When I worked on a dredge ship as a lad, I had a boss who
recommended that I read romances so that I could understand the feminine mind
and woo them. I didn’t (see four reasons why below)—at least, none but the
Pulitzer-winning Gone with the Wind by
Margaret Mitchell and literary classics like those by Jane Austen, George
Eliot, the Bronte sisters, etc.
I recently reread Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, which is labeled as a romance although I’m not sure why. A man abandons
his wife for a younger woman who has been living with them—a cousin whose
father and former wealth have both passed on. What makes the novel powerful is
not the ill-fated couple’s love despite a wife who tries to separate them, but
that of long-suffering wife’s who by the end is suddenly thrown into new light
by the foolish impetuosity of the other two. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) If it is a romance, then the
modern romance seems to be riddled with tragedy.
See also Henry James’s DaisyMiller, which is also lumped into this category. Two men fall in love with
a woman, and she doesn’t seem to love either although she seems to love them
being in love with her. And then she [Spoiler redacted. See link for
spoilers un-redacted.] This is a love story?
Maybe just the fact that someone is in love with someone
else—requited or not—is enough to qualify a story to be a romance. In other
instances, the romance seems merely pleasant, not involving romantic love at
all. So maybe in some instances, a romance could be a story with a happy
ending.
Four things barred my interest in the non-literary romance.
The first being their covers. Bare-chested men—or otherwise,
a hunk. Women with wind-blown hair. Sometimes together, sometimes separate,
with nothing more to indicate their complicated situation. The covers are often
fluffy, brightly colorful and designed to catch the feminine eye. I like the
kind of cozies and locked-room mysteries that Agatha Christie wrote but so many
modern covers of this ilk are littered with dogs, cats, prettily colored
cottages. The mind reels. Make the sign of the cross, to protect yourself.
The second are the openings. The characters are way too
idealized. This perfect woman meets that perfect man, but the imperfect community
strives to keep them apart (or the man is imperfect until she reforms him). Despite
being the lead characters, too few have imperfect women like Gone with the Wind. Although Scarlett may
have been a little too imperfect, she eventually makes herself admirable. And spoiler
alert, she doesn’t even get the guy. Is that romance?
(It is interesting that readers of these books long for the
idealized view of people, rather than a realistic picture. Maybe men are the
same: idealizing men as unflawed, conquering heroes, battling mastermind
criminals, but I don’t think most men see themselves in place of such heroes
but rather wished they could be that flawless. I’ll discuss James Bond in a
different post.)
Third, the initial scenarios are hard to buy. Jennifer
Blake’s Roan starts enticingly
enough: A woman is kidnapped but she escapes with a gun only to be shot at by
the police, thinking she had Stockholm syndrome like Patty Hurst. [Consider the rest of this to be spoilers
although it’s necessary to establish the length the genre goes to stretch
credulity.] Her shooter is a rugged cop who lives in the beautiful country
and takes her to be a prisoner under house arrest in his own home because the
prison is full of evil men who might touch and leer at her, which of course the
cop does when he makes her a prisoner, but it’s ethically okay because he’s a
handsome cop and one of the good guys. She, of course, is a rich heiress which
she cannot tell us or the cop until toward the ending when they happen to bump
into her former fiancé.
Finally, the writing at times is awful. Some passages may be
nice enough description, but it’s awkwardly done: Why would the character be
studying her house now? Why is she looking in the mirror to observe her
over-looked beauty? It’s almost as if she knew the reader was present and she’s
trying to sell us on all her good points while at the same time pretending to
be modest about her good points.
Last February, Audible had a free two-month trial of their
Escape program, one of which was James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues, which I wanted to read anyway—possibly his best
book. His main character, Dave Robicheaux seems to embroil himself with men
still haunted by Vietnam, twenty years after the war, but here he has lost his
wife and his job and is trying to clear himself of a crime he didn’t commit all
while trying to raise a young orphan. Somehow not being chained to being a cop
frees the book to become a literary mystery, which I suspect has been his aim.
There has always been an element of this in his books, often digging into
character pasts to realize them, but here the characters pop out. Go read it. (I’m
not sure why it is bundled with romance books except maybe his love of wife and
child is almost idealized, but the usual genre awkwardness is eschewed.)
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