The literary world is in uproar because the Booker Prize has its newest celebrity judge. It’s Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, who appears to be a genuinely enthusiastic fiction reader. She voted in this year’s New York Times poll to pick the best books of the 21st century (The Bee Sting, The Corrections, The Goldfinch) and owns a publishing imprint specialising in “sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking and discussion-driven stories.”
This self-conscious turn from TV frivolity to the world of serious ideas is fun and campy: as Susan Sontag said, “camp sees everything in question marks… it is the furthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.” Parker has gone from playing the role of a sex columnist to the role of reader-publisher, complete with serious arbitrage over this decade’s literary canon and a serious role on the Booker panel. The closest cultural equivalent here is the chapter in Joan Crawford’s 1971 advice manual My Way of Life in which the actress testifies, between treatises on dinner parties and interior design, to reading Balzac to improve her mind.
And that is the perfect tone for the Booker, whose proceedings must sit somewhere between the high-mindedness of a Verso Edition and the cautiously middlebrow Guardiancore of your local Waterstones. Its marketing team has to make it glamorous enough to capture mass-media attention, but not so obviously-low-minded that they actually alienate writers and critics. In its shortlisted books, glossy styles and scenarios are often overthrown by milquetoast moral and political conclusions. This year’s winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, was set on a space station – unusual for literary fiction. But this formal innovation acted as a Trojan Horse for its actual content – as one Goodreads reviewer put it, the book consisted of “rather weedy reflections on the oneness of humanity.” People are beginning to catch onto this trend – instead of losing cache in the slightly-more lucrative arena of downmarket publishing, the Booker needs to allow its experimental, highbrow contingent to wink and nudge at its middlebrow one.
The appointment is also refreshing to the young female reading public: a literary role model who isn’t obsessed with her own neuroses? Unusual. In 2024, to browse and buy upmarket women’s writing is to be hammered on all sides by deliberately complicated protagonists. Over in Dublin dwell an influential horde of young women who have spilled, over the past decade, from the pen of Sally Rooney. But it goes further: the main character of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who takes herself out with a Judy Garland-esque range of prescription drugs, and the Palestinian protagonist of this year’s The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, whose new insights about Zionism are somewhat undercut by identikit passages about compulsive cleanliness and New York luxury. An emerging subgenre of “femgore” has seen authors like Mona Awad and Eliza Clark take this tendency and mix it with now-aged horror-film tropes about catharsis and “the monstrous feminine”. While Anna Kareninas and Emma Bovaries have existed in fiction for aeons, Complicated Woman books often try to make a rebellious point about the misbehaviour and psychiatric unrest of their protagonists: in the past two years we’ve had A Very Nice Girl (Imogen Crimp) and A Good Happy Girl (Marissa Higgins), both about disillusioned young women who find themselves ensconced in someone else’s extramarital arrangement.
Parker’s TV world is the perfect antidote to this cultural ennui. It all became clear when her SATC co-star, Kim Cattrall, appeared on The Criterion Closet, a web show used to advertise the upmarket Criterion Collection of classic and art DVDs. ‘Anything by (Austrian-Jewish Hollywood director Ernst) Lubitsch,’ she said, pulling out a branded copy of 1943 romcom Heaven Can Wait. ‘Brilliant.’ Sex and the City is a direct ancestor to Lubitsch’s work. His unique mixture of glamorous, aristocratic characters, mannered European-style comedy and rhythmic dialogue made him a success among female filmgoers from the gloomy 1920s into the Second World War – and SATC did the same thing, running with a cheerful tone from one market crash to the next. A feature spin-off premiered in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. The ‘City’ is New York, but the protagonists are so busy having tumultuous casual sex in 2001 that they never think to address the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Meanwhile the young, cosmopolitan readers the authors of Complicated Women Fiction are looking for are probably about to disappear. Rents have gone through the roof in most major first-world cities, and those looking for white-collar work have to navigate a maze of layoffs and fake online job listings. Thus the messy literary protagonist’s fictional life in New York or London, with liveable flat and boring office job, is the stuff of dreams. She is supposed to be in touch with the sensitive, shameless female reader, but she always comes off as spoilt. Not even the most dedicated fan of contemporary literary fiction wants to read about how her flatmates are actually dysfunctional or that she lives on junk food and continually falls prey to the sexual manipulations of older men.
Take, for example, Moshfegh. If you’re trying to hack your way into the art world, it’s tricky to understand the rich protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who throws away her first job at a gallery and descends into a drugged stupor instead. You’re not supposed to relate to her – she’s deliberately unlikable, and the book’s kick comes from its deadpan subversion of an apparently-idyllic life. This is an established American idiom, but it feels overplayed and out-of-touch now: just look at the obvious opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which insects crawl under a picturesque white picket fence, or the much-parodied pastel tyranny of the Stepford Wives. One can’t help but wonder whether this subversion means the same thing to a young reader without cash or prospects as it does to Moshfegh, who is in her forties.
It is no coincidence that an online resurgence of interest in Sex and the City and its stars coincides with another, post-Covid financial crash. For new Gen Z fans, it’s a stylish, grown-up form of escapism, populated by women who don’t seem like they’ve ever even heard the phrase “self-loathing.” Performatively-messy womanhood has become the most distinctive literary trademark of the 2020s – in fifty years’ time, satirists will get their kicks from dark family histories and monotone descriptions of sleeping pills. But it doesn’t need to be this way – and in the middle of serious economic tumult, it feels like the last thing female readers actually want. The most interesting thing a writer can do in 2025 – even if they are highbrow enough to be up for the Booker – is to let glamour pass without interrogation or subversion. That is an art too. And we should trust Sarah Jessica Parker to judge it.
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