the new term brother, or fraternity satire, was coined a year ago by Warren St. John of the New York Times, presumably because its editors didn’t approve of another term that rhymes with “chick lit.”

But somehow, fratire doesn’t seem catchy enough. And that concern about frat culture: Is throwing up on your own shoes really that interesting?

What if – boychik bed instead? Derived from the Yiddish word for a young man who has more chutzpah than brains? Boychik lit can be a counterpoint, an alternative, and a parody of the hugely popular female-oriented genre of fiction. Furthermore, boychik lit challenges the widespread notion that today’s young people either don’t want to or can’t read, presumably because they have been conquered, co-opted and rendered brainless by the video game industry and excessive self-abuse.

As for the general population, even if they aren’t rabid fans of children’s literature, the woman on the street and her pompadour male companion will know something about The diaryof Bridget Jones Y The Devil Wears Prada. An even larger audience of viewers will have eagerly anticipated episode after episode of Sex and the city.

One need look no further than the lush pastures of HBO to find the enlightened boychik demographic home. Surroundings is a series about budding young people in Hollywood. As predictably repetitive as the punctuation theme in Babe-alon is, not only young men but also men of a certain age who fantasize about being young never seem to tire of it. Surroundings.

Boychik’s godfather was Peter De Vries, former editor of the New Yorker and (today) the sadly deceased and almost anonymous master of the male-centric comic novel. For example, never one who strays away from subjects of questionable taste, de Vries wrote. hunched over to Kalamazoo, about a confused young man who elopes with his teacher, and always panting, about a struggling actor who divorces his wife to marry his mother-in-law.

To summarize, in the boychik-lit story:

• The male lead seeks sex and is baffled by the emotional entanglements.
• He is a hacker and a slacker, smart and resourceful but chronically lazy.
• He’s a dropout who can’t hold down a steady job.
• Far from being the hero with a single tragic flaw, the boychik is riddled with troubling flaws, with one or two possibly redeeming qualities.
• The tone is observational and witty, at times sarcastic.
• The boychik tells his story in a confessional narrative in the first person.
• By the end of the novel, the hero has almost managed to undo the complicated mess he has made over the course of the story and believes that he has learned important lessons, which may or may not be valid.

Oh, and one more crucial distinction: the girlie novel is typically set in New York City, ironically, where many people readily understand what a boychik is. The boychik novel is set in Los Angeles, where many people will mistakenly assume that boychiks wear wigs and stilettos and hang out in certain West Hollywood bars.

# # #