The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction

The Cambridge Introduction

to Modern British Fiction,

1950–2000

By Dominic Head

[…] Literary history enjoins us to appreciate innovation as a gradual process; it also exposes the false clams of literary fashion. A casa in point is the rise, in the 1990s, of so-called 'Lad Lit' and 'Chick Lit' novels that concern themselves with the tribulations of urban twenty- and thirty-something faced with changing heterosexual mores and the pursuit of a desired lifestyle. This is a prime example of a phenomenon that reveals its significance in an evolving paradigm of novelistic change, but that surrenders its import once refashioned ads a new vogue. Nick Hornby might be hailed as the originator of 'Lad Lit', whilst its counterpart might be said to originate with Helen Fielding. This has certainly been view of broadsheet articles on the phenomenon, of which the following is representative: 'The Chick-Lit novel (twenty-something-girl-shares-flat-has-crap-job-and-life-full-of-petty-annoyances-which-can-only be-alleviated-by-finding-the-right-guy) is a relatively new genre, dating no further back than Bridget Jones.' It is worth remembering, lest critical amnesia might be said to replicate the self-congratulatory narrowness of these genres, that this kind of genre fiction has actually been a more enduring feature of the post-war literary scene. In 1970 Bernard Bergonzi lamented the repetitive types into which new fiction frequently fell, one of which he summarized in this manner: 'Fey, mixed-up Joanna, in Earl's Court bedsitter, has trouble with boy - and girl - friends.' Another recognizable type comprised the 'lightly written tale of nice young adman with scruples. He overcomes them, sleeps with the boss's wife, but marries the girl from back home.' These types, emphasizing the sexual and professional anxieties of the urban young, anticipate 'Lad' and 'Chick Lit' very closely.

The crucial difference is that, for Bergonzi, the repetitiveness found in contemporary fiction a generation ago was 'unconsciously generic', partly on account of 'the narrowness of the experience which the authors can put into it', but also because of the formulaic nature of the modern novel, which these writers had internalised. By contrast, 'Lad' and 'Chick Lit' is consciously generic, and aggressively marketed on this basis. The formulae dictated by the generic type might appear to enforce a disastrous delimitation: yet the principal novels of Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding reveal something more interesting about the social function of the novel than the generic straitjacket was soon to allow. With the false claims of newness put in perspective, both writes can be seen to have afforded a revealing insight into the social moment.

Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) is based on a column written for The Independent, so it might be seem inappropriate to project the criteria for a serious novel on a book that started life as a series of humorous newspaper sketches. The finished novel, however, is well-crafted, taking Austen's Pride and Prejudice as its ironic blueprint. Moreover, Bridget Jones's Diary has proved hugely influential in the resurgence of lifestyle fiction, and precisely because it is felt to have accurately recorded the zeitgeist of the 1990s. As the TLS reviewer put it, the book 'rings with the unmistakable tone of something that is true to the marrow; it defines what it describes. I know for certain that if I were young, single, urban woman, I would finish this book crying, “Bridget Jones c'est moi.”'

Bridget Jones, a thirty-something with a junior post in publishing, embodies the anxieties of the single woman in a society that makes her feel the desperate urgency of finding Mr Right; or as Bridget's new year resolution puts it, the need to 'form functional relationship with adult' (p. 3). Her diary entries begin with a ready reckoning of, for instance, how many calories, cigarettes, and alcohol units she has consumed, the occasional self-congratulation for abstemiousness punctured by the cumulative impression that personal desire and the need for solace run counter to faddish restraints. Insofar as Fielding's humour deflates Bridget's idealized self-images, the vanity and self-regard of this social world becomes a focus of satire, as when Bridget reflects that a close friend could have been suicidal, unbeknown to friends, who are 'all so selfish and busy in London' (p. 261).

The structure of the book, meanwhile, colludes with Bridget's romantic projection, tracing her misguided affair with her sexually incontinent boss, an 'emotional fuckwit' in the parlance of Bridget's circle of female friends, through to the satisfactory romantic conclusion of her sexual union with the high-profile barrister Mark Darcy. Bridget's response to this Darcy, who is explicitly compared with Austen's (p. 244), mimes the slowly dawning awareness of Elizabeth Bennet: Bridget, too, must overcome a misperception of her Darcy's haughtiness, to allow her love, rooted in admiration for his dynamic masculine moral rectitude, to flourish. The parallel is ironic, of course, though it does supply Fielding's narrative structure.

In a retrospective review of Bridget Jones's Diary Zoe Heller places the novel in a new tradition of confessional feminine first-person narrative (or FFPN) in which the aim 'to replicate the easy, jokey, demotic tone of girl talk', involves a 'candid admission of female silliness and vanity'. Hellen sees this as an aspect of 1990s post-feminism, the 'subversion of the expectations created by all those Virago paperbacks'. Bergonzi's identification of the earlier generic type – 'fey, mixed-up Joanna, in Earl's Court bedsitter' – shows that the situation of a Bridget Jones has a longer provenance. The shift towards the confessional style is also part of a more gradual change. Yet the new emphasis of FFPN explicitly challenges the 'feminists postures' of the intervening period (that is, since 1970), which are characterized by 'self-sufficiency and sisterhood'. FFPN is thus reinvigorating in Heller's account, offering 'resoundingly incorrect' elements of female experience (such as the desire 'to be sexually objectified'), making women's writing 'surprising again' before hardening into a 'new literary orthodoxy'. This is well observed, and it may be Fielding's novel alone that will emerge as the significant example of this fleeting moment of genuine post-feminine surprise.

In many ways Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995), set in north London, is the masculine precursor to Fielding's portrait of female insecurity in the 1990s. Hornby's first book, the confessional memoir Fever Pitch (1992), introduced the kind of soft-hearted, but honest analysis of the confused male identity that Hornby develops in High Fidelity, his first novel. As with the treatment of Bridget Jones, the gender-specific foibles and shortcomings of Rob Fleming, the confessional narrator, are exposed in such a way as to insist on the ordinariness of his plight. This is the essence of the broad appeal of both works: each one relies on the comedy of recognition in its depiction of social and (especially) sexual inadequacy in a 'smart' singles culture where weakness is deemed to be unappealing. Both Bridget Jones and Rob Fleming resist the lifestyle that superficially circumscribes them, and both seek solace in the comforts of popular culture, as significant protagonists in post-war fiction, from Jim Dixon onwards, invariably have. And where the quest of Bridget Jones is for that 'functional relationship with responsible adult'. Rob Fleming's tacit goal is to become 'a fully-functioning human being' (p. 153).

It is in the structure of the personal quest, however, that High Fidelity reveals greater pretensions to seriousness than are found in Bridget Jones's Diary. In delivering an idealized romantic conclusion, albeit with an element of irony, Fielding's book effectively refashions its heroine as the deserving recipient of the modern-day Darcy's attentions: the comic structure undermines the critical self-analysis. Ron Fleming, however, goes through a more protracted process of self-evaluation that forces him to confront the source of his emotional immaturity. In this sense the novel is one of moral growth in which the protagonist begins to realize hid potential 'as a human being' (p. 210), by finding a new language, and a new way of relating to women.'

As the owner of a small record shop, Fleming has retained the musical snobbishness of the teenage male, together with a simplistic way of classifying experience. Rob's partner Laura has left him at the beginning of the book, and the narrative focus is on the terms of their eventual reunion, after Rob's misguided 'what-does-it-all-mean' (p. 161) attempt to make contact with the women listed in his 'top five most memorable split-ups' (p. 9), and his brief affair with an American folk/country singer-songwriter. Hornby brazenly uses the psychoanalytic 'truism' that it is a fear of mortality that makes men resist monogamy and domestic stability, but pushes this further to suggest that a direct confrontation with death might also have the reverse effect. The death of Laura's father is the deus ex machina that brings them back together, and that eventually elicits from him a fumbling, unromantic proposal, which is appreciated, but not accepted (pp. 249-50).

The relationship had started with Rob making a compilation tape for Laura of his favourite music; it ends with his epiphanic realization that it would be better to compile a tape that's 'full of stuff she's heard of, and full of stuff she'd play' (p. 253). This represents a surprisingly moving conclusion, because it condenses the sense of ordinary, masculine impercipience that pervades the novel. It is a simple enough recognition of the need to privilege the needs of another, but one that profoundly contests the surrounding lifestyle culture. Both High Fidelity and Bridget Jones's Diary advance the democratisation of narrative fiction – one of the keynote developments in the post-war novel – in which the distinction between high- and low-brow expression is satisfactorily blurred. It is ironic that works that exhibit a degree of contempt for the cult of materialistic self-definition should have spawned the generic lifestyle fiction of their 'Lad' and 'Chick Lit' imitators.