In my August article, inspired by Churchill’s comment on the name Bossom - “neither one thing nor the other” – I instituted the Golden Bossom award for things that fall between two stools or are neither fish nor fowl. These include Intelligent Design, vegetarians and modern hymns. Here, from this week’s Spectator, is another contender: intelligent chick lit.

I am not a great reader of chick lit. Even on holiday or when relaxing in the bath, I prefer a good detective story, albeit with a female detective such as Kinsey Millhone from A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar. (What will Sue Grafton do when she gets to X? Will she stop at Z, or will she go on to numbers like Janet Evanovich?) However, if I decide to read chick lit, I want it to do what it says on the box, that is entertain me but not tax my brain.

This is not good enough, according to Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, who have written a novel, Literacy and Longing in LA.

Noun or noun phrase plus location seems to be a syntactical winning formula for a novel, by analogy, perhaps, with Reading Lolita in Tehran - or could it be Black Hearts in Battersea? I may try and write one someday: Tapas and Trauma  in Tufnell Park, or  Bonking and Bruschetta in Belsize Square. Or perhaps, after a memorable line from Death of a Salesman, Arch Supports in Archway.

Anyway, let’s get back to our click lit for blue stockings, who, one suspects, are the kind of blue stockings who whip their nerdy glasses off to allow raven tresses to tumble down while the man gasps: “My God, you’re beautiful!”

Dora is your quintessential chick-lit heroine: thirtysomething, single, with self-esteem issues and acres of time on her hands in which to obsess about the two interlinked questions of supreme importance in her life — cellulite and finding the right man. Except that instead of indulging in Marlboro Lights, magnums of Chardonnay and designer shops to assuage her emotional traumas, Dora binges on books. ‘Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat. ... I do what I have always done: go off on a book bender that can last for days. I fall into this state for different reasons ...it’s symptomatic of my state of mind, ennui up to my ears, my life gone awry, and that feeling of dread when-ever I’m asked what I’m doing. How can anyone sort all this out? All things considered, I’d rather read. It’s the perfect escape.’…

In keeping with her less literary counterparts, Dora likes to disconnect the phone and run herself a bubble bath, before getting hopped-up on a killer cocktail of Hemingway and the Brontë sisters. The aftermath of these excesses is described in much the same way as one of Bridget Jones’s hangovers: ‘My eyes are bloodshot and I have bruised circles beneath them. My matted hair is sticking up in clumps and my eyebrows look like someone combed them with a whisk. I am surrounded by the wreckage of my apartment, where heaps of discarded clothes lie.’

You see what too much Tolstoy can do to a girl. Though an amusing project written with journalistic polish, Literacy and Longing in LA would have worked better if it were firmly tongue-in-cheek. The problem is that the all-American earnestness shows through, the heroine is too self-consciously bookish for this literary experiment to be enjoyed without prickles of annoyance throughout. In real life one rather hopes that women are perfectly able to reconcile the two sides of their character: reading Proust while having a pedicure. But in anti-elitist cultures like America or Britain, writing about an all-consuming love of literature can only come across as pretentious. ‘I’m really just another boring bibliomaniac,’ sighs Dora with audible pleasure. And since the Americans tend to regard good writing as morally improving, one might have hoped that the knowledge accrued by ploughing through the world’s great authors would endow Dora with a more mature and responsible approach to life. Which in most people’s eyes would, of course, finally destroy her as a plausible chick-lit heroine. We are even treated to Thomas Carlyle saying, ‘The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.’ So why does Dora remain so obstinately flaccid, and resolutely blind to the fact that she is still in love with her ex-husband until the very end of the book?

Good question. The bookishness is, of course, artificially implanted into an otherwise empty head, and can easily be dispensed with when Mr Right comes along.

I am in two minds about whether to classify Anita Brookner as chick lit. I have written about her novels here, here and here.