LONDON (AP) -- Bridget Jones does not have a friend in Beryl Bainbridge.
The Booker Prize-nominated novelist on Thursday dismissed "Bridget Jones's Diary" -- Helen Fielding's book about a self-obsessed urbanite's search for Mr. Right -- as "froth."
"It is a froth sort of thing. What is the point writing a whole novel about it?" said 66-year-old Bainbridge, whose novel "According to Queeney" is favored to win this year's Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award.
Published in 1996, "Bridget Jones's Diary" has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, been turned into a film and spawned a slew of breezy "chick lit" paperbacks with titles like "Single White E-Mail" and "Tom, Dick and Debbie Harry."
But heavyweight novelists including Bainbridge and Doris Lessing -- who made her name with searing novels inspired by her African childhood -- lament readers' and publishers' appetite for literature lite.
"As people spend so little time reading it is a pity they perhaps can't read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound, something with a bit of bite to it," Bainbridge told the British Broadcasting Corp.
"It's a pity that so many young women are writing like that," agreed Lessing.
"It would be better, perhaps, if they wrote books about their lives as they really saw them and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on."
Fielding said her book was not meant to be taken seriously.
"Sometimes I have had people getting their knickers in a twist about Bridget Jones being a disgrace to feminism and so on," she said.
"But it is good to be able to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you are living."
And "chick lit" has its highbrow defenders.
"Young people, because they have an insecure sense of their own identity, love reading books that confirm that identity," said Pat Barker, who won the Booker in 1995 for her World War I novel "The Ghost Road."
"I think as people get older they need that from their reading less and less and most of us end up much broader minded about what it is we are prepared to read," she added.
