Finding Myself
Toby Litt Hamish Hamilton, 432pp, £12.99
ISBN 0241141559
The way some bookish types talk, you'd think chick lit was some sort of Japanese knotweed of the novel world, choking the literary landscape and preventing choicer, rarer specimens from flowering. So it's good news for us commercial women's fiction writers that we are about to be rescued from the outer darkness and made respectable. A real-life Best of Young British Novelist, Toby Litt, has taken it upon himself to write Finding Myself, which his press release describes as an "achingly funny pastiche of the chick-lit genre". I should explain that "achingly funny" is an oft-used description in the blurbs accompanying commercial women's fiction, so the press release is an achingly funny pastiche in itself, as well as the first recorded instance of a press office being ironic. Even more ironically, Tobe's publisher, Hamish Hamilton, is owned by Penguin, which itself makes a tidy profit out of chick-litters such as Marian Keyes and Jane Green. Go figure, as they say.
It would be uncharitable to suggest that Finding Myself is an attempt by a so-called "serious" novelist to hitch a ride on a successful bandwagon without sacrificing his intellectual credibility, so I won't. Instead, I'll say that Finding Myself is an entirely new type of novel, neither chick lit nor Brit lit but something in the middle. It concerns the ironic adventures of an ironic chick-lit novelist, Victoria About, who pays for all her friends to spend a month with her in a house in Southwold with the intention of writing the results into a book. It's a clever idea - part The Big Chill, part Big Brother and with lots of To the Lighthouse references thrown in to keep those brainy types happy. And it's well executed: there are many funny bits and the idea of Victoria's editor being one of the housemates and editing the text afterwards adds an extra layer of interest to this already multi-layered operation. All this irony is a bit overwhelming - is there any point at which the reader can relax and enjoy the story without feeling like a no-brain? (Presumably the dedication to the parents is genuine. Or is it?)
I'm told - by a chick-lit author, funnily enough - that Toby Litt is a top bloke and so I don't want him to take all this personally. He won't anyway, I'm sure, because elsewhere in his press release there's a quote from the Big Issue describing him as "the last great white hope of English hard-boiled fiction", which makes him sound a resilient sort of chap (especially the hard-boiled bit). I've also reviewed his books before and have been impressed with his writing, his flowing, precise sentences, his perception and imagination. He is, without doubt, a very gifted writer. It's just that his novel seemed to me to be neither fish nor fowl. Or chick, come to that.
Wendy Holden's latest novel, Azur Like It, is published by Headline in August
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