The Early Death of Lad Lit

Laura Miller has a nice piece on the "lad lit" pseudo-genre in the New York Times. Assuming that her claim "men make up as little as 20 percent of the readership for adult trade fiction" is correct, then her obit for the genre is dead-on accurate:

However realistic the chick lit heroine may be, her love object, the brass ring that makes all her misadventures worth suffering, is usually a figure of fantasy, an initially intimidating alpha male who secretly cherishes her wacky antics and inner goodness...Lad lit is intent on spoiling the fantasy...If female readers allowed themselves to believe that most straight men spend their time holding conversations with their penises, watching the Cartoon Network, fiddling with their rotisserie baseball teams and contemplating the fine art of passing gas on subway trains, romance--and perhaps even human reproduction itself--would grind to a halt.