I don’t know where this book gets off saying “A Novel” on the cover. Bookends is chick lit, pure and simple.

What’s the difference? Well, chick lit books are of course novels, in the sense that they’re fiction, but novels aren’t necessarily chick lit. Chick lit is very specific: it has a female protagonist; the purpose of the story is to hook her up with the guy who the author has, early on, chosen as the obvious perfect guy for her; it’s narrated by the protagonist; and the protagonist has almost no personality, only a collection of fun facts you know about her.

I’ll write later about Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, but suffice it to say that they’re almost universally wildly codependent, with very little self-knowledge, compulsive emotional eating, no idea whether the guy really likes them even if he comes in with “I Really Like You, Protagonist” tattooed on his forehead, and deep shame about themselves and especially their bodies (which are always telegraphed as very very beautiful despite what the protagonist thinks). Oh, and every man in the book is either gay, married to a friend of the protagonist’s, or a future love interest. There are no other options.

This one also can’t tell a story. Jeeezus. The pacing of this book is rocky; it starts out with several chapters about the characters in their early twenties, then rockets forward to the 31-year-old present with no explanation for the early chapters, then much later on brings back the one character who left the group in those early chapters. It’s obvious that she must be coming back, but only because it would be a terrible book if such a pivotal character were introduced and then totally dropped.

The story gets back on track with her return, only to drift off again toward the end as every plot thread has to get wrapped up, often off-camera. I can’t tell you how many of the characters’ experiences are just summarized for us by the narrator. There are times, in the last few chapters, where days and even weeks of intense character development are retold at a breathless pace. Like, she has the narrator tell us that her friend Si is telling us his friend Eva’s life story, and we hear the whole ENTIRE thing third-hand, and then we get this:

“And she really is [fine],” Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.

Come on: how would the narrator even know what he was going to think and do after he hung up? It ends up ringing false because (like any good codependent) the narrator has no boundaries. That is, Green is trying to write the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, but puts her in the body of a specific character who couldn’t know all this stuff and isn’t the right vehicle for it.

The problem here is that Jane Green has too many great characters with fascinating stories for one book – the way that she chose to tell it. Si’s story would have made a much better book. Or she could have told different chapters of Bookends from different perspectives, letting the overall story unfold as each character played their own part. That would have made an incredible book. Instead, the story is hamstrung by being forced through one rather passive woman’s perspective.

There are also too many stories happening – the opening of this new bookstore, Bookends, which is co-owned by the protagonist and another main character, and even lends the book its name, takes up a lot of time but barely serves to advance the plot at all. It’s a major undertaking, and a major success, and yet there’s no emotional impact to it: we’re told that it makes the other main character’s life very busy, which puts stress on her marriage, but it causes so few problems for the protagonist that it seems pointless other than as occasional comic relief.

So: chick lit. Because of the boundary problems, the Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, and the slapdash writing. I’m not saying that chick lit can’t be well-written, but this particular kind of slapdash fast-paced gallop through a storyline, with little pause for real emotional depth, is characteristic of the genre. I enjoyed Bookends anyway, but I don’t think I would read it again.