Totally Deconstructed

One of the chief tensions of contemporary CanLit is the ongoing tug-of-war between the instincts of the typical writer — oddball by temperament, outsider by circumstance — and the conformity that’s crept over the culture. In recent years, our literary community has been flooded with a specific brand of radical politics that has become effectively de rigueur. But, of course, that which is dictated by the fashions of the day is not radical at all. So there’s a paradox at the heart of our national scene that raises thorny questions: Can you be an iconoclast when the cherished beliefs that you’re attacking are the same ones that everyone else is attacking — that everyone is expected, even required to attack? Is a policed status quo any better if it purports to be radical? Perhaps most pressing, how does an emerging talent find their voice — and stand out — in a climate that actively discourages doing so?

Ugh! As If! sees this clash between originality and orthodoxy play out on the page. The premise for Veronica Litt’s debut is intriguing, centring on the 1995 teen comedy Clueless, itself an adaptation of the 1815 Jane Austen novel of manners, Emma. In her book-length exploration of the thirty-year-old film — directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz and Paul Rudd as Josh Lucas — Litt mounts a spirited defence of what she refers to as “girly art,” or frothy pop cultural products that explore women’s stories in pleasurable ways. In her telling, the cult classic is anti-elitist and unapologetically so. It is open-hearted and generous. It resists succumbing to despair over the state of the world and rejects dystopian narratives. It believes in change, individually and collectively, and offers both a welcome reprieve from cynicism and an antidote to it. “When I watch Clueless, I get to inhabit Cher’s light, bright perspective for 90 trouble-free minutes,” Litt writes. “I enter an escape hatch from my actual problems: precarious employment, clinical depression, the fear of being evicted in a brutal housing crisis — all bog‑standard millennial stressors.”

Litt, an assistant professor at Cape Breton University, argues that “without feeling preachy or phony, Clueless doubles as both a comfort watch and a crash course for viewers hoping to improve themselves and their world.” It’s possible, she maintains, “to recognize problems and think constructively about amending them without plummeting into complete doom-and-gloom pessimism.” And so, ultimately, the sleeper hit’s main strength is that it is invested in hope, the possibility of transformation, and community: “In a million subtle ways, Clueless argues that we need each other, that things get better when people unite.”

Litt’s take is refreshing and, it must be said, countercultural. In our hyperpessimistic era, hanging on to one’s faith in humanity is not an insignificant rebellion. Yet she is clearly conflicted. Litt may champion anti-elitist art, but, oddly, she recruits highbrow theories on race, gender, and sexuality to do so. The reader, then, is left with the baffling experience of seeing ideas from the likes of Columbia University’s Jack Halberstam grafted onto a mainstream mall movie from decades past, resulting in near-incomprehensible statements such as this: “According to the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, juvenile ‘unknowing’ can, funnily enough, lead to a higher-than-average willingness to listen, learn, and reinvent.” Escapism is acknowledged but with a self-conscious ambivalence: “I’m gesturing towards Audre Lorde’s original meaning of self-care as keeping yourself intact so that you have the energy to challenge systems of oppression.” Elsewhere, we see a silver-screen kiss read through the lens of fourth-wave feminist consent discourse: “Gentleness is itself desirable. Also, we are all on Team Consent, yes? Paul Rudd proves that checking in is (and has always been) both good and hot.” Silverstone comes under fire for endorsing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president in 2024. Litt even argues that Ta‑Nehisi Coates — a writer who could never be mistaken as optimistic on race — was overly generous in his assessment of the film’s portrayal of race relations, which, in her view, perpetuates a harmful ethos of colour-blindness. All told, “the movie’s proposal for an improved society contains some deeply regressive ideas.”

It’s hard to know who the target audience for such a critique is, but one suspects it’s not the average reader. If we are going to be truly anti-elitist, that’s probably who we should consider.

Although it has much to recommend it, Ugh! As If! basically converts a ’90s chick flick into a vehicle for political posturing: “Ditzes use cluelessness to fight the power.” In doing so, it veers away from something sparkling and fresh and becomes the sort of online polemic that one could read anywhere. A voice in the wilderness becomes a voice on Bluesky.

Litt is clearly someone who reads widely, thinks deeply, and writes well. She has a long career ahead of her, and it’s likely her impulses toward independent thought will win out. But this new author, and CanLit as a whole, might want to spend a little less time thinking about what’s popular with close peers and a little more time thinking about general audiences. Whatever one makes of the politics that currently dominates modern literature, conformity to any ideology can become tedious and can risk alienating the public, particularly those who are not steeped in the mores of activism and academia. Which, it turns out, is most of us.