the reviewers commented that it was now “an entirely new paper”) but rethinking my entire approach to my thesis. Those two reviewers gave me tough but really constructive and detailed advice on the kind of work I needed to be doing with my project.

A little over one year after I had originally submitted the manuscript, it was accepted.

THREE years after that it has finally been published. By then I had submitted my thesis, defended it, revised it, taught four courses in one semester and decided that version of academia wasn’t for me at this point and moved back into journalism.

The paper I wrote, “Flight from the Womb: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit”, which I felt pressure to submit so as to have some published work when I entered the job market (ha!) contains the heart (in kernel form) of the idea I developed so much in the three years after I submitted the revised version.

Anyway, if you’re interested in chick lit, please read it here. If you don’t have access to the journal, please email me at readingchicklit@gmail.com and I will try to send you a copy.

Love in the Time of Affluenza

Title: Love in the Time of Affluenza
Author: Shunali Shroff
Publication: August 2019, Bloomsbury India

Here’s the blurb:

“Raising three beautiful children in her beautiful Bombay home with her aristocratic husband of 15 years – every bit the prince you read about in fairy tales – Natasha has it all. But when her closest friend drops the bombshell that she’s isn’t entirely fulfilled by her family and is having an affair, Natasha begins to ask some difficult questions about her own seemingly perfect life.”

So there you have it. This is a “what happens after the happy ever after” tale, set in the upper echelons of Mumbai society. Tellingly, the novel opens with infidelity – Natasha spots her friend Trisha with a mystery man, “looking left and right in the manner of a woman who’s really bad at having an affair”. Also tellingly, this intrigue takes place in the aisles of the kind of upscale groceries that are finally giving the local baniya and bazaar a run for their money by not only offering the opportunity to buy your regular veggies and fruit at exorbitant prices in air-conditioned comfort but also tempting you with such signifiers of global taste as “shitake mushrooms” and “arborio rice”.

When confronted with her infidelity, Trisha is unabashed. You know, then, that this will be more Desperate Housewives than Sex and the City. Trisha’s complaints about her husband (“He never wants to touch me anymore” and “To him, I’m just the mother of his children and the housekeeper whose cleavage he’s allowed to check out”), who inconveniently happens to the business partner of Natasha’s husband, prompt Natasha to take a long hard look at her own fairytale and, not surprisingly, to find it wanting.

Natasha clearly belongs to the one per cent  – she appears to live in a house, not an apartment, gets invited to fashion shows, parties of the season and dinner with the (British) royals, is married to a prince, owns designer clothing, holidays, shops abroad and spends Rs 7 lakh on the flowers at a birthday party. Her problems, though, are Betty Friedenesque – she is restless and feels unappreciated.

Her husband Varun “was every bit the prince you read about in fairy tales – upright, decent, chivalrous and hardworking, which was virtually unheard of among India’s famously indolent royals”. Yet, from the beginning, there are intimations that all is not right. Natasha alludes to the “my wife is a flake look” that Varun sometimes gets after her latest gaffe.

Chapter 2 opens with this Carrie Bradshaw meets not-so-smug married reflection:

“I have arrived at the conclusion that a happy marriage is one where the wife is daft and has no opinions of her own on anything except what moisturizing cream to use and where to buy bed linen. Men, as long as you agree wholeheartedly with everything they say and toe the line, are happy creatures, their ego sated and their sense of power intact. But say anything to contradict them, and their world goes off balance. Submissive = good wife = happy marriage.”

She observes that “Varun thinks I lie around all day wondering what I’ll wear to dinner, but the truth is that that there’s always something sucking up all my time.” She sarcastically notes that after giving their daughter a bath, Varun was “positively glowing with the joy of having been a hands-on father for all of twenty minutes”.

Meanwhile, such tasks are the bread and butter of a homemakers’ life. Work, such as going through the children’s medical files “is tedious and something only a peon or a clerk should be doing, but then such is a homemaker’s life. A glorified peon who does not get a salary.”

However, she is warned by her mother not to challenge Varun because “women who fight too much with their husbands push them into the arms of other women”. And, like many Indian woman, she has a mother-in-law to put her in her place (“My mother in law lives by the dictum that if you have nothing nice to say, then you must say it” ).

Thus, while Natasha may be part of high society, some of her concerns would resonate with middle-class women. A fair bit of her angst centres on  unreliable domestic help – “It’s either the driver taking off when he fancies or the cook who seems to have an unending supply of dying relatives that all require long trips back to his village. If Sylvia Plath’s cook had a death in the family every time she was due to throw a dinner party, I bet she would have stuck her head in the oven sooner.”

Actually, Natasha is closer to the truth here than she lets on. Plath did struggle with the demands of being a wife and mother while being a poet.

Interestingly, while Natasha is frank about the important role her domestic help in her life – she does not invisibalise them as younger chick lit narrators tend to do – she does not explicitly mention help with child care. Rather, she says, in contrast to Varun who “was raised by his dai and then packed off to a boarding school”, she “want(s) to be able to meet all their emotional needs since I’m not doing anything else with my life anyway. When my babies have bad dreams at night, they call out for me and not Shanta or Sunita or Mary. I don’t want to outsource their upbringing when I can do it myself.”

And yet, as she sashays out for drinks and dinner, there must be someone looking after her children. This arrangement is not spelled out in as much detail as the woes of dealing with cook and driver – yet when Varun is left with the children and faces a crisis, someone called “Sylvia” is at hand to help.

That said, Natasha does not pretend to being a paragon devoted to her children (“The hardest part about being a mother is having to wake up for school in the morning and trying to evoke feelings of maternal love within yourself when all you want is for the kids to leave so you can go back to bed”) and about her children’s devotion to her (“with both Ria and Sumer bowed in front of the television reverentially as if in the presence of the Buddha, I might as well go out”).

Moreover, having children put something of a cramp in her glamorous personna. Having zipped herself into a Valentino dress, she wryly  observes that”standing in front of me is a woman who has completed the first trimester of her pregnancy and is ready to announe this happy news to the world.”

After all, as Natasha notes, the phrase “lady of leisure” is a misnomer: “to be beautifully put together always while retaining one’s pre-teen figure is by no means less demanding than running a successful business”.

In some ways, the novel is typical of chick lit. There is the obsession with self-improvement, via weight loss (” I curse myself for being the person who turns to food for comfort instead of turning away from it altogether like glamorous women do”), spiritual pursuits (through the latest meditation/yoga fad) and the almost mandatory list of resolutions – though this being a married mother, they include admonishments such as “discourage adultery vociferously”.

Unlike Western chick lit which is often heavy on the consumerism, Indian chick lit tends to eschew the name dropping of brands. This might be because realistically a young Indian woman living alone in a city doesn’t have the funds to drop on one designer handbag, let alone an entire wardrobe.

This is not a problem for a woman married to a well-heeled prince, so we hear a fair bit about Natasha’s Gianvito Rossi shoes (“Who needs an exciting lover on the side when you can have shoes like these?”), her red Valentonio gown (“I have too many clothes and too little time left”) and even a mink coat that she worries she is being cruel to by not storing it properly.

While typically chick lit features a single woman in pursuit of a romantic partner, Natasha has already found her beau. Noticing her friend Sukh, “the eminence grise of the advertising world”, ignoring his date in favour of another pretty young thing, the relief “of not being a single woman in this hell is so immense” that she texts a loving message to her husband, only to receive an instruction in reply asking her to look for his blue shirt.

Not only is her husband often absent and when present less than romantic, sex has taken a turn for the worse. While the typical chick lit protagonist is hardly a virgin, sex is not much discussed. For married women, sex – or rather the lack thereoff – is a preoccupation. Take this exchange:

“He hardly wants to touch me anymore longer, Natasha. It’s like he’s impotent or something”

“That’s not impotence, that’s marriage”

Natasha notes: “There are only two types of sex after so many years of marriage – there is make-up sex and then there is drunken-after-an-ocassiona sex. And make-up sex is decidedly the better of the two”

Is it any wonder that Natasha is tempted to seek a little romance on the side for herself as well? The novel takes on the delightful quality of farce (“imagine having to exercise caution for someone else’s affair”) as Natasha is somehow steamrolled into abetting Trisha in her affair and then begins a harmless flirtation of her own, all the while chronicling the shenanigans of those in her set with a gimlet eye.

In the end, Natasha has her happy (again) ever after and the preeminence of (true) love is reaffirmed. Her dabbling with the possibility of infidelity is shortlived. She is reminded of her love for her husband by overhearing some pretty young things talking about how attractive he is and how faithful to her, his wife. This is her reflection:

“Varun and I may no longer share the compelling chemistry that new lovers enjoy, but is that not the way of every relationship? That exciting, enthralling attraction has been replaced by something more sublime and more permanent”

Natasha’s faith in her marriage is restored, and conveniently, this is a marriage of means, but the resolution of Trisha’s storyline is idealistic too. In a “in a city like Bombay, the size of a man’s apartment matters more than any other attribute (physical or otherwise) when it comes to attracting a worthy mate”, Trisha, who once had only to press a bell for her liveried staff to serve coffee is now making tea for her guests herself  but she is “willing to give up the good life for love”.

If romance – and the lack of it thereoff after longer than a decade of marriage and children in tow – is one of the preoccupations of the novel, the other, like conventional chick lit, is career.

The counterpoint to Natasha, Trisha and their well-married socialite friends is Nafisa, Natasha’s single, ambitious friend, who powered on in her career in journalism where Natasha left off. She notes: “I’m the woman who married when while the rest of them go on to write books, film documentaries and edit magazines. And what a marriage it is that I’m always going to these dinners with my McQueen clutch instead of my husband.”

It is Varun, however, who pushes Natasha to get back to work. While she understandably feels that she has enough on her plate, he alludes to the fact that part of his attraction towards her had been her career-woman image.

However, Natasha remains torn, convinced she will not be able to do justice to her children and in the end make a mess out of home and work. When she does leave her husband in charge of the children, he demands she return home when one child has a fever (she doesn’t but a female friend saves the day) and she spends a fair amount of time talking to her children and about them on assignment.

There is a bit of trenchant feminist critique of the expectation that women “have it all” which not only sets “impossible standards” but also standards that are not expected of men. Rather, Natasha points out, “women cannot even begin to have it all until all responsibilities, parenting and otherwise, between men and women are split down the middle”.

Educated men, she notes, buy into the idea that women have an inborn maternal instinct because it allow them to leave the bulk of raising children to women, contenting themselves with “token tasks like playing soccer with their child on the weekends”.

While Natasha is scathing about Varun’s lack of support, he only has to turn up as a surprise to a ceremony at which she is granted an award (it’s unclear what for) for her to be mollified. Add to that Varun taking charge when her parents are in trouble – by drawing on her fancy boarding school connections – and his knight-in-shining-armour credentials are burnished.

Although Natasha’s dilemma surrounding work might link her to the concerns of the wider sisterhood, her privilege shows in the ease at which she can slide back into the workforce. Many women returning to work after having a child find employers less than eager to welcome them back; Natasha, however, can turn down jobs (“writing about a vacuum cleaner isn’t my idea of a career”).  It seems that magazine editors were just waiting for her to make her comeback – and it helps that her best friend is one of them.

The fairytale ending at the end of the novel is Natasha finding her way out of her Friedenesque dilemma. While she has firmly stated that “having it all” is impossible, she seems to come fairly close and without much ado.

Overall, the novel is well written, with, as must be obvious from the above, lots of quotable quotes. It reminded me a bit of Twinkle Khanna’s Mrs Funnybones, but manages to stitch together a coherent narrative more successfully. Natasha has something in common with the protagonist of one of my favourite chick lit series – Plum Syke’s Bergdoff Blondes and The Debutante Divorcee – an intelligent woman who is not afraid to be frivolous.