Oh Lad, Poor Lad
By LAURA MILLER

A new genre of commercial fiction, lad lit, was recently pronounced stillborn by Publishers Weekly, a mere month after its arrival had been announced by The New York Times and The Associated Press. Nothing stings quite so bitterly as cold numbers, so when the magazine printed that Nielsen BookScan had detected sales of only 1,716 copies of Kyle Smith's ''Love Monkey,'' an ostensible leader of the well-publicized ''trend,'' it had to hurt. An events planner at a Chicago bookstore chain was quoted saying that lad lit might attract women readers interested in ''spying on the other side, getting a look into the locker room,'' but she had to admit that the 10 stores in the chain she works for hadn't sold a single copy of either ''Love Monkey'' or another exemplar of the genre, Scott Mebus's ''Booty Nomad.''

Like Jayson Blair's tell-all, sell-little memoir, ''Burning Down My Master's House,'' the fizzling of lad lit demonstrates that press coverage doesn't always translate into cash receipts. It also proves that novels that don't appeal to women are a tough sell. Market research firms consistently report that men make up as little as 20 percent of the readership for adult trade fiction, and with the exception of a few franchise authors like Tom Clancy, writers who appeal mostly to men have a tough time of it. By contrast, a half-dozen ladies, each armed with three names and the capacity to churn out two books a year, manage to sell millions of novels while barely registering on the media's radar. The likes of Mary Higgins Clark and Anne Rivers Siddons are the Godzillas of the fiction trade, towering over the scurrying masses who think of Jonathan Franzen as the big time. Even Bridget Jones shrinks to the dimensions of a minor phenom in comparison.

Nevertheless, chick lit is a legitimate and booming genre, perhaps the only new one to spring up in the past 25 years. Most bookstores now devote a shelf, or two or three, to its candy-colored, cartoon-bedizened offerings. What makes these books so appealing and the lad lit novels so not? The chick lit formula has been tweaked to accommodate heroines who are, among other things, black, Latina, middle-aged and married, often to great success. How come the sex change attempted by lad lit turns out to be a tweak too far?

Helen Fielding's innovation was to fuse a fond, satirical take on the contemporary cult of feminine self-improvement to an old-fashioned romance plot. ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' is famously based on Jane Austen's ''Pride and Prejudice,'' but while Fielding's Mr. Darcy isn't too big a departure from Austen's hero, Bridget Jones is no Elizabeth Bennett. Instead, she's the creation of modern women's magazines. She wouldn't be funny -- and to work, chick lit has to be funny -- if she weren't perpetually falling short of the absurdly inhuman standard of perfection to which she aspires. You wouldn't want her to succeed. She'd be insufferable if she did.

The narrators of lad lit carry no such cross. It's not that pop culture has no paragons of masculinity -- the fictional genres aimed at men are staffed with strong, masterful, good-looking, altruistic heroes. It's just that the average guy rarely feels pressured to equal them. He may resent the need to behave with adult decorum around women, but when he transgresses, the results are more likely to be boorish than endearing. So, for example, the narrator of ''Booty Nomad'' can't remember the names of the women he's slept with and gives them nicknames like ''Bendy Girl'' and ''Totem Pole.'' The narrator of ''Love Monkey'' says things like, ''This girl is harder to get into than Rao's.''

The titles of the books alone tip you off to the precarious line they try to walk. (Has anyone but Nick Hornby ever managed it?) ''Monkey'' says rude, animalistic behavior, guys! But we've softened it with ''Love,'' girls! From the unholy mating of ''Sleepless in Seattle'' and ''Jackass'' only misshapen progeny can spring. As for ''Booty Nomad,'' what woman wants to sympathize with the kind of man who thinks of her bed as a pit stop? ''Love Monkey'' and ''Booty Nomad'' have enough similarities to suggest the germ of a subgenre: each is about a 30-ish man pining for an unavailable woman while trying to get into the pants of several others; each features a scene in which a spectacularly crass buddy (put in to make the hero look decent by comparison) drags the narrator to a strip joint.

Lad lit authors may be truthful about young men's preoccupations, but the recipe for great escapist reading does not include ample servings of stuff people would rather not know. The promoters of lad lit confuse the way women exhaustively analyze a boyfriend's smallest words and gestures with genuine curiosity about men's inner lives. What could be mistaken for a process of detection is actually an act of construction on the part of women who already have a pretty good sense of what's going on in the locker room and prefer to imagine something more appetizing. 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. He isn't that different, really, from the kind of hero featured in the thrillers, westerns and spy novels read by men. A little less brooding and violent, perhaps, but an honorable and decisive fellow anyone can admire. That's one thing men's genres share with women's: they're all in love with the same guy.

Lad lit is intent on spoiling the fantasy, and this could result in something even worse than the despair of being caught on a cross-country flight with a tiresome book. 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. So for the good of the species, they're staying away from lad lit, in droves.



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