Archive for: March, 2010

Monday Morning Stepback: At What Point in the Writing Process Do Writers Think About What Will Sell?

Mar 15 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

1. Links of Interest

Post of the week: Super Wendy’s DNF review of a historical that tries to be many things but succeeds at none of them

DABWAHA has begun. Put on by Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Dear Author, it’s “a tournament of books that mimics the March Madness tournament of basketball. We’ve picked a slate of 64 books in 8 different categories to compete against each other through the next few weeks.” Entrants can win amazing prizes, including an iPad for the grand prize winner.

Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight has posted the PCA romance section program. Check it out, and see if you can spot:

1 erotic romance author who also happens to be a librarian
1 author who describes their work as “gay porn with plot”
1 mastermind behind a leading romance blog
1 romance author and multiple RITA award winner
1 koala hugger

A great post at the Millions: What About Genre, What About Horror? (hat tip Ann Somerville)

let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction: the academic novel, the comic novel, the adultery novel, the comic academic adultery-novel, the experimental novel, the novel of foreign travel or inward journey, of unexpected encounter, of breakdown, of alcoholism, of youth, of middle age, of a hundred different things so well-known and encoded that the fonts used for the titles and the authors’ names tell you as much as the flap copy.

Heather at Galaxy Express is Mad As Hell At Double Standards in Science Fiction Romance and She’s Not Going to Take it Anymore.

The F-Word is talking about the possibilities of self-publishing and POD:

Can print-on-demand and self publishing help feminists today continue the legacy of the suffragettes & the women’s liberation movement?

The Ecological Case for Ebooks at the Guardian Books Blog:

I’ve only managed to find one report – on the Kindle (by The Cleantech Group) – but it backs up suggestions that so long as e-readers are used as book replacements rather than supplements, they soon start to pay back in carbon terms.

Lynn at All About Romance is defending the first person narrator.

A cute feature at The New Yorker’s Book Bench, determining what your book shelf says about you. I’m thinking of sending in a picture of mine.

An interesting post on American Indian dress of the nineteenth century at Petticoats and Pistols.

2. How do art and commerce intersect in the writing process?

Let me preface this by noting that

(a) I don’t think this question applies only to genre fiction writers, and certainly not only to romance writers (It’s not just a question for “commercial art” in other words. You can hardly find an art form more steeped in class, money and celebrity than modern art, for example, which is considered very high art indeed. But I am asking it about the romance genre because that is what I am interested in.)

(b) I don’t think there is anything wrong with writing, among other reasons, to sell books, nor that doing so diminishes a book’s quality, although it might (people write for all sorts of reasons in addition to creating art, like being loved, avoiding boredom, revenge, impressing someone, etc. In this post I am focusing on writing to sell books, but I don’t for a minute think that’s the only possible non-artistic motivation.)

I was reading an erotic romance recently. It was a story I liked by an author I like. Then I noticed that the romance arc was pretty much resolved and I was at the halfway point. Hmmm. Sure enough, part 2 involved the introduction of another man, and the development of a menage relationship as an HEA. I felt the hero, as he had been portrayed, would never have consented to this, beyond maybe a one night experiment. I also felt the massive negative social and psychological consequences of arranging their lives in a way that most of society condemns were minimized in favor of several sex scenes. I kept thinking, “this would have been a great story if it had ended at the halfway point.” and I speculated — maybe unfairly — that the author wanted to throw in a menage, even though it did not fit the narrative, for other reasons. Like that menages sell.

I have this simplistic idea that thinking about sales (packaging, using social media to promote your book, marketing, etc.) should happen after the story is written, but I know that’s not possible. For example, suppose you want to write a Harlequin category romance. You would look at the guidelines of the particular line. And those guidelines are written based on what sells. So already, as a writer, the commercial aspect of writing is intertwined with the writing.

Also, you have to get an agent if you want to publish outside of categories or some e-pubs, don’t you? And an agent is looking not just for good stories, but good stories that sell. Same for editors.

Finally, if you go to RWA meetings or have any involvement with local chapters, you are being exposed to a culture of thinking about what will sell as a part of the writing process. For example Emily Bryan gave a workshop on adding humor to your books at RWA 2009 called “Neurotica: How adding Humor Can Jumpstart Your Career like Crazy”. The first bullet point is “Why Write Funny?” and the first reason is “market demand”.

Romance writers are artists, with all the good things that implies (all the things we value about art, like beauty, creativity, insight, pleasure, communication of emotions, values and principles, community building, etc, etc). And romance authors see themselves this way. When authors are interviewed, they talk about “giving birth to the characters in their heads”, and “being true to their own voice” and such. They rarely say “well, menage/BDSM/YA/zombies (name your trend of choice) is selling like hotcakes so I thought I would write one of those.”

So, I wonder where in the writing process writers think about this. (What makes it an even tougher question is that it is not easy to disentangle “writing for readers” from “writing to sell”.)

Does saleability function like a limiting set of pre-writing conditions, which, once determined, leave the writer free to forget about them, as long as she stays within their boundaries? Or is sales always one of the voices in a writer’s head as she types away?

Possibly it also matters where one is in her career. I wonder if a never published or early carer writer has to pay more attention to what sells. We all make fun of certain kinds of stories (think of the subjects of #romfail, for example), but if a veteran successful writer, named, say, Nora Crusie-Kinsale were to tell her editor she was penning a story about a leprechaun and his unicorn lover, would they balk?

I feel that as a reader I do sometimes detect “bandwagoning” when it is in conflict with art: when it is not true to an author’s voice or the story. But maybe the only difference is in how skilled the writer is. Maybe Nora Crusie-Kinsale could shrewdly look at the trends and write to them, and I wouldn’t know the difference.

What do you think?

3. Personal

Now that the transition to Read React Review has been completed, and spring break is over, I’ll likely return to my 3-4 days a week blogging schedule.

Our masks finally arrived from South Africa, (although only one of them is actually South African):

(This isn’t where we’ll keep them. We are in the process of redesigning of our first floor. Exciting stuff, I know.)


4. On the blog this week:

A review of Carolyn Crane’s Mind Games (early Wed)

A TBR pile historical review for Keishon’s TBR Challenge (late Wed — this will probably be Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran).

A post on ethical criticism late in the week.

HAPPY WEEK!

15 responses so far

HaMPO: Help A Moral Philosopher Out: Live Blogging An Academic Conference, Ethics of

Mar 14 2010 Published by under Academia, Blogs and blogging, Ethics

Welcome to my new feature, HaMPO, in which someone who has a PhD and 10 years professional experience in her field cannot answer what should be a pretty simple question:

Is it ok to blog an academic conference?

We are coming up on the National Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association annual meeting. Last year, I blogged several sessions. I ran into a few “issues”:

1. I got a point in one presenter’s paper wrong. I edited the post. But I only knew this because I had sent her a link to the post. She likely would not have seen it otherwise.
2. One presenter took me to task for not getting her permission. I removed my discussion of her paper from the blog at her request.
3. Some of the blog commenters got a little heated/dismissive in their remarks on papers they disagreed with, not exactly keeping to the tone of academic discourse

Last year there was a big issue at Cold Spring Harbor Lab when bloggers live blogged a conference there. Apparently CSHL has a set of clear rules for journalists, which include getting permission from the speakers in advance, but bloggers kind of went in under the radar. Now the rules are the same for bloggers and journalists (a more detailed discussion here). While I think the worries about live blogging even a restricted conference like the Biology of Genomes are overstated, and the benefits of blogging the presentations understated, the issues with presentations at CSHL might be a little different than issues at PCA. In particular, the CSHL conference is billed as a small forum for researchers to present work in progress in a particular kind of supportive environment. I would think you could attend another conference if you didn’t like the restrictions.

But back to PCA. There are no formal rules, so attendees like me will have to figure out for ourselves what is appropriate and what isn’t. Could a Bloggers’ Code of Ethics help?

Well, there’s this section:

Minimize Harm
Ethical bloggers treat sources and subjects as human beings deserving of respect.
Bloggers should:
• Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of information is not a license for arrogance.
• Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.

Here’s an excerpt on harm from another Code, from Upstart: The Magazine for Aspring Journalists

9. Consider the possible effects of every post you make

Bloggers should not set out to be intentionally hurtful to other individuals in the course of their blogging, in fact the ethical blogger should take steps to minimise harm to others wherever possible. Pro-blogger Jaime McD suggests that bloggers should adhere to the Golden Rule when blogging, namely, treat others as you would be treated yourself.

We can note first that both these codes map blogging ethics onto journalist ethics. I am not sure that is appropriate, especially for blogs like this one. So, for example, I may have special duties as a blogging academic that have nothing to do with journalism, or special duties relating to feminism, or literature as a public good, etc.

Could blogging about conference presentations cause harm? Four possibilities come to mind:

1. Maybe someone reading this blog will scoop the presenter’s WIP, stealing her thesis and getting an article into print first. The presenter loses a publication and time spent on research. This could affect her chances for getting tenure (this would not be an issue for presenters who are presenting published or forthcoming work, of course).

2. Blog commenters are harshly critical of the presenter, in a way no one in an academic audience would be. They write things like, “That is just stupid” or “What a dumbass!”. It is hurtful to the presenter — not a reaction she was prepared for, and she worries it will devalue her work if it is the first thing that shows up in a Google search.

3. It is not the presenter’s best work. In fact, it is really not ready for prime time. She hates the idea that it is online for posterity, when she plans to radically alter or abandon the research post conference.

4. The Golden Rule bit from the second code: suppose I gave a paper that, because of 1, 2, or 3, I did not want blogged. Would I expect any bloggers present to obtain my permission?

Moving away from harm, another way of looking at this is in terms of ownership of the material. The “consent” requirement suggests a kind of ownership. That is, as a blogger, I don’t have the right to do with that material what I want. It’s the presenter’s.

Most of these issues could be resolved by obtaining the speakers’ permission. I don’t think, after my experience last year, that I can assume consent. I also don’t think that sitting in the front row and typing furiously alerts the presenters to my intentions clearly enough that I could be confident they that have given tacit consent by not stopping me.

But then, how would consent be obtained? Hand everyone a business card after the conference, telling them about the blog and assuming they will tell me? Ask them directly? Email them?

I confess I hate the consent idea, mostly because it is time consuming enough to write the blogs, never mind chasing all of these people down, and partly because I do feel I shouldn’t have to obtain consent for reporting on something I experienced in a public forum. How is this different from tweeting about a rock concert (“they just played my favorite song, and they botched it!”). can a rock band really say “I was only playing to Providence. I didn’t want the whole world to know how we played that night!”

If I go ahead without consent, should at least give them a card or email them the URL and invite them to make corrections if necessary?

What about counterbalancing ethical concerns? Are there any ethical arguments in favor of blogging the conference? I tend to be skeptical about this in terms of my little blog, but here goes. Possibly the goods of disseminating information, and any ancillary goods that come from that, like contacts being made (someone reads this blog, finds out Julie Juniper is working on her topic, they get in touch, they collaborate or develop some other mutually beneficial exchange), or academics who were not able to attend the conference (maybe they were ill or couldn’t afford it) getting to stay updated in their field a bit, or nonacademics, i.e. most readers of RRR, benefiting by getting a glimpse into a different way of approaching their favorite books, and enjoying this or learning from it.

One penultimate question: I was slightly dismayed by some of the comments last year. This is a “worlds colliding” thing. No comment was beyond the pale in terms of blogging, but when I put my academic hat on, I was uncomfortable. Should I issue a warning on the post? Wade in and defend the presenter? Close comments? (the last of these would defeat most of the purpose of blogging the conference, though).

And a final one two: does it matter how detailed the blog posts are (maybe I can defuse criticism and reap the benefits if I merely summarize briefly)? And does it matter, ethically speaking, if I offer my own critique (positive and negative) of the paper?

PS. I’ve blogged about this before, but as you can see, I am still unsettled. Also, I was joking about HaMPO being a new feature. It’s not. But I would love your opinions on this!

22 responses so far

Notes on An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (part 3 of 3)

Mar 12 2010 Published by under Academia, Genre musings

A book discussion of John Roberts’ An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens, GA; University of Georgia Press), 1990. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.

This post covers the last chapters, 9-11. With my commentary in [brackets].

Chapter 9 Literary and Paperback Bookscapes

The distinctions within  “learned” and the “unlearned” bookscape differ:
1. they recognize formally different texts (junk fiction is a “literature without texts”)
2. they have differing conceptions of the author
3. their genres differ in visibility (a “literature without genres”)

In short, while both have texts and genres, the fascination with the literary landscape is primarily about texts, and fascination with paperbacks is primarily about genre (system).

The Literary Bookscape: the Variorum Text

The variorum text is the text with commentary
The commentary developed because learned readers want to know what other learned readers see in a text
“Literature” is a collective term for individual works

The unlearned bookscape shows no interest in commentary “more sophisticated than reviewers’ brief recommendations and warnings” (hey, at least he didn’t say “grunts and howls!)

Literary commentary is “anything that learned readers find interesting” (p. 193) [are you dizzy yet from the circular argument here? Junk fiction is what doesn't have commentary -- the grunts and howls, oops, I mean "recommendations and warnings" of junk fiction readers do not count. So what is commentary? it is "anything that learned readers, i.e. readers of literature, find worthy of saying.]

The gateway to the paperback bookscape is the supermarket, the gateway to the literary bookscape is the classroom.

When a body of literature begins to form around a junk fiction text, it is now being accepted as “canonical” (i.e. has left the realm of junk fiction)

The varorium text , which does not exist in the paperback world, is why literature readers often find junk fiction “thin”. Paperback readers think it is a kind of “reading decadence” to turn away form a text to read other texts about that text.

The Paperback Bookscape: Writers Versus Authors

An author is “uniquely creative” not merely “creative”. An author has a unique style of his or her own.

A writer “makes stories for people — good stories, of course, even excellent stories, stories with truth in them sometimes, and beauty, but not the kinds of texts being made my those who would be authors.”

[Ok, so what is this textual difference? Exactly?]

Readers are in awe of authors, but not of writers.

Paperback writers, whose name is a “label” and not an authorial identity, get to play 4 games:
1. The disguised writer — they use several open names (literary writers at most use one). They can write in very different voices for each pen name, and readers may only enjoy the author under one “label” (for example, Nora Roberts versus JD Robb)
2. The writing team — literary writers just do not do the Cruise/Meyer thing
3. The ghost writer — a paperback writer can die and ghost writers can continue with a series, without upsetting readers. [hmm. Can you think of any case of a romance writer doing this? The closest I can think of is when you have a husband/wife writing team, and the spouse dies and the other spouse carries on the writing under the same pen name.]
4. The jam session – literary writers do not partake of these, but junk fiction writers will do all kind of riffs, for example, all contributing tot a story on one theme,

“[genre fiction] readers do savor the work of individual writers … but none would mistake the critical discourse of the paperback bookscape with that of any of the learned bookscapes (p. 199).”

The Genres in the Two Bookscapes

Here Roberts criticizes the way literary folks use the (mis)use the word “genre”. For Roberts, it is not a class, but a tradition, “a system of changing rules” (p. 200)

Time is everything to the distinction between literature and genre fiction. Literature is always a varorium text because it takes at least 50 years until a text is canonical. Literature readers cannot experience a text the way genre readers do, dynamically, in the present.

A few random points Roberts makes here:
–paperback reading is effortless because it is of our times (as described in an earlier chapter)
–genre sticks out to junk readers because readers read more of them, and can see the system more clearly (connect to the relative ease of reading genre fiction)
–the significance of the “human sources” of the stories is much weaker in genre fiction – whose writers think of themselves as “artist-craftsman” as “professionals”, rather than as “artists-prophets” [I found this last point very interesting. I've posted before on the question of whether writing counts as a profession.

[Clearly genre fiction writers want to be considered professional. Do literary writers feel the same way, or does the word "professional" connote a set of standards that cramp the style of the "uniquely creative" author?]

Just as literary fiction cannot be read dynamically, so it it cannot be read in terms of genre, because the genres have often floated away by the time a text is canonical.

“the paperback bookscape rarely offers its readers the monumental text, and when it does they may be annoyed that the text is asking them to give it careful consideration.” (p. 203)

[Again, no definition of "monumental" is forthcoming from Roberts, who asks this word to do too much work to leave it undefined. He does give examples of texts that were "monumental to begin with", such as The Iliad, Goethe's Faust, and George Eliot's Middlemacrh).

Chapter 10: Reading Thickly

Literary readers "study", while junk fiction readers "read thickly".

Roberts begins by quoting Janice Radway (about whose book Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight has recently given us a thoughtful refresher), and this is very interesting in light of my recent thinking about fantasy in romance reading, and what a large role it plays for many women readers. Radway argued that romance readers don;t care about anything but story, and that they speak as though story were "a transparent window opening out onto an already existing world" (Radway, p. 189, as quoted by Roberts, p. 205)

But Roberts says readers like those Radway interviewed are downplaying the complexity of their reading.

Roberts surmises that it is the private nature of genre reading that has hindered the consciousness on the part of such readers of how much attention they actually do pay to things besides "story", such as language and implications. He suggests that more public reading and more commentary on paperbacks would generate heightened awareness.

Stories

Here Roberts takes the gloves off and says what he has been hinting at the whole book:

"The novel recognized as canonical literature also tells a story, of course, and almost always the story it offers is superior. Some apologists for the paperbacks become angry when critics say this, but it is true." (p. 207)

[I don't quite get it. If all he means is that these are the best books written at a certain time, as determined by reader reaction and the springing up of learned commentary, then it's tautological. If he means they are objectively superior, then he needs an argument.]

Information

A bit repetitive, as he has already told us genre readers get information when they read. Here he emphasizes that it is not the information itself but the pleasure they take in it — even when it is useless– that matters.

Forms

Also repetitive. Roberts reminds us that genre readers enjoy formal elements of genre, although these features may be “less purely formal” (p. 211).

Writers

Here Roberts seems to take back his earlier assertion that genre writers do not have distinctive voices. The best of them do, and he names Heinlein, Agatha Christie and Chester Himes. Still, readers do not “reverence” paperback writers, they “merely care” for them (p. 213) [I could have a feminist ethics field day with Roberts' privileging of "reverence" over "care" but I will spare you.]

What does it mean to “follow” a genre?

1. Genre Mapping

The main thing is recognizing what is new in a genre and what is not. New genre readers get excited over the wrong things: what distinguishes the genre from other genres. But seasoned genre readers get excited about what distinguishes this genre texts from the others.

Literary readers do not do this, because “the reading of primary texts by genre is denied to any but the most specialized readers”. (p. 215)

The literary bookscape is not arranged by genre.

2. Canon Disturbances

This is another source of pleasure to genre readers. We enjoy the drama of the lists and the rankings and the changes which are their own meta stories [I think Roberts would view interest in the AAR list of best 100 romances, or the RITA awards, in this light.]

3. Genre Mutations

Self-explanatory — we enjoy these too.

4. Sociability

Roberts notes that nonreaders think readers are “withdrawing into themselves” when they read (p. 218)

Roberts argues that readers are getting a “private sociability”, a “virtual fellowship” of character, readers, and writers

Two kinds of fellowship:
a. Fandom — the folks who meet up and have ‘zines, etc. these don’t interest Roberts
b. “virtual fellowships of readers who sense one another’s existence but do not know one another individually” (p. 219)

“Most readers of pulp fiction do not know anyone who reads in the same genres they read; and, everything considered, they woudl prefer not to know or be known.” (p. 219)

[the first part of this describes my real life, and the second did describe my attitude to romance reading for the first year or two]

Some think of readers as dupes of the publishing industry. But these readers are powerful, not servile: they should get the credit and/or blame for pulp fiction.

Roberts distinguishes between “arbiters/critics” (literature), and “guides/reviewers” (pulp fiction).

“Simply put, critics try to make the world better. Reviewers try to make the world happier.”

[John Stuart Mill is rolling in his grave right now over what this implies about the relationship of happiness to the good.]

[Although ... when's the last time a genre fiction blogger called herself a "critic"?]

[Roberts gets wrong a lot of what he says about reviewers. For example, that they don't talk about books they do not enjoy. OTOH, it used to be rare for romance readers to do that, didn't it? I think taking his own experience a the only possible experience of junk fiction did not serve him well at all.]]

There is “no instruction in taste” in pulp fiction, because there is no commentary or criticism, and readers like it that way. They want to gush about their favorite authors, not criticize.

Roberts notes that part of the “virtual fellowship” [we read that phrase so differently today with Twitter and blogging, huh?] is with the author, and as pulp fiction readers read an author’s works, they come to be invested in the narrative of the author, her career successes and failures (not commercial so much as her struggle with her material. As when a writer tweets “finished 100 words”, or “stuck as a scene”). [I see this very strongly in Romanceland, and I think it explains in part what I originally found baffling: romance readers' interest in publishing.]

Roberts admits that these are not just stories for tired brains, as he said in an earlier chapter, but offer other mental pleasure,s including emotional ones

Both “study reading” and “thick reading” offer:
–expanded alertness
–awareness of story
–awareness of texture and design
–awareness of the human source of the story,a dn of other readers
–awareness of a personal canon of valued texts

So how is “study reading” different? It is more a matter of emphasis. For example, the “text yields more” to study reading, and in study reading there is more attention paid to the author. [this is not all that clear -- he admits in the next chapter (p. 250) that he really doesn't tell us what "study reading is". This seems to me to be a rather large gap.]

A genre is neither a formula nor a set of formulas although it contains formulas. Genre reading is only 100 years old or less.

Roberts ends this chapter by rejecting the analogy that literary readers are gourmands and junk fiction readers are gobblers. This sounds good until he writes that the better analogy to junk reading is “half-aware reading of political slogans, one-line jokes, advertising tags, greeting card sentiments, and those other messages that make up so large a part of a landscape saturated with visual language.” (p. 228)

Chapter 11: Reading Learned Essays and Watching Television

Roberts says that a literary bookscape is a learned bookscape that is “prepared by experts for the profit and pleasure of amateurs” (p. 233). What he means by expert is “anyone who has command of a special knowledge” and by “amateur” “anyone who is driven by a special kind of love”. It is not a competence based distinction.

Fro the expert, the bookscape is “a linkage and overlapping of intellectual neighborhoods” (and Roberts uses the MLA’s distinctions as an example), while for the amateur “it is a heroic landscape of mountains and monuments, of rich valleys and awesome waterfalls, [etc.]” amateurs wander where ever interest and love take them, while experts stay put. Experts have a residence in the literary landscape, amateurs travel it.

When experts follow contemporary literary commentary, they are at that moment most like genre readers. They are reading by genre, and everything they do has its parallel in the thick reading of the junk fiction reader. Fro example, just as you have genre readers who are “exclusivists”, and will only read one genre, you have experts who will only read criticism of one author. And just as genre readers “follow” a genre, so experts “follow” the commentary on their chosen author or subfield, and they get as much of a charge as genre readers do when it changes.

Television

I skimmed this a bit, but on p. 247 Roberts quotes Kathe Robin (“Tete a Tete”. Rave Reviews 13 June/July 1988, p. 73), who wrote about readers’ complaints about romance novel covers: [Is "Rave Reviews" the older incarnation of Romantic Times?] Robert’s point here is that “a book is an object with physical properties that tell us what it is, cue our reading, and — sometimes — please and amuse us in their own right” (p. 248).

In case you are curious his point about TV is the same as his point about literary scholarship: that it, too, is a literature without texts, just liek genre fiction, an “art without masterpieces”.

He concludes the book by saying that if the institutions of art faded away, we would still find and study the masterpieces because they repay that kind of study. [So Roberts is clearly working, as we've suspected all along, with some kind of objective account of aesthetics.]

Just because genre fiction doesn’t repay study doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read it. Junk books “reward us very richly indeed when we are content to read them.”

8 responses so far

Review: Something About You, by Julie James

Mar 11 2010 Published by under Reviews

With her first two novels, Julie James gave us contemporary romance for adults: witty dialogue, intelligent humor, incredible sexual tension, and flawed but lovable characters to care about and root for. I’m happy to report that Something About You makes it a hat trick for Ms. James.

This is one of those reviews I have a hard time writing because there are so many other great reviews out there. James has a comprehensive list — all glowing — here. So this will be short.

As the book opens, Assistant US Attorney Cameron Lynde is being kept awake by loud sex in the next door hotel room. Eventually she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, the place is swarming with cops and the FBI: the woman next door has been murdered. When FBI Special Agent Jack Pallas walks in, Cameron’s heart sinks: this is the guy who went undercover to nab a Chicago crime boss, at great personal cost (he was tortured for two days when his cover was blown) only to have Cameron’s office decide not to try the case. When Jack unleashed his rage at Cameron on national TV, he was punished by being transferred to Nebraska, a second insult for which he blames her. In fact, Cameron’s involvement in both the dismissal of the case and Jack’s career trajectory was much more benign that Jack knows, but she is sworn to secrecy about the details.

This review might make it seem as if a Big Misunderstanding provides most of the conflict in this book, but that would be too simple. For one thing, Cameron and Jack each did something to the other that, no matter how you slice it, was hurtful. For another, as they rewrite the narrative of their shared past, another external conflict looms large to take its place: Cameron, having looked out her hotel room’s peephole to spy the killer leaving the room, is the only witness. This puts her in mortal danger, and Jack and his team are assigned to guard her.

I normally don’t really enjoy romantic suspense, but I did really like this one, because the focus stayed on Jack and Cameron, because there were no “let’s take a moment to grope each other before the gun toting killer rounds the corner” scenes, and because the suspense plot didn’t make me feel like the author thought I was dumb as a bag of rocks. I would describe the suspense plot as simple but effective, much the way I would describe the In Death suspense plots. I especially liked the passages from the killer’s point of view: the scene when he remembers the woman (who happened to be the paid lover of a US Senator) as “the mess he’d left behind” was chilling, since he wasn’t a depraved maniac, but someone who had, over time, gotten his hands dirtier and dirtier to the point where he didn’t know where they ended and the evil messes he made began. (and that’s as much bad poetical writing as you’ll get today, folks. I swear.).

James’ first two books felt lighter and snappier, more like the screenplays the author used to write (although James still works in a cute movie reference to It Happened One Night, when Cameron and Jack have to share a hotel room, but agree to stay on opposite sides of a “Wall of Jericho”). This book was heavier due to the seriousness of Cameron’s situation, the long shadow of the past, and Jack’s personality, which is much more typical alpha than James’s first two heroes. James has a little bit of meta fun with this, having Cameron use the romance buzz word “glowering” to describe the dark looks Jack throws around. While Jack’s protectiveness made sense given the situation and his job description, sometimes he got a bit too macho, as when he chided Cameron about a revealing dress, and about her close relationship with her gay male best friend.

It wasn’t clear to me why they ended up having sex when they did, although for anyone wondering, after reading James’s rather chaste first and second novels, whether she can write a more explicit scene and maintain both her trademark style and the sexual tension for the rest of the book, the answer is a definite yes.

There is a great deal of very effective humor in Something About You, not only in the exchanges between Cameron and Jack, but in their interactions with friends and colleagues. For example, here’s Cameron talking with her best friend Amy about Jack:

Cameron peered back up at Amy in the mirror. “Besides, I generally have this rule about not sleeping with a guy until he’s taken me out on some kind of date.”
“When he saves your life, I think you can bypass that part.”
“He did have dinner delivered the other night, although I think the FBI picked up the tab. Do you think I can count that?

Three last comments, one negative, one positive, one a question. First, although I liked the characterization of the murderer, some language was added in the second half of the book that veered into “I hate women” territory, a catch all motive that wasn’t really needed here and comes off as cliched to me whenever I encounter it in fiction.

Second, the characters go to some lengths to not make moral judgments about the murdered prostitute. Despite having dirty hands herself in ways that are revealed in the book, she was always presented as a human being worthy of a better life and better death than she got. That was something I appreciated very much.

Third, in each James book, if I remember correctly, the heroine has an androgynous name (Taylor, Payton, and Cameron) and has a career — lawyering — she loves and is good at. By the end of each book, the heroine is not only happily in love, but she has had some major, unexpected, but richly deserved career success. Finally, in each book, the heroine and hero are related in some way by their work.

So, I think it is fair to say that deliberately intertwining a fantasy about work success with the fantasy of romantic success is a James trademark. Is she unique in this? Or have I just not read enough contemporary romance?

3 responses so far

The “hot men” segment of the romance bloggerverse

Mar 09 2010 Published by under Blogs and blogging

Just a few random observations. But here is one thing I am NOT saying. And I am going to bold it and set it out so there is no confusion:

I am NOT criticizing romance readers for whom fantasy is a part — even a large part — of their engagement with the romance genre.

I think almost everyone who reads romance recognizes at least some fantasy element is operating for them at least some of the time. It may be as simple as “I don’t have to think for the moment about the stresses/challenges in my life as a mom/engineer/wife/doctor/CEO/caretaker/NASCAR driver/backyard chicken tamer” or “I don’t have to worry these characters will end up miserable or dead”.

But there are two kinds of fantasy engagement with romance, especially romance novel heroes, or real men who are supposed to represent them, that are fairly prevalent on line that I wanted to point out in this post.

1. Treating the characters as “real” in some sense outside the text

My first romance novel experience as an adult was J.R. Ward’s Lover Revealed. It was published in March 2007, which coincided with my spring break. I wanted to read some pulp fiction, something I had not had time to do for years, so I grabbed it off the drugstore shelf while on vacation in Florida. I was immediately hooked, and went to the author’s forums to check them out. I noticed right away the tendency of the “Cellies” to treat the characters as real. They gushed over the heroes, fantasized about them, used erotic pictures of men supposed to represent the BDB for their signatures, and generally interacted with the novels in a way that felt very alien to me.

Here are a couple of the ground rules at the J.R. Ward message boards, which give a sense of the tendencies to which some Cellies are prone:

10. Brother/Angel Ownership- There is NO Brother or Angel ownership. It will not be tolerated. The board is here for everyone to enjoy spending time with each other, J.R. Ward, and the Brotherhood. Let’s remember the Brothers’ books are written for everyone’s enjoyment.

11. Role-playing- There is to be NO role-playing here on the boards. It’s a form of copyright infringement and will not be tolerated.

Recently, another paranormal romance author, Karen Marie Moning, had to issue an Official Facebook Statement, and create official Facebook characters, because unofficial Facebook characters were harassing each other.

For those of you who wrote to tell me that my “unofficial” characters were being unkind to each other in ways that disturbed you, and that these unofficial Facebook pages—rather than making you interested in the books, were making you actively dislike the series and my characters—you now have a safe place to visit.

Lots of romance websites devote some or all of their time to this kind of fantasy. For example, DIK Ladies Rule is premised on the idea that bloggers can fantasize about bringing romance novel heroes to a desert island. Their tagline is “the island where women can go to escape their every day lives … where their favorite books are waiting … and the heroes are naked.”

And lots of other blogs fantasize in this way, too, such as Reviews by Jessewave, Leontine’s Book Realm, Smexy Books (with a page on “Smexy’s boyfriends”, with romance novel heroes). There’s even a Build Your Own Book Boyfriend meme. [I don't mean to single anyone out. I just randomly picked these, as examples. There are many more I could have chosen.]

2. Fantasizing about the cover models, about real men who might resemble the characters in the text, or about handsome men (especially actors) in general, as part of the romance reader discourse. For example, Penelope’s Romance Reviews, which has a “Beard of the Day”, and “Most Romantic Beard” posts, The Naughty Bits, Lust in Time, etc.

A lot of bloggers in romance will just do a post of good looking men in their underwear. When you think about it, what does that really have to do with romance novel reading? It seems connected to the way romance works as one kind of fantasy. If it were just about visualizing the text, then there would also be pictures of women, and ancestral estates, but there usually aren’t.

I tend to gravitate to bloggers who are more like me — fewer images in general, less emphasis on fantasy, more emphasis on romance as fiction.

This is not an invidious distinction. A lot of bloggers engage in multiple ways on their blogs with the genre: they’ll have the hot men, and then they’ll do a post on whitewashing of book covers, or the marginalization of GLBTQ romance, or they’ll write careful reviews. I think of Katiebabs as someone who “blogs across the board” like this. And any of the blogs mentioned above (so, for example, I get a lot of Apple news from Teddypig’s blog, and good reviews from Smexy Books, etc.). And while I would guess the “hot men” blogger may tend to focus on steamier books — “romantica” and the like — that’s not necessarily the case.

It’s also not an invidious distinction because there are bloggers like me who maybe don’t do much of it, but at least sometimes read those “hot men” posts or enjoy the images.

My personal tendency is to focus on my own preferred type of engagement. And my other tendency is to downplay the fantasy aspect, because it can feed pernicious stereotypes of the romance reader. But then, what doesn’t feed those stereotypes? As a professor who reads romance, I am a walking stereotype of a repressed bluestocking, right? Still, I think it would be interesting to think more about these types of overt fantasy engagements, because they are so obviously an important component of the way many women engage with romance. (And romance is not alone in this: speculative fiction is perhaps (?) the closest cousin to romance with regard to its fantasy function. Maybe this is connected to paranormal romance being the subgenre that jumped out when I was thinking about fantasy.)

I have read somewhere the notion that posting pictures of men in their undies (er, they probably don’t call them that, do they?) smacks of exploiting men. Certainly whole books have been written about the oppressive effects of the Adonis Complex, etc. I would have to think more about that.

On the other hand, from a feminist perspective, just as we sometimes talk about sexy romances and erotica as positive reclamation of women’s sexuality, maybe bloggers who are having fun with “hot men” — and they are having fun, a concept with which I am not especially familiar — are doing that too.

Then there’s just the personal comfort factor. The impetus for this post was actually finding images this week of full frontal male nudity in my Google reader, with no warning. I felt such bloggers had crossed a line, and deleted them from my reader.

It’s a testament to the diversity and flexibility and richness of the genre that any given text can serve many kinds of readers and many kinds of engagement.

37 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: Lots o’ Links

Mar 08 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

All the online happenings … a week late.

Links of Interest:

Yesterday I interviewed Milena, a Croatian romance and SFF reader, who has written an article on Romanceland to be published in Croatia’s Centre for Women’s Studies journal.

It’s Read an Ebook week. Books on the Knob –which will round up the deals daily — explains:

For those who are new to ebooks, this is a promotion started by Rita Toews, where ebook publishers and authors try to entice us to try them out by offering free and discounted books.

A writer’s blog I have been enjoying a lot lately is Tracey Cooper-Posey’s/Teal Ceagh’s. She’s an erotic romance author who blogs about such topics as The Perils of Writing Erotic Romance and Love ‘em or Hate ‘em — What Amazon is Doing for the e-Book Business is Phenomenal.

10 Rules For Criticism from A Commonplace Blog (inspired by the Guardian’s 2 part series featuring advice from 29 contemporary writers, each of whom was asked to produce ten rules. It took some very undeserved flak, IMO. Why would anyone think that writing is the only human endeavor that successful veterans can’t offer advice about?). Here’s a snippet:

(1.) You are not a makeup artist. You shouldn’t be applying anything, least of all someone else’s “system.”

(2.) In fact, give up the dream of a system altogether. There is no general system or theory of literature; there are only particular texts, with their own particular system of law, which demand a particular respect.

The Guardian Books Blog on why The Best Contemporary Japanese Novel is a Manga (The Legend of Koizumi, by Hideki Ohwada).

When’s the last time you read an A+ review? Here’s one by Sandy M at TGTBTU on Sylvia Day’s The Stranger I Married.

The big action in feminist philosophy online last week was reaction to the NPR report on recent research on sexual assault on college campuses. Very distressing. Here’s the summary from NPR of the research:

There’s a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so.
…
It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it’s not. “They are very forthcoming,” he says. “In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They’re quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag.”

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

The NPR comment thread is over 300 comments long. Then Matthew Yglesias posted on it, and his ambiguous comments upset a lot of people, and spawned another huge thread (he has since updated and clarified). See this post at Feministe for a feminist take on the original Yglesias wording.

The American Scholar is talking about Reading in the Digital Age (from Books Inq.). It’s very long — it makes my blog posts look like haiku — but it’s a thoughtful meditation on what is changing and what might be at stake. Here’s a passage:

MY REAL WORRY has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking, the kind that would depend on a machine-drive harvesting of facts toward some specified end. Ideally, of course, we have both, left brain and right brain in balance. But the evidence keeps coming in that not only are we hypertrophied on the left-brain side, but we are subscribing wholesale to technologies reinforcing that kind of thinking in every aspect of our lives. The digital paradigm.

Marg at Reading Adventures is talking about the Book Blogger Hop. 89 bloggers have already signed up, but few from romance.

A New Yorker review of Sexual Ethics for the New Millenium, a new book by psychology professor Paul R. Abramson. Here are the principles: do no harm, celebrate sex, be careful, know yourself, speak up and speak out, and throw no stones. Got it? Now you can go have all the sex you want, minus that unpleasant moral residue!

A NSFW commentary at Racialicious on a series of racialized, hypersexualized images of Disney princes. Sometimes I am really happy to say “your kink is not my kink”. And this is one of those times.

Finally, Steampunk Week begins today over at The Book Smugglers with an Introduction and Primer.

Personal:

The governor announced that the university system budget for next year is projected to be $6 million higher than previously thought. No one knows whether it is too late to save the two “mystery” programs in my college that have already been targeted for elimination, but it definitely relieves the pressure for next year. I’m still holding my breath until we get official word.

This week is my second week of spring break, although I actually have a very busy schedule at my other job. I have a presentation on fluctuating mental capacity, one of the hardest things to deal with as a clinician or an ethicist (and no, not MY fluctuating mental capacity, the patient’s!). There’s also work on code status for brain dead patients who are organ donors. While always treating the body with respect, at what point can we focus solely on the needs of the recipient, and stop treating the dead patient as a living being? Finally, I am coming up on my annual review, which means I have to subject myself to a battery of diabolical computer modules on things like blood borne pathogens and moving the heavy patient. Somebody decided I had to complete all the same modules a physician’s assistant completes, which is super fun because, you know, Aristotle and Hegel talked all the time about pharmacy formularies, interpreting labs tests, and suturing. Like lima beans, I know it is good for me, but I do not enjoy it.

Spring is here (by which I mean temps in the high 40s). We’re getting the garden ready and I couldn’t be more pleased we’ve made the turn in the road away from winter. (Now watch, there will be a huge snow storm!)

The WifFi only iPad is available for preorder March 12 and will ship April 3. Units with 3G will be available a bit later. This really is not “personal.” Because I am not buying one. Really. I’m not.

On the blog this week:

The third and final installment of my summary of An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, followed by a summary and discussion of the first two chapters of Feminist Popular Fiction by Merja Makinen. I’ll also write a review of Julie James’s latest, Something About You, because I think my Romanceland passport will be revoked if I don’t.

Finally, a big THANK YOU to everyone for your help with transitioning to Read React Review. And thank you for sticking with it!

8 responses so far

Interview With A Croatian Feminist, Anarchist, Speculative Fiction Writer, and Avid Genre Fiction Reader

Mar 07 2010 Published by under Academia, Blogs and blogging, Feminist contentions, Genre musings

Milena Benini, a regular reader of this blog, won my last contest. When I realized I had to send her prize to Croatia, I let out a blood curdling scream and hid my wallet,  took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. It turns out Milena is, in her words, an

anarchist, blogger, cat-feeder, cook, dog-minder, editor, feminist, fire-horse, human being, illustrator, journalist, mum, mum, reader, Sagittarius, theoretician, translator, web-mistress, wife, woman.

I couldn’t fit all that on the address label, so Milena kindly agreed to answer a few questions for RRR. She’s also a writer of speculative fiction and has written a paper on the online romance community for her workplace, the Centre For Women’s Studies (more on both below).

1. Say a little about your blog and what you do there.

Well, my tag-line includes women, genre and politics. I have a whole group of posts about women I like and/or admire, particularly early sufragettes, but also some contemporary stars — anyone whose life and work I happen to appreciate. I usually try to post about them on their birthdays, with the idea that, some day, I’ll have a whole “feminist calendar”.

I also write about genres; my primary focus is SF (interpreted as Speculative Fiction, not just sci-fi), but I also talk about mysteries and romances. Oh, and I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly a romance. :)

I sometimes also talk about politics, although that’s mostly related to open-source issues and stuff like that, as well as women’s issues, and sometimes anarchism.

1b. Can you say more about your position on open source?

Writing this on a computer running Ubuntu and having given away a novel under a CC license, I think I can safely say that I am very much in favour of open source. FOSS has a pretty strong community in Croatia, although, as is the case everywhere, I think, a lot of people tend to keep away from it out of habit, or fear of the unknown. There is also the fact that people are often suspicious about things they get for free, because we’re very much conditioned to think that worth can only be measured in money. But there is also a growing number of people who can see the value of things like open source or creative commons. Mostly thanks to Cory Doctorow, probably. :)

2. Is there any way for those who do not read Croatian to read it? I tried Google translator but … unless you are in fact a drunk monkey at the keyboard, I cannot believe it does your words justice.

Oh, yes, Google translator is an endless source of humour, but very little correct translation. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there’s a simple way to resolve this.

3. How long have you been reading romance novels? What are your favorites?

Just about all my life. There is a very famous Croatian author, Marija Juric Zagorka, who wrote about a dozen historical romances — and they’re real monster-novels, one of six and one of twelve tomes! — and that’s where I started. Then I went on to the classics such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. When I started reading in English, I also passed through a — I suppose I should blush now — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss period. In my defense, I was very young at the time. :) . Then there was Georgette Heyer, of course!

I love Loretta Chase, Patricia Gaffney, Jennifer Crusie for the humour, and I also enjoy Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, especially the first trilogy; Robin McKinley is also among my favourites… oh, there are too many to mention them all. I’ll also read anything with vampires in it — I even read Twilight! Research purposes and all that (I’m writing a book about parallels between vampire and spy fiction) — but, unfortunately, there aren’t that many really good vampire romances.

4. Do you read in English? Translations?

I read mostly in English, especially since translations of romances are few and far between in Croatia, not to mention usually more expensive (smaller print runs make for expensive books!). Furthermore, nowadays, I read a lot on my mobile phone, and there are almost no e-books in Croatian.

As for Croatian romances, I’m afraid the answer is — not any more. Apart from Zagorka, whom I have already mentioned (she was–and still is — probably the best-loved Croatian female author of all times, a very interesting woman who managed to also be a proto-feminist and one of the first female journalists in this part of Europe, and when she got poor in her old age her fans got together to feed and clothe her — a fascinating story, really), there was one woman who was pretty famous as a romance author some thirty years ago, but she stopped writing about a decade ago.

Oh, and there is one woman who writes under an English pseudonym and, allegedly, has a dayjob as a waitress. But we’re a small country (only 4.5 million people) and books are not a good way to make a living. In addition, romances are still mostly despised — even when there are actual romances translated, they’re never marketed as such. SEP is marketed as general fiction in Croatia, and Nora Roberts is invariably shelved in the mystery section.

5. What are some attitudes towards romance novels you’ve encountered?

Well, I have to stress that mine is not a typical situation: I am very much a part of the SF community — which is a lot stronger in Croatia than the romance community — and I don’t have any problems there, because we’re all outsiders together, in a way. And people in the SF community — at least here in Croatia — are not afraid of romance novels; in fact, there are several people who also read them, and when I post about romance novels, people generally react favourably.

Also, at the Centre for Women’s Studies, my interest in any genre was always welcomed, but they are all great women anyway.

6. Can you say a little more about the speculative fiction community in Croatia?

I think it’s more or less the same everywhere: SF-fans are viewed as those strange people who walk around with false pointy ears and recite poetry in Klingon. Even if you don’t speak a word of Klingon, you get marked as such once you publicly proclaim your interest in SF…

In Croatia, the SF community is something of an exception in its attitude towards women: for example, our national SF-award, SFera, has the largest percentage of female award-winners of all Croatian literary awards. I understand that this is something of an anomaly, caused probably by the fact that our fandom was started by grownups and not teenagers, so the more mature outlook rubbed off on the following generations.

7. What is the difference between “SFF” and “speculative fiction”?

Well, “speculative fiction” is the broader term. People first began using it when the borderlines between genres started getting blurred — particularly in the seventies, with New Wave — and it’s getting more and more used today because it’s often impossible to tell if something is science fiction or fantasy. When you look at people like China Mieville, for example, it’s impossible to define him as “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “horror”: there are elements of all three in his work. And “speculative fiction” is a nice umbrella-term for all the genres that, at heart, start from the question “what if”. A lot of people who are interested in one thing are also interested in another, whether as readers, writers, or both. So it makes a lot more sense to use one name for the whole thing.

8. Can you name a couple of your favorites in mystery and speculative fiction?

In mystery, I am a great admirer of the grandes dames — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh — and from the newer authors, I have to single out Martha Grimes, who is doing weird and fantastic and wonderful things while staying strictly within her genre. And SF is my first love, so the list is very long… Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Moorcock for the classics; Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod and Cory Doctorow for the new voices; Steven Brust as an all together great guy; ditto for Neil Gaiman. And Robin Mckinley and Melissa Michaels, who also do strange and wonderful things. I think I better stop now…

9. Is there a Croatian romance community?

Not really, I’m afraid. There are two or three blogs that cover romance as one of their interests, but only one blog that I know of that focuses exclusively on romance. And in the “real life” sense, there’s nothing.

10. What did you say in the article you wrote?

Well, it’s basically an overview of the development of the romance community on the Internet, and it includes a (very) short history of the genre itself. The article will be published a special edition of the Centre’s magazine “Treca” (The Third, in female form — Croatian is much more gender-specific than English). There was a whole semester devoted to popular culture intersecting with feminist issues, and my article is part of that.

I tried to show that the Internet has given an opportunity to smart, educated women who like romance to get together and discuss their genre in a way which was difficult before the Internet. And I also tried to outline the way in which the genre has started looking at itself, after long being the object of fascination and disgust for outsiders. I find this somewhat similar to what happened in SF — at one point, SF fans got fed up with outsiders telling them what their genre was like, and started developing their own theory, combining it with the “official” academic approaches and reaching new and exciting things. And now we see a similar process at work in the romance community, which has to deal with the added problem of romance being, to a very large extent, a “female” genre, which is often the reason why it gets so much criticism, regardless of whether the bias is shown openly or not.

The thing is, although genre lit in general has not been overlooked in Croatian academic circles, romance is usually almost completely left out in such analyses, or is dealt with in a very offhandish manner. That’s why I was trying to give people a place to start, especially young women. I mentioned your analysis of ethics in Patricia Gaffney as an example of how romance can be approached not as a phenomenon, but rather as literature.

11. What is the Centre for Women’s Studies?

Well, it’s so far the only such place in Croatia, because our academic community is not really too keen on feminism, at least not in the upper echelons, where decisions are made. The Centre organises all kinds of educational programmes, publishes books, holds workshops, etc. One of the things I do is maintain their web-site, and there are at least some pages in English, so you can take a look if you want.

12. How about a blurb for your book?

Yes, I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly  romance. :)

Kalaide, priestess of the Moon, is trying to hold her home together in the midst of war when a strange prisoner is brought: Enaor, an Elder, who lost his family, his city, and almost his sanity in the war for which he blames Kalaide’s gods — and his own brother. With the unnatural winter gripping the land, the two must form an unexpected alliance in order to survive… and maybe, just maybe, save the world as well.

Hvala, Milena! Thank you!

6 responses so far

Review: This Heart of Mine, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Mar 06 2010 Published by under Reviews

(1) A semi-short positive review of this book, followed by (2) discussion of the rape of Kevin by Molly, and (3) the character of Lilly in the context of a feminist analysis of beauty culture

Audio note: I listened to this on audio (and then I immediately read it in paper), and it’s one of the best romance audio recordings I have ever heard. Anna Fields has narrated several SEP’s and she’s always fantastic. Highly recommended.

(1) Review

THOM (2001) is one of the Chicago Stars/Bonner books. Molly Somerville was the surly teenaged half-sister of Phoebe in It Had to Be You (1994). In THOM Molly is the author of a modestly successful series of children’s books based on the adventures of a fashion conscious, and conscientious, bunny named Daphne and a rowdy and sometimes thoughtless badger named Benny. Ordinarily a straight arrow and good girl, Molly is known to go off the rails every so often, in usually innocuous ways like setting off a fire alarm in college or dying her hair. In a move which is characterized alternately as crazy, and a mature and beneficent act, she gave away the 15 million dollar fortune left to her by her SOB father, and is barely getting by. She idolizes Phoebe and Dan’s marriage and family life, and wants that kind of love for herself, but pessimistically believes it will never happen and resigns herself to the idea of being a wonderful spinster auntie.

Molly’s had a crush on Stars QB Kevin Tucker, the model for Benny, but it’s tempered by her dislike of his selfish playboy ways — he has a habit of draping international models on his arm at all times — which Molly unfavorably compares to Dan’s. Molly respects Kevin’s football skills, but she doesn’t respect him as a person, which perhaps explains why she climbs into his bed one night and has sex with him without his consent. They are both horrified, but Molly becomes pregnant and, because this is Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ world, they get married, in part due to the intense moral suasion applied by Dan and Phoebe.

This all happens by page 90, and the next 300 pages deal with the aftermath. Kevin always saw Molly as a spoiled rich girl (he didn’t know about her divestment), and her sexual assault and the forced marriage (not at gunpoint, but at “football contract” point — Phoebe owns the team Kevin plays for, after all) hardly help. For his part, Kevin has some demons, especially his relationship with his estranged birth mother (he was adopted), and his inability to form close personal relationships. Football for Kevin has filled in the gaps where his personal development should have been.

Through a bizarre but pretty believable set of circumstances (another gift of SEP’s) Molly and Kevin end up together that summer running Wind Lake, a summer camp owned by Kevin’s late parents. There they meet the usual SEP cast of well drawn and often funny secondary characters, like the randy young couple who are supposed to be caretakers, but are too busy shagging each other — much to Molly and Kevin’s frustration, on many levels — to actually get any work done.

SEP is a master of contemporary romance. I am not sure I think she has an equal. Funny dialogue and situations, sexual tension, secondary romances — often, as in this case, with older couples — that actually enhance rather than detract from the main romance. And that’s balanced by moments of true heartbreak, all the worse because you have been laughing and lusting along with these characters. There was a scene in THOM that absolutely killed me – if you’ve read it you know I am referring to one that takes place on the road — and a few others after which I needed literary CPR. When I am reading an SEP, I just think “this is the complete package”.

This is not to say that everything worked perfectly for me. In particular, Molly’s bouts of insanity didn’t ring true to me. Her assault of Kevin, in the beginning of he novel, and later, near the end, when she nearly tanks the HEA, felt out of character, and not in a good way. I can see Molly really bugging readers who have less patience than I do. Like many contemporary authors, SEP laces the characters’ self-understanding with a psychology narrative, so Molly explains to the reader that it is family of origin issues that make her do these crazy things. It felt artificial. Kevin too, psychoanalyzes himself at the end, explaining what he was running from and why in language that could come straight from Dr. Phil. The whole HEA scene was off, come to think of it, but it didn’t detract in a major way from my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

But the pleasures of this book outweighed those irritations for me. Especially the humor. For example, every random person Molly meets says, “I’ve always wanted to write a children’s book”, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, Molly’s unconsciously writes sexually suggestive lines for the Daphne books as the sexual tension with Kevin ratchets up, and the sex advice Molly gets from a newlywed teen at the camp.

SPOILERS:

(2) Molly’s rape of Kevin. I know a lot of people stopped reading at this point, feeling that no couple can overcome such a violation. I’ve blogged about rape in romance, although my focus was on women as victims. My feeling about it, regardless of who is the victim, is that if a rape is portrayed in a titillating way, a way that is meant merely to arouse the reader, and a way that doesn’t take seriously the real life consequences — whatever they would be for that character, in that setting — I put the book down. In THOM, the rape was not portrayed in a titillating way — neither was sexually pleased by the experience (a real difference from when a hero rapes a heroine, I might add) — and the repercussions reverberated, at least for Kevin’s attitude towards Molly, for at least 3/4 of the book. Kevin calls it a rape, and it’s a major obstacle in their relationship, Kevin only forgiving Molly towards the end of the book. That they never tell Phoebe and Dan about it indicates the seriousness with which they take it. Molly’s actions were reprehensible, but they were out of character. Her rape of Kevin doesn’t reflect her pervasive anti-men attitudes, or a domineering personality.

You could argue that Kevin should have been more upset for longer. And you could argue in a society in which rape of men is not taken as seriously as it should be, Kevin’s quick recovery (or non-traumatic reaction) shores up pernicious rape myths about men (that men always want sex anyway so you can;t rape them.). But Kevin rejects those rape myths and Molly does eventually too. (Although many people do not think it possible to rape a man, so THOM is not as hopelessly regressive as it might have been.) all I can say is that the book overall worked for me. Narratively, one thing SEP did which was very smart was to have Molly miscarry, which makes her very sympathetic. It worked for me, but I can see why others feel differently.

(3) A major subplot is the arrival of Kevin;s birth mother, Lilly, to the summer camp. Kevin has a lot anger at Lilly, who went on to becomes a famous TV actress, for giving him up. His estrangement from her is the major developmental work his character must do, and it’s presented as the key to his ability to have loving relationships with other women, like Molly. Those psychoanalytic tones again!

Anyway, I have a very mixed reaction to SEP when it comes to my politics. She is not a feminist writer by any stretch, and is quite retrograde in many respects. I kind of go into an enjoyable fugue state when I read SEP, and later rile myself up by pointing out all the ways her books bug me politically. But the character of Lilly really crystallized the problem for me, and why I can continue to read SEP.

Lilly is an aging beauty. She was the Farah Fawcett of her day — the sexy star of an all female detective show with a famous poster which sold millions. She is a widow when we meet her, essentially retired from acting, and at loose ends over her estrangement from Kevin. She is also in a kind o recovery form her marriage, which was characterized by the dominating behavior of her late husband, who controlled her and her career, both.

At the camp, Lilly meets Liam, a reclusive ornery famous painter (naturally, you would have both a famous actress and a famous artist together at a summer camp in Illinois. (To her credit, SEP has Molly note how bizarre this situation is). Lilly feels washed up, like she’s no longer attractive because of her extra girth and wrinkles. But Liam wants to paint her naked. He finds her irresistible, and loves her all the more for her imperfections. The way Lilly is written, it’s almost entirely her own vanity — a personal character flaw — that leads her to think her value as a human being is diminished as she loses her looks. And it is a man who rescues her from this crazy idea.

In my world, it is patriarchy that leads women who are less than physically perfect to feel worthless and diminished. And they don’t just feel diminished: they are. To take just one example from my own profession, studies show that women who are thin and attractive get better student evaluations regardless of the quality of their teaching. And before you object the same is true for male profs … it isn’t. Female professors’ evaluations are much more strongly tied to how closely they hew to gender norms than are men’s. (there’s a lot more I could say here but I will stop now). From a feminist point of view, the problem isn’t that some woman are superficial and vain, although they are. It’s rather systemic, and patriarchy is a system that, on the whole, benefits men (and some women, especially the beautiful ones).

I liked Lilly and Liam’s story as I was reading it. And I really liked this book. But while the idea that a woman can just “shake off” beauty norms by “being strong” and finding a man who loves her “just as she is”, may make for fun reading, it’s bad politics.

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