You know, I don't really hold Britain accountable for much, but I feel like I can blame them for chick lit. You might be thinking that we had it in the United States before Bridget Jones, that we were always a nation of pulp lovers and beach readers, that there's a reason we have so much romance on the shelves and so little in our lives. And I would agree with most of your argument, if it weren't for the fact that Jane Austen was born in 1775, a year before the U.S. was a country.

I've never read anything by Jane Austen, the patron saint of chick lit, but I understand the basic premise of "Pride and Prejudice," mostly as reiterated through "Bridget Jones's Diary." Austen's well-loved novel isn't all that different from Helen Fielding's epistolary opus a few centuries later, and it can't be a coincidence that the latter casually references the former. It also can't be mere coincidence that most of chick lit's major authors-including, but not limited to, Helen Fielding, Marian Keyes, Cecilia Ahern and Sophie Kinsella-hail from the British Isles.

I guess the question, then, is why the derivation of chick lit matters at all. The answer is that it doesn't, except for the fact that the point of origin is usually a woman. And this isn't really an issue, either. I'd like to believe that a talented author of either gender could write a chick lit book. Given the genre's repetitive conventions, I don't even think it would be that hard. But the thing is that a guy never will, because he has a more realistic chance of making it big. In other words, the day I go to the bookstore and see Jonathan Franzen writing about Manolos and appletinis is the day I'm making a dollar on the dollar. Basically, this day is not going to come.

Meanwhile, J. Fran won't ever have to deal with an astonished New York Times reviewer effusively praising his novel as "masculine, clinical and objective," as Liesl Schillinger did with Rivka Galchen's "Atmospheric Disturbances" last week. It always amazes me that people marvel at a woman's novel when it shows depth and detachment, like female capability is some strange creature at the zoo, but nobody ever asks Michael Chabon what it feels like to pee standing up. The experience of the successful, serious author is a masculine one, and, regrettably, Schillinger made that very clear.

But chick lit doesn't help matters much. The name of the genre itself reinforces the separation of "chicks" (even the word is diminutive) from mainstream literature. It's pigeonholing for women, by women, which I guess makes it better than pigeonholing for women, by men. The problem is that chick lit seems to be one of few forms through which a woman of letters can make a name for herself (and some bank).

This is, paradoxically, the same thing that sabotages female authors of general fiction. As Schillinger wrote in the same review of Galchen's book: "It's unusual-in fact (why be coy?), it's extremely rare-to come across a first novel by a woman writer … in which the heart and the brain vie for the role of protagonist, and the brain wins." Because commentators believe it is abnormal for a woman to write an "intellectual" novel, the event becomes noteworthy. And if the plot of "Atmospheric Disturbances" had followed the comic misadventures of a lovelorn meteorologist, it wouldn't have been critically eviscerated. It would have been ignored.

So I guess I shouldn't blame the British after all; far-reaching though their influence may be, the chick lit problem isn't (entirely) their fault.