Chick Lit vs. Dude Lit

The Daily Beast has a piece examining dude lit vs. chick lit in the wake of Jonathan Franzen's new novel and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love book that's been turned into a Julia Roberts film.

From the piece...

There are, I understand, books that deserve to be called "Chick Lit:—ones in which finding the right Hermès purse counts as a serious plot line, and hair colorists figure in as major characters, developing from chunky highlights to subtle weaves. I don't know: I'm too busy reading Jennifer Egan, Hilary Thayer Hamann, Vendela Vida, and Mary Karr. But I suspect some reviewers take one look at the pretty cover of a female author’s book, with suspicious praise from Oprah and a few other women’s magazines, and dismiss it as the same kind of fluff. (I know, and I’m cranky about it, because it happened to my memoir, All Over the Map).

Suppose reviewers were as quick to dismiss serious men’s books that take readers on an emotional trajectory—I’m not talking Mr. Commitment (Mike Gayle’s 1999 novel) here—as they are women’s books. There are as many guys’ books that explore the nature of being a guy in the early 21st century as there are women’s books about trying to figure it all out in these confusing times. What if they called the male species “Dude Lit”? (There is another term for the genre with a more felicitous rhyme, but we chicks don’t like to use the word “dick.”)

In Chick Lit, women obsess over designers and shoes. In Dude Lit, men never change their clothes. They may not even dress; we’re not sure.

As a genre, Dude Lit books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior. Nick Hornby is perhaps the prince of Dude Lit, along with Martin Amis, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Ford, David Carr, and sometimes Michael Chabon (Dave Eggers’ touching Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius gets a mention as honorary Chick Lit).

Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Saul Bellow are in a category of their own: Prick Lit. What separates Prick Lit from Dude Lit is that the Dude Lit writers may have once, perhaps in college, said something positive about feminism, if only to get laid.

Don’t get me wrong—some of these guys are among my favorite authors, even if a few of them tend to hit the same notes in almost every book. But as a genre, Dude Lit has as many reliable attributes as Chick Lit, with some rather stark differences.