Chick Lit Goes To War

If the year's most insane literary experiment fails, have the terrorists won?

Tim Cavanaugh | November 18, 2004

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Then again, mighty Clancy himself was caught pretty much flat-footed by September 11. If Fielding is insufficiently interested in the sterile business of force and destruction, Clancy is inspired by little else: In Clancy's "Jack Ryan" universe, the United States has already been devastated by nuclear terrorism, an Ebola attack, a 9/11-type attack on the White House, and other horrors. Clancy's apocalyptic, great-powers sensibility is wildly out of tune in the fight against a cave-dwelling, omnicidal media whore and his legion of admirers. If you really want to see fans tearing into a former favorite, dig the customer comments on Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy's first post-9/11 effort.

One of the more insidious effects of 9/11 was the way it made everything else seem slightly shameful and ridiculous. This was especially apparent in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when Irony lay dying and The Onion sagely announced: "A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Shit Again." Clearly the nation has by now renewed its love of Stupid Shit (while stubbornly resisting my colleague Chuck Freund's thesis that Stupid Shit is America's most devastating weapon) but in a self-conscious, bipolar manner. The hemisphere of policy is a place of relentless tragedy; the hemisphere of culture and communication stays sane by walling off the other hemisphere.

All this makes Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination a fascinating experiment. It takes a genre defined wholly by its starstruck, media-engorged frothiness and applies it to the most dreadful and serious (though also media-engorged) business of our time. Not all the book's articulations work, but enough of them do, and the attempt itself is so audacious, that I think the critics are not only wrong but clueless. Michiko Kakutani uses a weasel construction by only referring to the Bond movies, but even so she's peddling straight-up bullshit: James Bond's SMERSH opponents were clearly defined Soviets, servants of an enemy whose chief products were heavy industrial planning, falsified crop reports, and mass murder. That didn't prevent Bond from traveling to every exotic spot in the world to dispatch them in ever more ridiculous ways. If the deadly seriousness of Tojo had stopped Abbot and Costello from joining the army, we'd probably still be fighting on Guadalcanal right now. I too questioned the appropriateness of having Olivia Joules escape from a situation that in the real world would have ended with her being beheaded after delivering a tearful, videotaped plea for her life; but I was glad (though unsurprised) that she got away.

This being Fielding the postmodern genius, in fact, the real world does intrude in its way. If I haven't already whetted your appetite, let me just note that the book's beautiful and absurd climax involves a terrorist plot on a little gold man by the name of Oscar® and offers ironic cameos for Brad Pitt, Tim Burton, and a fat producer whom Fielding, for reasons of her own, declines to identify as Harvey Weinstein. Clearly, this is the year for blowing up celebrities. (Movie adapters be advised, though. Much of the book's action takes place during tropical ocean dives, and as A.S. Hamrah warned, there is no acting underwater.)

Along the way, there's a riff on CNN's riddle-me-ree phraseology and its equal applicability to horror and banality: "He's tall, he's bad and he hid in a hole—Saddam Hussein! It's Wet, it's see-through, but without it we'd die: waterrrrr! They're small, they're green, they're widely available, but they're about to poison the world: castor beans!" And (Olivia being a good liberal) this shrewd description of President Bush addressing the nation: "He paused with that odd look in his eye, which struck Olivia as that of a nervous stand-up pausing for a laugh."

So I say, soldier on, Helen Fielding, fix the handful of technical problems that prevented readers from appreciating your new series, and get cracking on the sequel. I suspect that you won't, that you will rack up your spy thriller as a lone miscarriage, maybe even a learning experience. But in some alternate universe, Overactive Imagination is just the caesarian birth of a popular series, and just as Jack Kennedy once based an entire presidency on the works of Ian Fleming, President Clinton will one day make Olivia Joules the model for her own hard-nosed White House.