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.