Summer reads

Chic lit: From a saga of 17th century maidens to a 21st century mom flirting with disaster, our novel recommendations will make you feel cheap and sexy in the best possible way.

Editor's note: This is the second of a four-part weekly series of summer reading recommendations.

By Salon staff

Read more: Books, Novels, Books Features

June 11, 2007 | Throughout June, Salon's staff is recommending summer books that won't make you feel cheap and empty. (Or maybe they will, in the best possible way.) Last week we featured killer thrillers.

In this second of four installments, we spotlight five novels we've dubbed "chic lit." They range from a lighthearted romp through the life of a novelist turned obsessive fan, to a dramatic historical novel about 17th century Chinese maidens chafing against their limitations, to a comedy about a bumbling mommy flirting with adultery, to close encounters between New York dog lovers, to a sexy British melodrama featuring an abandoned baby and three now-successful women who may be the mother.

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"Little Stalker"
By Jennifer Belle
Riverhead, $24.95

Jennifer Belle, the quirky, funny, JAP-tastic writer who brought you the hooker-pays-her-way-through-college classic "Going Down," and the paean to real estate lust "High Maintenance, is back this summer with "Little Stalker." It's the story of a 33-year-old one-hit-wonder novelist who's working as a receptionist at her father's medical office, stealing money from him, discovering secrets about her family's dark past, befriending the elderly, dementia-stricken Mrs. Williams, falling in love with a paparazzo while dodging a sociopathic gossip columnist, and spying on her celebrity obsession, neurotic, nebbishy, scandalously kinky New York film director "Arthur Weeman." Ahem.

"Little Stalker" hops and shimmies with perhaps an excess of twisty plot: Secret relatives? Check. Barely repressed pubescent sexual trauma? Check. Nasty relationship with a distant, deceptive father? Check. Unraveling mysteries about the sexual proclivities of that famous director? Check. A brain tumor? You got it.

All this energy makes Belle's third effort, like her underattended-to previous novels, compulsively readable. And the joyous mix of New York eccentricity, sexuality and loneliness make it a precise and surprisingly stirring tale of a woman trying to broker a peace between her badly damaged 13-year-old self and her self-absorbed armor-coated adult identity.

Like Belle's other books, "Little Stalker" studiously shies away from the saccharine. Rebekah is dry, wry, overlived and underloved; she gets her daily doses of affection from Pa, as played by Michael Landon on "Little House on the Prairie" reruns, and throws up on a man to whom she's administering a blow job (blame her blocked throat chakra).

The speed of the narrative seems to have translated to the editing process, which feels distractingly sloppy in the hardcover edition I read. At one point, while considering her shifting cinematic sympathies for characters in Arthur Weeman films, Belle writes, "It was Diane Keaton who kept me spellbound, while Mariel Hemingway left me cold." Hey, wait! Aren't we, or the libel lawyers at the Penguin Group, supposed to believe that Arthur Weeman, with his stutter, egg-shaped glasses and taste for Elaine's, is a figment of Belle's cinematic fantasy world? At another Freudian moment, Belle writes about an exchange with her editor, who is pooh-poohing Rebekah's proposed novel about a pedophilic septuagenarian movie director and instead pushing her toward chick lit. "I promise you a lighthearted romp through New York," Rebekah tells her. "'Oh. Well, then, this is wonderful news,' Evan said, cumming around." It reads like a moment of typographical rebellion, recalling Belle's earlier, smuttier subject matter.

And yet, Belle does provide a lightish-hearted romp through New York, making us laugh at the sadness of Upper East Side dowager Mrs. Williams, who like her younger friend gets her emotional sustenance from television, frequently asserting that she, Blanche Rose, and Dorothy are going to dine on the lanai. "Little Stalker" is an affecting meditation on the connections we make -- with others and with ourselves -- as we age, from a writer whose work is maturing quite beautifully.

-- Rebecca Traister

Next page: Lovesick girls in 17th century China wrestling for control of their destinies