Pills & Pucci: Those Sex & Shopping Novels!

[chiqui]

I luuurrved Jackie Collins' Rock Star. Its so tacky, cliche-ridden, overmelodramatic, and totally readable. It was so much fun trying to guess who all the characters were based on. There's Kris Phoenix, lead singer of a rock band that's a mashup of the Beatles and the Stones; another singer is meant to be Mariah Carey with an Ethiopean opera singer father, and there's a villanous Ahmet Ertegun character with a secretly black (she bleaches her skin) wife. There's suicides, intrigue, wife beating, appearances by royalty, miraculously cured blindness, and terrorists at the big concert at the end! Totally cheesy fun.

In a similar vein music author Lisa Robinson wrote Walk on Glass that tried to be a trashy novel about a female singer/songwriter's rise to fame, but took it too seriously so it wasn't as much fun.

[Daisy Pusher]

Jun 9, 2009 12:06:07 GMT -4 Peggy Lane said:

We haven't even mentioned the book some call the first chick lit novel..."The Best of Everything." Rona Jaffe. Women in gloves. Men in Brooks Brothers. Abortions. Divorces. It's all there, and it's all so good. It makes you want to go live in Manhattan in 1957.

I have never read this book, but I love the movie version. It's so awesomely overblown! And Suzy Parker was beautiful, but acting was not her strong point. Everytime she whines "David" at Louis Jourdan I want to bop her upside her lovely red head, but maybe that's the point.

[dwanollah]

Rock Star may be my favorite JC novel. Or...hm... maybe Lovers & Gamblers. Or Hollywood Wives. Or-

It's like choosing which of your four cats you love best, isn't it?

[huntergrayson]

They stink up your bookshelves like your cats stink up your house! .

The reason I wanted this to be just Susann is I'm unsure of how much the "shopping & fucking" genre would overlap with the "Chick-Lit Thread" - should we say nothing after 1990? Only the fine works of high trash?

Could someone please post that Salon article with the "rules" of the shopping & fucking novel? Then we'll have guidelines.

[dwanollah]

Contemporary chick lit is all shopping and no fucking. Where did our society go so terribly wrong in the last ten or fifteen years...?

[Daisy Pusher]

The original article is too long for me to post without facing the Wrath of Dwan, so here are some highlights and the rules...

The Shopping and Fucking canon includes anything by Susann, Danielle Steele or Sidney Sheldon. Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying," "Scruples" by Judith Krantz and "Blue Skies, No Candy" by New York magazine food writer Gael Greene are the genre's holy trinity. If you haven't read these masterpieces, then surely you've seen the miniseries or stumbled on a well-thumbed paperback at a summer house. Or maybe you're a heterosexual man.

For those who want to broaden their literary horizons, I've compiled the following requirement list for entry into the S&F pantheon. Feel free to print out the list on pink manuscript paper before making your next trip to the bookstore.

1) To cut the Shopping and Fucking mustard, there must be oodles of shopping, preferably at designer boutiques, preferably in Rome. Words like St. Laurent, Givenchy and Pucci should appear no less often than other personal pronouns like me, her or him.

2) Sex, and I don't mean one or two suggestive scenes marked by a well-worn crease in the spine, must occur in at least a one-to-one ratio to shopping. Page 193 (chosen at random) of "Scruples" yields the following: "She felt his hot tongue tracing her ass and the sensation was so maddeningly good that she pushed back against him and found herself rotating her pelvis without conscious design."

3) The book must be written by a woman, with the exception of Sidney Sheldon, who has a woman's name.

4) Women must be referred to as broads. Anyone referred to as a "woman" in a Shopping and Fucking novel is a feminist. Which means she is a lesbian. Heroines are never same-sex oriented, although plenty of them fantasize about going down on other broads.

5) Shopping and Fucking broads are always Super Beautiful! Super Talented! and Super Horny! And they always have one good, strong man who takes care of them, tolerating and/or encouraging their extramarital affairs:

"He let out a low whistle. 'Babe, you're built like a brick --' He stopped suddenly and smiled. 'Well ... let's say you're better than any top fashion model.'

"She laughed. 'That's why I adore this Pucci. It clings and makes me look --'

"'Fantastic.'"

This from a conversation between father and daughter Mike and January Wayne, the protagonists of "Once is Not Enough." In the next scene, Mike -- a famous producer -- encourages a studly Italian actor to fuck his daughter maddeningly.

6) The story reads the same whether you start at the beginning, middle or end. Which means that you can pick 'em up and put 'em down without conscious design, just like the broads do with their men -- and their credit cards.

7) The cover, featuring a gauzy shot of semi-clad female anatomy, must look like a soft-core Hallmark card. And, after one sweaty-palmed reading, it must fall off. Not only does this appropriately allude to the unveiling that happens within, it disguises the book for subway reading.

8) The sacred and the profane. These stories inevitably focus on celebrities -- world-famous actresses, designers, screenwriters and psychoanalysts. Yet they always maintain the flavor of small-town gossip, where the coveted piece of ass is thy neighbor's wife, who just happens to be an international superstar model.

9) There must be a cavalier attitude toward drugs. According to Silverberg, Susann and her rainbow-colored dolls led the way: "I think that Jackie opened the door to all of those people. She introduced middle-class drug addiction." By the time Gael Greene came along, her Upper West Side mavens were practically expected to sit around in caftans smoking a joint.

10) Not all Shopping and Fucking novels are novels. Plenty are written as self-help manuals or even as autobiographies, but that doesn't diminish their luster. In "Mayflower Madam," Sidney Biddle Barrows rhapsodizes about her favorite aspect of running a high-class escort service.

"I took her [Tara, a call girl] to Saks, where I helped her select a handsome business suit and a silk blouse. As I told the girls more than once, 'If you're walking through the lobby of the Pierre at midnight, you want to look as if you belong there.'"

(Biddle Barrows, of course, learned everything she needed to know about the escort business from the executive training course of Abraham and Strauss, the bygone New York superstore.)

Sorry for the length!

[notmquinn]

I'm surprised that Danielle Steel is listed. There's implied fucking. The dirtiest she would get is mentioning legs spreading or being entered.

[Peggy Lane]

I think that the Sex and Shopping novels tend to be larger in scope, aren't written in the first person, and the main female character is a grown up. Oh, she might be young, but she's either not childish or she grows up quickly. Also, the main love interest is a grown man.

Chick lit tends to be narrowly focused, is often written in the first person, the main character tends to be young, and often the main love interest is also young seeming.

Example: Anne Welles and Lyon Burke were young, but they weren't children with apartments.

Oh, and not only is the sex better, but usually the shopping is as well. And Danielle Steel is pretty guarded with her sex scenes, but makes up for it in her descriptions of clothes in settings. Or at least she did in her novels set in earlier time periods (Wanderlust, which made me want to take a cross country train trip topped off with dinner at 21).

ETA- Weirdly enough, I think the Gossip Girl series comes the closest to the old sex and shopping genre. Its a far closer match than any of the grown up chick lit books. I can see Blair and Serena as the literary granddaughters of Anne Welles and January Wayne.

[huntergrayson]

I've only read one GG book but bless you for making the GG connection.

On the feminist note, it's interesting that all of Susann's protagonists work. Or, more importantly, want to work. Both in OINE & VOTD, you have characters telling January & Anne that they're so beautiful that they can just instantly land a husband and then not do anything, but they want to attempt to have jobs and be independent.


On another note, Oh my god, I want to go to 21 so bad. I'm having major NYC envy since my friend is visiting and I'm reading OINE. And 21 is always, always mentioned in any NYC set S&F novel. It still exists, doesn't it? It just isn't the playground for the powerful & privileged as it used to be?

[HotLips]

Jun 9, 2009 12:23:45 GMT -4 Auroranorth said:

I am totally blaming you guys for the backache I'm going to get tonight hauling all this crap home from the library.

Seriously. I've got my library's online catalog open in another window so I'll know what to look for the next time I'm there. I live in a conservative town, so I wasn't expecting to find anything, but it looks like they've got a ton of Jackie Collins.

Jun 9, 2009 17:54:55 GMT -4 @dwanollah said:

Contemporary chick lit is all shopping and no fucking. Where did our society go so terribly wrong in the last ten or fifteen years...?

Everyone started buying vibrators?

"He let out a low whistle. 'Babe, you're built like a brick --' He stopped suddenly and smiled. 'Well ... let's say you're better than any top fashion model.'

"She laughed. 'That's why I adore this Pucci. It clings and makes me look --'

"'Fantastic.'"

This from a conversation between father and daughter Mike and January Wayne, the protagonists of "Once is Not Enough." In the next scene, Mike -- a famous producer -- encourages a studly Italian actor to fuck his daughter maddeningly.

It's Papa Joe and J Simp!