The Way Men Act

I don't read so-called "chick lit". The name of the genre is in itself insulting to me. It seems to say: "this book is so sappy, so full of unrealistic romantic crap and so devoid of substance that only women - or, to be more accurate, 'chicks' - could buy into it." I just hate this picture in my head of otherwise intelligent women across the world...more

I don't read so-called "chick lit". The name of the genre is in itself insulting to me. It seems to say: "this book is so sappy, so full of unrealistic romantic crap and so devoid of substance that only women - or, to be more accurate, 'chicks' - could buy into it." I just hate this picture in my head of otherwise intelligent women across the world sitting in beds, on benches, or on buses reading fluff after fluff after fluff - like they're not capable of reading anything more challenging than a romance, and if it doesn't have a happy-ending they will stay far away from it. That's the snobbish me, the one who wrote that scathing review of Twilight a month ago. Then, on the other hand, I've been also known to watch Grey's Anatomy sometimes - and I figured surely even the worst chick lit cannot compete in awfulness with this season of GA. So I decided to give it a try. I picked "The Way Men Act" because the blurbs made Lipman out to be something more than just a Danielle Steel or another Stephenie Meyer. They said things like "The confidence of Elinor Lipman's writing, her humour and her brilliant ear for dialogue put her in a different league." or "Part of the joy of this wise and charming novel is in the writing. The rest is in the thinking - smart, offbeat, funny." or even "Like a particularly good episode of Friends crossed with the ER, but the elegance of her prose and her wisdom concerning the human heart elevate it to serious literature." It turns out, the blurbs were not that far away from the truth. Certainly this was a book made of real people: people that you've met at some point in your life, that you will easily recognize and, not least, that you will be glad to see ridiculed. A book where conversations sound natural, words of advice ring true, monologues are insightful and often funny - delivered though they are by a somewhat-annoying protagonist. (Melinda: something of a loser and your typical "cheerleader" type who is very popular but insecure deep down. Though she is sure she can sleep with anyone in town she never even suspects that the man she loves has feelings for her blah blah blah we've heard it all before) Yes, the ending is predictable and I probably won't even remember reading this book two years from now but, hey, I finished it in two sittings and I got some good one-liners out of it. That has to count for something, right? Quote: "I had this boyfriend, Seth, for four years in California. He supposedly loved me, and his friends thought I was a breath of fresh air, which is what the graduate-level educated (cell biology, U.C. San Diego) say about the high-school educated if the latter is pretty and the former wish they were sleeping with her, too."   hide