The Bride Hunter is officially out, a debutante all dressed up in pink, ready to have her card marked or to sit on the sidelines like a wallflower. I'm hoping it'll be the former, of course.
On Friday night, I went to Wahaca, a Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden, to celebrate with margaritas and tostadas. We also found the book in Waterstone's and Border's. The novel looked very pretty on the tables, though perhaps not as bright as I was expecting: my friends were delighted with how it looked. It's possible that I was somehow hoping it would flash on-and-off with neon unmissability, subliminally screaming, BUY ME, BUY ME to everyone in the store, from retired colonels seeking angling manuals, to small girls looking for Jordan's pony care book. Perhaps that was a tad unrealistic.
It also gave me a chance to check out the competition. I bought one of the books, Vintage, by Olivia Darling, and have been reading it while watching the Easter snow this weekend. There was a piece about the new bonkbusters in The Times this weekend and I've already read books by two of the other featured writers, Lesley Lokko and Tilly Bagshawe, because they're both published by Orion, like me.
I really enjoyed their novels (though I haven't read their latest books so maybe I am not comparing like with like) but so far, and with only the last 50 pages to go, Vintage is the most fun. It's very fast-paced, and the three main women characters - all competing to produce the best champagne-style wine - are sympathetic yet enjoyably flawed. I really don't know which is going to win and, bizarrely, I am rooting for them all. A very neat trick by the author. There's sex, of course - otherwise it just wouldn't be a BONKbuster - but the sex isn't as much of a draw as the story. When the blockbuster novel first hit the shelves, the explicit sex felt like a novelty: I remember reading Lace etc and my eyes popping out of my sockets (I had less experience with men than with goldfish and the thought that you could combine the two was very bizarre). Now we live in a time when a couple of clicks can bring the perviest of behaviour to your own computer screen, so I am not sure that the sex is so important any more in these kinds of books. It has to be there, of course, but personally I think the 21st century bonkbuster is distinguished more by jetset locations, big egos and bigger ambitions. It's a fun change, though I'm not sure I'd want to read lots of them, back to back.
It's made me think about my book, and the way we define different genres. As well as bonkbusters, there are all the 'lit' sub-genres: chick lit, of course, plus bloke or lad (or 'dick' lit), mum lit (where the heroines are getting to grips with nappies), hen lit (for the slightly older chick), and, most recently, chick noir (where the heroines are bitchy and sharp). Chick lit, the Times suggests, is full of angst and obsessing about weight and men, and presumably the mum/hen varieties are similarly burdened by neurosis about nappy contents or HRT. I think that's a caricatured version of chick lit, but it's certainly true that the emotional side is given more attention in chick lit than in the bonkbuster.
The former are also frequently written in the first person, which makes them more intimate and more likely to dwell on doubts and fears. Bonkbusters tend to be written in the third, which keeps the reader more at arm's length. If an author is writing in the first person, I think it's more important that the reader empathises at least to some extent with the narrator, otherwise it's a very long journey, to go through an entire book that way. In the third, the action tends to switch between characters so that empathy is less critical. It's also easier to keep secrets from the reader in the third: if you hold back something from the reader while writing in the first, the reader may feel very cheated if the denouement depends on something that s/he hasn't been told. In the first, it's more likely that the narrator discovers things about herself, or her past, at the same time as the reader: either emotional truths or secrets others have been keeping.
What both must have in common, though, is a compelling story: whether it's a fight to prove yourself in a man's world, or a journey to discover who you really are.
The Bride Hunter is firmly in the chick lit category though I hope the match-making/head-hunting element makes it original. Also Becca is no Bridget Jones. She's not one to worry about her stomach or booze consumption or about whether a man fancies her. If anything, she'd prefer it if they didn't. But I'm not ashamed of the fact that I want readers to like her, even if they find her a bit infuriating at times, as she gets lost trying to help her clients navigate the path towards true love...
So - which genres do you like? And are there any you just won't consider reading?
