• Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Does this look like chick lit to you?

The war between Jennifer Weiner and Jonathan Franzen has been going on for nearly four and a half years, since the fall of 2010 when Franzen’s most recent novel, Freedom, was published, and hostilities show no sign of abating, largely because of Weiner’s immense capacity for taking offense and Franzen’s equally large capacity for giving it. (This is, remember, the man who became famous by asking Oprah if he had to take part in her book club.)

The interview prompted a spirited discussion on Jezebel, where commenters mostly agreed that Franzen is a dick, but debated the quality of Weiner’s novels and where to draw the line between “chick lit” and “literary fiction written by women” and if there should even be a distinction between the two, since there is none for books written by men, or at least no comparable term for “chick lit.”

On the literary side, it’s a collection of short stories, a form that is “literary” by default since story collections don’t sell very well anymore. Many of said stories had first appeared not just in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, but also Ploughshares and several other small literary magazines with high prestige and low circulation. Heiny has an MFA. There’s a degree of moral complexity in that many of the characters are participants in adulterous affairs, and nobody feels too bad about it or even gets punished.

  • Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Heiny

Heiny has enough imagination and skill that even though her characters end up in places that might, in retrospect, seem obvious, they get there honestly, motivated by their own interior logic instead of the author manipulating them to serve the needs of the story. That may, in fact, be one of the major distinguishing factors, between “literary” writing and a “commercial” writing, along with the fact that literary books tend to be tragedies while commercial ones tend toward comedy. All writing is artificial, of course, but writers who are considered literary are better at hiding the artifice, or at getting the reader to suspend her disbelief for a while.