Boychik Lit is Hipper Fratire
the new term brother, or frat satire, was coined a year ago by the New York Times’ Warren St. John, presumably because his editors didn’t approve of another term that rhymes with “chick lit.”
But somehow, fratire doesn’t seem catchy enough. And that preoccupation with frat culture: is throwing up on your own shoes really that interesting?
What if – boychik bed instead? Derived from the Yiddish word for a young man who has more nerve than brains? Boychik lit may be a counterpoint, alternative, and parody of the hugely popular female-oriented genre of fiction. Furthermore, boychik lit challenges the widely held notion that today’s youth either don’t want to or can’t read, presumably because they’ve been conquered, co-opted, and brain-deprived by the video game industry and excessive abuse of themselves.
As for the general population, even if they aren’t rabid fans of children’s literature, the woman on the street and her pompadoured male companion will know something about it. The diaryof Bridget Jones and The Devil Wears Prada. An even larger audience of viewers will have eagerly anticipated episode after episode of Sex and the city.
One need not stray further than the lush pastures of HBO to find the home demographic of enlightened boychik. Surroundings is a series about budding young people in Hollywood. As predictably repetitive as the punctuation theme is on Babe-alon, not only young men but also men of a certain age who fantasize about being young never seem to tire of Surroundings.
Boychik’s godfather was Peter De Vries, former editor of the New Yorker and (today) the sadly deceased and mostly anonymous master of the male-centric comic novel. For example, never one to shy away from subjects of questionable taste, De Vries wrote. hunched over to Kalamazoo, about a confused young man who runs away with his teacher, and always panting, about a struggling actor who divorces his wife to marry his mother-in-law.
To summarize, in the boychik-lit story:
- The male lead is looking for sex and is bewildered by the emotional entanglements.
- He’s a hacker and a slacker, smart and resourceful but chronically lazy.
- He’s a dropout who can’t hold down a steady job.
- Far from being the hero with a single tragic flaw, the boychik is riddled with troubling flaws, with one or two possibly redeeming qualities.
- The tone is observational and witty, at times sarcastic.
- The boychik tells his story in a first-person confessional narrative.
- By the end of the novel, the hero has almost succeeded in undoing the complicated mess he has made over the course of the story and believes that he has learned important lessons, which may or may not be valid.
Oh, and one more crucial distinction: The chick-style novel is typically set in New York City, ironically, where many people readily understand what a boychik is. The boychik novel is set in Los Angeles, where many people will mistakenly assume that boychiks wear wigs and stilettos and hang out in certain bars in West Hollywood.
# # #
