Summer reads

Chick chat: From a black-humored romantic romp to the tale of a single woman flirting her way around the world, these novels make perfect beach companions.

By Salon staff

Read more: Fiction, Books, Sex, Sex and the City, Novels, Joy Press, Books Features, Louis Bayard, Rebecca Traister, Summer Reads, Sarah Hepola

June 2, 2008 | Salon's staff is recommending summer books you can really sink your teeth into. Last week we featured killer thrillers. In this second installment, we spotlight four novels that loosely fall under the category of chick lit. They range from a black-humored romp about a spurned MBA student seeking romantic revenge to the saga of New England belles living it up in a gothic manse on the Maine coast to a single city girl who sets off on a round-the-world adventure to a funny mother-daughter duo in need of some serious bonding -- and a good bat mitzvah dress.

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"This Is How It Happened (Not a Love Story)" by Jo Barrett

"The problem," confides Madeline, the heroine of Jo Barrett's "This Is How It Happened," "was he was beautiful."

"He" being Carlton Connors, a diabolically attractive Texan who worms his way into Maddy's bed and heart. He's got a perfect body, a Michelangelo face, eyes of "buttered almond," a dimple in the chin … "and when he smiled at me -- that sexy sideways smile -- my thoughts dropped away and everything I was became available to him. He's one of those men I would've jumped in front of a Greyhound bus for."

Sadly for Maddy, Carlton is the bus. Before she knows it, she's doing his MBA classwork for him. ("You're so great with marketing, Maddy.") Then she's handing him her business idea -- Organics 4 Kids -- and letting him install himself as CEO. And then she's howling as he kicks her to the curb.

Oh, we're just getting started on the evil that is Carlton. He sleeps around. He cooks the company's books. He insists on unprotected sex but doesn't tell Maddy he has herpes. He gives her an engagement ring ("Forever, my Juliet") but makes her take it off around his father. He breaks up with her by e-mail. He steals her office furniture and junks her portfolio.

A woman might consider herself lucky to be rid of such a shithead, but Maddy is in no way free. When a friend asks if she's still hung up on Carlton, she answers reasonably: "I'm not hung up. I'm obsessed."

The only thing that keeps her going now is the thought of retribution. She flirts with sending Carlton poisoned brownies -- and only kills a local raccoon. She experiments with carbon monoxide poisoning -- and nearly asphyxiates herself. Finally, using the connections of her ex-con brother, she engages a hit man. Not to inflict bodily harm but to carry out a subtler course of revenge that will pierce her ex down to his black soul.

This comeuppance, it must be said, loses some of its luster because we never actually see it happen, and Barrett has further denatured her wronged-woman fantasy with a rather dim subplot about a shiksa converting to Judaism. And, OK, since I've slapped on my critic's hat, I'll concede that "This Is How It Happened" has some common chick-lit drawbacks: wavering tone, narrative slackness, a counter-feminist insistence on giving every pot its lid.

But Jo Barrett has fulfilled the basic requirements of the author-reader contract. Which is to say you'll want Maddy to get her mojo back, you'll dearly want Carlton to get stuffed, and you'll have a surprisingly relaxed time watching it happen. If Barrett hasn't squeezed her premise for its full black-comedy potential, her milder approach allows her to get at equally dark veins of feeling -- specifically, the ways in which independent women cede their sovereignty to men.

This isn't exactly a new subject, but the details still pack a punch. When Carlton flinches at the prospect of buying tampons for her, Maddy immediately sets about concealing "the cold, grim facts of my womanhood ... I wrapped my used tampons in enough toilet paper to embalm a mummy. I threw them in the outside garbage, so he'd never see them in the bathroom trash bin." She hand-washes her stained panties (but doesn't hang them in the bathroom to dry), and the rest of the time, she's shaving and plucking like a maniac and wearing makeup on Saturday mornings and getting a bikini wax every other week. On and on it goes, a litany of biological self-denial, to which a stupefied male reader can only respond: We are so not worth it. -- Louis Bayard

Next page: I lost my heart to Anne Rivers Siddons!