What genre do I pitch my manuscript under?

Question

The writers who've read my manuscript compare it (in a good way) to Nick Hornby. I can't find a specific genre to pitch it under. It's not literary, chick lit, historical, sci-fi, or fantasy, and those are the sub-categories I usually see with publishing companies and agents. Should I just pitch it as contemporary fiction?

Answer 1

Well, there's apparently a "new" genre being touted these days, one that includes Hornby and Kunkel. It's supposedly the counterpart to "chick lit", so it's called, of course, "guy lit." (In England it's "lad lit")

"Kunkel's is the latest in a spate of books that have collectively been dubbed "lad lit," the male riposte to "chick lit" — that juggernaut spearheaded by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary in 1996, which sold two million copies and spawned both a sequel and a companion book, two films, and countless imitators. Each of the recent lad novels is a sort of anti-bildungsroman, in which a sardonic, clever, unapologetic slacker refuses to grow up, get a meaningful job, commit to relationships, or find any meaning in life.

Like chick lit, lad lit has a British pedigree, with Nick Hornby providing the touchstone texts of the genre. Rob, the protagonist in High Fidelity (1995), is a 35-year-old London slacker who works at a record store and organizes his life by Top 5 lists; the well-named Will Lightman in About a Boy (1998) drifts along on inherited family money (his father composed a horrific but massively successful Christmas jingle). Worldly wise and wisecracking, both are temperamentally unable to commit to relationships or a sense of purpose in their own lives. But then something happens, and they actually do get a life.
The genre's American ancestry is rooted in the "brat pack" fiction of the 1980s, most notably McInerney's own Bright Lights, Big City (1984). Like Hornby's protagonists, McInerney's unnamed 24-year-old narrator, adrift in the big city — bored with his job, suffering writer's block, left by his wife, coked and clubbing every night — eventually finds a modicum of redemption, repudiating the corruption of the city and starting over. In Britain the term "lad lit" evokes a certain type of urban male — part slacker, part metrosexual; here in the States, there's no corresponding notion of laddism. What the Brits call lads, we call simply guys. Guys play poker and video games, drink, ogle women, and lounge around their grungy apartments.

Here, then, is a summary of guy-lit novels:

I may be 30, but I act 15. I am adrift in New York. I'm too clever by half for my own good. I live on puns and snide, sarcastic asides. I don't look too deeply into myself or anyone else — everyone else is boring or a phony anyway. I may be a New Yorker, but I am not in therapy. I have a boring job, for which I am overeducated and underqualified, but I lack the ambition to commit to a serious career. (Usually I have family money.) I hang out with my equally disconnected friends in many of the city's bars. I drink a lot, take recreational drugs, don't care about much except being clever. I recently broke up with my girlfriend, and while I am eager to have sex, which I do often given the zillions of available women in New York, the sex is not especially fulfilling, and emotions rarely enter the picture. I am deeply shallow. And I know it.

Oh, and then something happens. I go on a journey, get inside the media machinery, sort-of fall for a new girl. Or 9/11 happens, but that doesn't really affect me much either. And though I might now mouth some bland platitudes about change, anyone can see that I'm still the same guy I was before. Only different. But not really.

Virtually every writer of guy lit is an almost-thirtysomething graduate of an elite college or university. Their college pedigrees read like the college rankings at a certain national magazine: Brown (Sam Lipsyte), Harvard (Benjamin Kunkel), Stanford (Erik Barmack), Wesleyan (Scott Mebus), Yale (Kyle Smith). Each writer, and their characters, lives in New York City. Each work is written in the first person, by a destabilized, unreliable narrator; these books are like one long run-on sentence of self-justification and rationalization. "I don't want your wholesome values, your reasonably good judgment," says Jeb Braun, protagonist in Erik Barmack's The Virgin. "My goal isn't to please you. So if you're expecting the whole handshake and nod routine, you can stop reading right now." (Several authors refer to "the book you hold in your hand," as if to distance themselves even further from their own sad story.)"

Answer 2

That sounds safest.