Mania, phobias and more
Katie Grant
ONE-HIT WONDER by Lisa Jewell
Penguin, £6,99, pp. 450, ISBN 0140295968
Let's not beat about the bush. Lisa Jewell is Enid Blyton for those who have progressed through Kirrin Island and Malory Towers and now go to Greenday concerts between episodes of Big Brother. She thinks the thoughts, talks the talk and her pulse beats to the same rhythms as modern, metropolitan, nice but trite everyperson. This explains the success of her two previous novels. Ralph's Party and Thirty-Nothing. Certainly they are instantly forgettable, but in them Jewell has provided chick-lit to be seen with whilst waiting for your mates in the wine bar, The stories are predictable: ugly ducklings turn into swans; relationships that look solid collapse; love matches go through Emma-like contortions before blissful endings. The sex may be crude and intrusive, almost as if Jewell felt obliged to put it in to satisfy her editor, but the books are perfect accessories for the bags of girls hooked on Sex and the City or Men Behaving Badly. Indeed, Jewell expects her readers to be familiar with this kind of telly. Her books are full of modern references that might leave many Spectator readers rather bemused.
In One-Hit Wonder, Jewell's third novel, for example, Flint's mate Terry (Flint being the rough and ready hero) goes against the
grain, girl-wise:
He fancied Phoebe in Friends instead of Rachel. He fancied Willow in Buffi: the Vampire-Slayer instead of Buffy. He fancied Carmella in The Sopranos instead of Dr Melfi.
If you do not watch any cult television you will have no idea what this means. But if you do, you might like Jewell not so much for her stories, which are, quite frankly, full of action signifying nothing, but for her ability to capture the cultural zeitgeist at the start of the 21st century.
Jewell aficionados may be concerned to find the author moving into darker territory than they might have expected in OneHit Wonder. In Thirty-Nothing we get a silly story, the highlight of which is a horrible but funny description of sex distorted by Ecstasy and accompanied by cats. In OneHit Wonder, however, we run the gamut of human misery from suicide, fatal accidents, Aids, disability and a variety of mental conditions from nymphomania to agoraphobia. This is EastEnder country. But fans need not be dismayed. Misery is not really Jewell's thing. So as disaster heaps upon disaster, One-Hit Wonder remains as attractively perky as her heroine's breasts.
Is this a failure? No, not really, provided you take the book for what it is, a comic without the pictures. Jewell has more conspicuous lack of success when she tries to give One-Hit Wonder an air of mystery, inviting the reader to try to work out why Bee, the 36-year-old one-hit wonder of the title, has topped herself, After 450 pages (about 100 too many) we get the answer. Any reader who takes that long should be seriously worried about their powers of deduction, Chick-lit may be nonsense but it requires a certain talent to pull off. It cannot shy away from contemporary 'issues', for they are the reason chick-lit exists. The trick is to sanitise, romanticise and soften contemporary life's difficulties through relentlessly optimistic and tongue-in-cheek outcomes. Jewell can do this standing on her head. The dead Bee's dreadful mother, having run through two husbands and caused untold damage to her children, captures a third man and suddenly, for no good reason, comes good. Among all the personal mayhem, money is never short — a convenient stash is found under Bee's bed — clothes are always designer and they always fit, careers are fulfilled and terrible experiences are expunged from the mind through the love of a good, hip and thoroughly cool man. He is always drop-dead gorgeous too.
Like all good novelists, Jewell knows the satisfaction of a happy ending with the hero and heroine clasped in each other's arms. But if Mills & Boon, Barbara Carfland and Georgette Heyer seem, along with Enid Blyton, to have been her foremost literary influences this should not make us sniffy. Just look at how many books Jewell sells and be amazed, be very amazed.
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