These women have no room for fluff

ITS title alone makes “This Is Not Chick Lit” a declaration against those tales that are the stepchildren of romance novels and cousins to fashion magazines. “Chick lit shuts down our consciousness. Literature expands our imagination,” editor Elizabeth Merrick writes in her introduction to this brazen and thoughtful anthology of fiction by piquant women writers who refuse to follow the much-copied recipe. It’s not so much that Merrick objects to the reading of these cotton-candy tales, which she defines as “white girl in the big city searches for Prince Charming, all the while shopping, alternately cheating or adhering to her diet, dodging her boss, and enjoying the occasional teary-eyed lunch with her token Sassy Gay Friend”. Rather, she resents the attention they take away from more ambitious writing. The deluge of these homogenized narratives, she writes, “has helped to obscure the literary fiction being written by some of our country’s most gifted women -- many of whom you’ve never even heard of.”

Although that statement may be both accurate and laudable, it’s also a little like arguing that reality TV obscures the great programming on PBS. True, but that’s probably beside the point.

There are, of course, times in every reader’s life when a little escape is what’s called for. But those who are interested in what literature (with a capital L) says about the human condition will continue to seek out books that meet a higher criterion. For them, Merrick’s anti-fluff anthology is an excellent introduction to the work of 18 contemporary women writers who may not be household names but whose work is compelling, deep, intriguing and, more often than not, downright disturbing.

In “Selling the General,” for example, author Jennifer Egan’s protagonist Dolly is a disgraced public relations diva whose career failures have brought her to the point where she seriously considers taking on a genocidal dictator as a client. The general “wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy, an end to the CIA’s assassination attempts. If Qaddafi could do it, why not he?”

Financially ruined, her reputation in tatters, Dolly is as desperate as the general is for an overhaul. She works to rehabilitate his public persona, first by having him be seen in a fuzzy blue hat, next by posing him with a celebrity model. When newspaper headlines report a few weeks later that the public believes the general’s war crimes may have been exaggerated, Dolly sees her handiwork. “How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?” With subtle barbs, Egan prods readers to see how our opinions are shaped by such prosaic impressions and to acknowledge the way desperation sculpts a person.

In “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” Curtis Sittenfeld asks us to consider the disposition of her narrator Frances, who volunteers Monday nights at a homeless shelter, playing with the children so that their destitute mothers can have a break. Frances seems the ideal volunteer -- young, eager and fantastic with the children. That is, until a new volunteer, Elsa, joins the ranks and Frances takes an instant and passionate dislike to her. In the way these two women chafe each other, readers get alarming glimpses of Frances’ true personality. We are all damaged goods in one way or another, Sittenfeld seems to suggest. It’s just that some of us are better at hiding it than others.

Cristina Henriquez’s moving story, “Gabriella, My Heart,” features a young man in love with a high school beauty. So haunted is he by his love for Gabriella that he fails to recognize his true sexual orientation until he believes he’s lost the one and only woman he’ll ever love.

Other selections include “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Two Days” by Aimee Bender, “The Matthew Effect” by Binnie Kirshenbaum, “The Seventy-two-Ounce Steak Challenge” by Dika Lam and “An Open Letter to Doctor X” by Francine Prose.

What these stories -- indeed, what all great literature has in common -- is a refusal to follow a simple formula, chick lit or otherwise. These are stories that make us grapple with the complexities of life and love and the ways we abrade each other, reminding us that the human experience is much bigger and messier than what is typically found in formulaic writing. These tales ask us to take a break from the cream-puff narratives we may have been splurging on and to remember how good it feels to read something nourishing and substantive, to once again engage in stories that feed the soul.

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Bernadette Murphy is co-author of “The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate.”