Read React Review

Welcome to the inaugural February Book Club review, with reviews by Tumperkin of Isn’t It Romance?, Meriam of Rape and Adverbs, and RfP of Read for Pleasure all reading and reviewing the same book. This particular book was RfP’s selection. If you haven’t done so, please check out Meriam’s, Tumperkin’s and RfP‘s reviews of The Edge of Impropriety (if they aren’t up yet, they will be very soon!).

My Take in Brief: While I am glad I read this book, and certainly appreciated the skills of the author, I was not very engaged with the characters and did not enjoy it as much as I’d hoped. I wonder whether my tepid reaction to this book reflects my own imprisonment within genre boundaries.

Setting: Prologue in Italy, a decade or so prior to the main action, London, about 1830.

Characters: Marina Wyatt, age 36, is the beautiful widowed Countess of Gorham.  A popular novelist who takes a young lover every Season, Marina has a slightly scandalous reputation, but keeps a high enough social standing to maintain her credibility and her invitation to Almack’s, which provides fodder for her fictionalized accounts of upper crust doings. When we meet her, Marina is trying to use her friendship with the handsome and sought after (but, at age 25, a immature and superficial) Sir Anthony Hedges — who wants to become her lover –  to stay on this knife’s edge.

Jasper James Hedges, late forties, is a classicist and antiquarian. He’s a snob, dismissive of novels like the kind Marina writes, and of the trappings of the ton in general. He is Anthony’s biological father, having had a disastrous affair with Anthony’s mother, his sister in law, but after a tragic accident, has raised Anthony and his younger sister, Sydney, as their “uncle”.

Helen Hobart, Sydney’s proper and uptight governess, is secretly in love with Anthony, and this couple provides the secondary romance.

Plot: Marina tries to drum up publicity and thus sales for her latest novel, the hero of which is modeled after Anthony, by having a public falling out with him. She needs the money not only to maintain her lifestyle, but to pay off blackmailer Gerrald Rackham, who knows about her past as the pre-marital mistress of her late husband, and as an Irish girl willing to do what it took to improve her situation. Though a despicable and greedy keeper of dark secrets, Gerrald is not just in it for the money: he’s in covetous love with Marina, and attempts to foil her affair with Jasper.

For his part, Jasper comes to London, which he usually avoids, to talk to Marina’s publisher (a connection enabled by Anthony) about a writing a book.

When they meet, Marina and Jasper are instantly attracted and begin an affair, which they plan to keep secret, for the duration of the London Season.

In the meantime, Anthony is choosing between potential wealthy brides, while noticing that his irritation and interest in his little sister’s governess is morphing into something else entirely.

Racy Romance Review:

Before RfP mentioned this book, I had never heard of it or the author. So I came into the book cold, and I’m coming in to this review cold, not having read my co-conspirators’ reviews. I’m guessing I will be the outlier on this one, but we shall see…

It’s clear from the cover art (a detail from 18th century English portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence), to the blurbs (Booklist and Library Journal), to the title, that this book is intended to work on some level beyond the usual Historical Romance.

Reading the book confirms its literary ambitions. Rosenthal has a very distinctive prose style that will either make you weep with admiration and joy over its allusiveness, its lyricism, and its erudition, or will make you want to rend your garments in frustration. I’m sorry to say I am in the latter camp. More on that later.

TEOI is, on the face of it, quite conventional. It’s set in Regency era London.  And, despite some red herrings, the real conflict, the one that eventually does threaten the relationship, ends up being whether the hero will reject the heroine because of her sordid past. The secondary romance between a rake with unplumbed depths and a stern governess with hidden charms is also hardly new.

But one of the things I really liked about TEOI was that these familiar settings and conflicts were rendered almost unfamiliar. There is the obligatory dinner party, the ball, and a stint on Rotten Row, but almost all of the interactions between the h/h take place in her bedroom, at night. The hero and heroine are not just older, but mature, both physically and emotionally. Marina wants to keep her social standing not for its own sake, but mainly (I think) to keep writing. She’s independent and strong, sexually confident, very unusual and very likable. Jasper wants their affair to stay secret and disapproves of her past, not because he’s judgmental, but mainly (I think) to protect his foster children’s reputations. I wasn’t sure what attracted Marina to him.

I also enjoyed the way the characters are connected in intricate and believable ways. The relationships between Jasper and Anthony, and between Anthony and Marina, matter significantly to both the primary and secondary romance. It doesn’t feel like they were forced into each other’s orbit at the author’s behest, but rather like you’ve just walked into an ongoing series of natural relations. The world is very believable in every way.

Another thing I liked about TEOI was its attempt to deal with some larger issues. There’s no reason at all why romance can’t do that. Marina and Jasper are extremely reflective and self-aware, and through their inner monologues, and their discussions with each other, questions are raised, albeit briefly and tentatively in most cases, about the meaning of aging, the value of propriety versus integrity, the definition of literature, and even (less successfully) the obligations of imperial nations to return artifacts plundered during their expansion (a belated attempt was made to paint Jasper to the colonizer and Marina, due to her Irish origins, as the colonized. This seemed to be a stretch).

A theme that ran through the text — between the on dits and Marina’s novels, lots of stories floated around — was the question of the stories we tell about ourselves, and that others tell about us: which story is ours? This made sense, especially when the writer, Marina, was thinking about it.

Marina and Jasper take to each other at first sight, embarking on a no strings affair, and while I really enjoyed their forthright, intelligent, and often amusing rapport, the cover copy led me to expect a very different relationship. I expected the tension in their relationship would be generated by Marina’s relationship with Anthony, (the blurb says “intrigue and betrayal”) and by the “edginess” of their sexual adventures (TEOI is billed as an “erotic novel”, and promises us “a dangerous voyage to the edge and beyond”).  In fact, not much tension is generated by either of those things. While I appreciated the attempt to make realistic use of their ages (difficulties getting out of tubs, out of clothes, sore hips, etc.), and understood what the author was going for when she had them making allusions to Greek art during sex, Little Jessica yawned and asked me to wake her when I got round to reading Kiss of a Demon King. My reaction made me wonder to what extent my own physical response, at least to erotic fiction, is tethered to social norms on the one hand, and/or to fixed expectations of the subgenre.

The relationship between Jasper and Marina doesn’t really progress at all, and they are so intellectual and thoughtful, only feeling emotions, when they do, through the lens of reflective distance, that I found myself not generating much emotion for them. Despite the amount of sex, this is just not a very passionate, emotional affair. Again, I wonder if I also felt like the microscope was on them so closely during their many bedroom scenes, that I didn’t really know either of them as well as I would have liked.

For example, here we are almost at page 200 (the affair began very early in the text) of a 300 page book, and we have this thought from Marina, who has just discovered that she will be outed by her blackmailer unless she sleep with him, and plans to leave town, and her lover, forever:

A pity, though, she thought as she entered her bedchamber and shut the door behind her, about her affair with Jasper Hedges. For she must admit she would have preferred if that had lasted out the Season.

The span of time between early spring and midsummer … as long as one needs …

Was that really all the time one needed?

She’d have plenty of time in France to answer that question.

But as for the following seven days in London — and especially the nights — she’d just have to make the time as memorable as she could.

If the heroine feels this way about the affair, why should I get worked up about it? Or is my expectation for drama and intensity in the genre based on the usual youth of the hero and heroine, or maybe (relatedly) on genre expectations that are unfairly restricting?

Now, something about the writing.

One of my favorite authors is Virginia Woolf. Woolf writes novels that are very conventional in many ways, but she emphasizes character, not plot. And the way she does character is also very unique: very internal, very little external action, very impressionistic. Woolf captures subjectivity like few others: we get to know Woolf’s characters as if we were sitting inside their minds, grabbing bits of thoughts and images as if they were floating by on a sea of consciousness. As I read The Edge of Impropriety, I imagined that Rosenthal had just come off a Woolf binge when she wrote it.

In TEOI, everyone is thinking all the time about their own thoughts and feelings, or about someone else’s. Sometimes this interiority worked wonderfully well. For example, here:

[Anthony] doubled the phaeton back upon the path to return to where they’d begun — to the very superior governess herself. Catching sight of her against a stand of graceless, leggy shrubbery, he was surprised to find himself oddly comforted by the picture she made. Perhaps because she, at least, had nothing of that forced husband-hunting brilliancy about her, as she stood tall, lonely, and pensive in the soft, spring afternoon light.

Notice the line, “he was surprised to find himself thinking”? That was constant. I was amazed these characters could walk across a room without knocking something over, so busy were they reflecting on what they were thinking and doing all the time. Here’s an example from Jasper’s head:

Faces swam before his inner eye: John’s, Celia’s, and now another one. He blinked. She didn’t belong in his thoughts right now. She oughtn’t be part of the us he’d been thinking about.

Even sex didn’t put a stop to the constant erudite inner monologue:

Damn, was that nasty little critical voice really going to intervene again, at this moment of all moments? It wasn’t fair — and yet the little voice wasn’t stupid. Because what it was telling her was, To hell with milk-and-water words like taken, Marina; the correct word for what this gentleman is doing is fucking you, and if you can’t call a fuck a fuck you shouldn’t call yourself a writer.

I understand that characters in an erotic novel have to think while they fuck. It wouldn’t be fun to read a blank page. But do they have to think about the things they think? This kind of reflexive self-consciousness is not our normal mode of being in the world — not even for writers and scholars. It feels more artificial and intrusive of the author to have Marina think about her inner voice, than to have her just think with it (“Marina realized she was not being taken, she was being fucked.”) (Ok, I’m no great shakes at writing, but you get the idea.)

And this example brings up another aspect of the writing that didn’t work for me: the obsession with words. It’s one thing for Marina to have this obsession (the difference between “fucking” and “taken” above), but does every other character have to have it?

Here’s Jasper, thinking about his clothing for the ball:

No wonder he’d procrastinated. Ha, procrastinated. Froze in terror would be more accurate.

And, again, from Jasper’s POV, during sex:

They both sputtered with laughter at that, though, at the silly little double entrendre of stiffening up.

Jaspar pondering the meaning of a sigh:

Yes, I’m ready, was what the sigh had signified — to be opened, explored, discovered.

Feckless Anthony thinks about words, too:

Sydney’s been telling him how, on a certain trip to Bath, Miss Hobart had persuaded (though terrorized might have been a better word) a particularly slatternly innkeeper into taking a hot flatiron…

And here:

When they stopped to change horses … he hoped he’d be able to get some advice about the vehicle’s right wheel, that sort of wobble he was feeling — well that unevenness anyway. One probably wouldn’t call it a wobble…

Even the stern governess gets in on the act:

And he had gotten the carriage moving again, even if neither of them knew for how long it would last. And figured out how to use the tool…

Troublesome word — she’d encountered it once in that coarse meaning in her father’s library. In a translation of one of Juvenal’s Satires, a Roman senator’s tool was held up for ridicule for its length…

The style of this book is breathy, lots of ellipses, lots of italics for emphasis, or for taking words out of the narrative to examine them. I think it either suits you or it doesn’t. Tumperkin had a great post not too long ago about the emotional connection a reader has to a romance novel. I recognize to some extent (I probably missed a lot) the many allusions, the metaphors, the lovely turns of phrase, and other elements things that make up very distinctive and very thoughtful writing. This is definitely not one of those books you read and think, “Hmm. Somebody needed to make a mortgage payment.” But –and I am willing to admit this may well be the result of prejudices about what I am going to be reading when I read romance — that emotional connection to the hero and heroine was not there for me this time around.

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