Chick lit’s unhappily ever after

Title: Soft Animal
Author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Published: April 2023, Penguin

This is not chick lit. I repeat: this is not chick lit.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan dislikes the term, one that after a fair bit of thought I decided to use in my PhD thesis, one that covers her early work.

But by my own definition of chick lit – (often lighthearted) novels about young women on quest for love and career success – this is not chick lit.

It is on this blog because it’s chick lit adjacent, because this blog has become chick lit adjacent, because I have read almost no actual chick lit since my PhD but I read a lot that is adjacent.

This novel, if anything, is chick lit’s unhappily ever after.

Helen Fielding wrote a three-quel to Bridget Jones’ Diary in which (spoiler alert) Mark Darcy is no more (gasp!), and Bridget is a single mum. I enjoyed but did not love that novel like I loved Bridget Jones Diary and its sequel. I remember thinking though how insecure Bridget still seemed. I thought 30–somethings were supposed to be scatty but one then grows up?

I certainly have. I wish I could have the whimsy of Bridget.

But I keep encountering female characters in their 40s who are as insecure as everyone else about stuff like how they look – even smart characters like Sally in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy – and I’m like huh.

Anyway this is all to say that Mallika in Soft Animal is grown up. Her life and her marriage has evolved, in a relatable way (not in the addition of two children without any of the heaviness BJD way, even if your partner, the love of your life, has died ffs).

There could be a chick lit version of Mallika’s life before she got married -Madhavan Reddy could write an excellent prequel, I’d imagine, but maybe she couldn’t because she too has grown up. I find myself unable to conjure up the levity of my early blogs, I am so far removed from that person as to be a different species.

And so, thankfully, is Mallika.

The novel has a memorable opening line: “I realized yesterday that I don’t like my husband anymore.” The ensuing narrative could be anything. A detective story, for example, that I thought Madhavan was supposed to be writing – but it turns out to be quintessential MMR, a stream on consciousness lens into a deteriorating if not dead marriage.

I once made the case that MMR’s work is in the ecriture feminine tradition and here I think she has perfected the style that began in You Are Here. The chapters are short, and not about anything in particular. Things happen but very gently.

If one got away from the chick lit comparison, this could be described as the great Indian (upper middle class, or – OK fine – elite) pandemic novel. I have to say that my heart sank when I realised it was set in the pandemic.

The extent to which I dislike novels set in the pandemic tells me how much it affected me even when my official position is that it wasn’t that bad for me all things considered. Mallika never really complains about the pandemic, and yet, surely it took a mental toll. (And her description of the middle-class colony’s response to the pandemic is spot on).

In several ways, the novel cut very close to the bone. I had a lot in common with Mallika, apart from her not having children but only an existential dilemma about them, that becomes a turning point.

There is nothing wrong with Mallika’ husband Mukund on paper. She is married to the kind of man a millennial urban Indian woman would want to be married to – goodlooking, rich, not overtly violent. His main flaw seems to be that he doesn’t help around the house, and, well, Mallika isn’t working so…

And yet. And yet. The pandemic provides a sympathetic backdrop for Mallika’s own feeling of being trapped. We meet her at the point at which she is ready to break free.

Mallika has always been fairly nice – she accepted her mother-in-law swooping in and decorating her house, and her husband casting this as a colossal favour – but the voice in her head isn’t, and now that voice is matching her actions. She acquires a sidekick – her mother’s dog – and a friend, an elderly neighbour who she visits even though their conversations are awkward, and the visits take a strange turn, and he never lives up to the promise of wise, elderly counsellor.

And yet, she has become completely detached – a situation probably exacerbated, but not entirely blameable on, the pandemic.

There is something Betty Friedanesque about Mallika’s predicament – and while Friedan’s work is out of fashion (too Western, too elite) – it described a moment and a feeling that could very much apply to India’s highly educated young urban married women today.

The end, when it comes, comes with a whimper, not a bang. Mallika decides to do what she wants, for no reason other than she wants to.

Why? … Because I don’t like honey in my tea, because I like the colour blue, because I am left-handed, because I prefer to sleep on my stomach.

Romantic Comedy

Not just any one. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel.

Look, I’ve not read a Sittenfeld novel I haven’t loved. She’s had two fictionalised accounts of the lives of first ladies (Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton), a contemporary Pride and Prejudice retelling, and a boarding school novel. All were excellent. I read and loved Sisterland randomly, and it was only later, when she had established herself in my mind as a go-to novelist, that it was by her. The weakest of the lot, in my opinion, was The Man of My Dreams – I barely remember what it was about.

Now this one. For some reason, although I eagerly await every new Sittenfeld, I was somehow reluctant to get started on. I think it was because I didn’t know how to place it. The blurb sounded like, well, a romantic comedy, but I couldn’t imagine how Sittenfeld could write something so, well, straight.

Well, I needn’t have worried. Sittenfeld carries it off with her attention to detail and her ability to channel voice. Sally is a whip-smart writer for a show that sounds like Saturday Night Live. We get a very detailed ringside view of what goes into making such a show.

But the premise of the novel is that Sally has a theory: mediocre looking men can get much better looking women, but the reverse isn’t true. This plays out quite close to home, as Sally’s office-mate Danny, he of the pungent burps, is dating a famous actress.

Noah Brewster is pop star, guest hosting the show, and Sally proposes a sketch based on her theory. Noah questions the idea, but also, ends up being attracted to Sally, thereby proving it untrue in practice.

So far so good, as the chemistry builds between Sally and Noah. Sally has been unlucky in love at least twice, and has now barricading herself against romance, especially romance as unlikely as between her and Noah. This is fine too.

Then, the novel takes a pandemic turn. The dread I feel when I read a pandemic novel is my cue to belatedly acknowledge how much the pandemic got to me even as my position has been that it wasn’t that bad, because we were safe.

So, yeah, I would love it if writers just skipped over the bizarreness of the past three years, but, nope, of course they won’t. Instead we get, in Sittenfeld’s case, an entire long distance section conducted over email. This too was actually fine.

It’s the latter section of the novel that didn’t do it for me. By then, Sally had reacted with uncharacteristic insecurity one to many times – and it’s never entirely clear to me why she’s so insecure, for such a smart person (though aren’t we all) – while Noah remains unbelievably zen, even though he calls her out, and she alludes to the fact that he’s clearly had therapy.

In romantic comedy (the genre), there’s tension or an obstacle that the protagonist, or both characters, have to overcome ideally by growing as people before they can get together. What Romantic Comedy lacked for me was a big enough obstacle. There seemed to be nothing keeping Sally and Noah apart, except for Sally, and somehow Sally’s constant sabotaging didn’t seem convincing for someone so smart and self aware, someone who writes comedy for a living for heaven’s sake. Admittedly, we all have our blind spots, and Sally’s inability to believe she could be genuinely attractive to a hottie is hers, but after the first “does he really love me”, it felt overdone.

The New York Times’ review said something about how the lesson here is that sometimes what’s getting in the way of us finding love is ourselves, and yeah maybe that was the point the novel was trying to make, but I wasn’t buying it of this character at least.

The Guardian has a more esoteric take on the novel being a remix of 1930s Hollywood, and if that is so, then it went way over my head. Sittenfeld herself says that it might be seen as a reverse of something like Notting Hill (the film, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant), and yeah, I do see the fun of that. Also, Sittenfeld is a straight-up SNL fangirl, and thus the setting, and the excellence of the first section set in the making of the show.

In some sense, I think the novel suffers from trying to be both a fly-on-the-wall of the making of television comedy, and a take on romantic comedy as a genre. It succeeds somewhat in merging these two propositions at the start, but then loses steam as it ventures deeper into romantic comedy per se.

Also, there is a really charming interaction between Sally and her beagle-obsessed stepfather, so charming that I was incensed when Sally failed to reply to one of his missives because she was so caught up in her own (frankly dubious) drama. There could have been more of this.

Look, the novel is fine as a romantic comedy. It’s well written. It falters in not having enough dramatic tension at the end. But the writing saves it somewhat.

But if it was trying to say something new about romantic comedy, the genre, to offer a retake, a critique, to write “to write non-condescending, ragingly feminist screenplays for romantic comedies”, as Sally says she wants to do, then I feel that it doesn’t quite get there.