On Sunday I was sitting in the movie theater watching the wonderful Star Trek for the second time, and I was thinking about the science in sci fi movies. McCoy says something like, “if we crash, our blood will boil in 12 seconds.” This is wrong, and a lot of the “science” in Star Trek is wrong. Not just over simplified, but dead wrong. The same is true of many “historical” movies, regardless of the time period, from 300 to Braveheart.
I was thinking about the purpose of these pop cultural products, which is not to convey scientific or historical truths, but to entertain, often by hitting certain emotional buzzers. I’m not a die hard Trekkie by any means, nor am I generally bloodthirsty, but I let out a whoop with everyone in the audience when Kirk said to the Romulan who is holding him over a cliff by his neck, “I’ve got your gun” and blows him to smithereens.
Romance gets criticized for its fantasy elements, and for its reliance on emotional triggers to entertain (that there is a perfect person in the world for each of us who will love us unconditionally, that love is everlasting, that the HEA solves all problems, the sexual fantasies), while we overlook or indeed praise the very same elements in other pop genres, like historical or sci fi films. I’m not the first person to say that it must be the content, especially the feminine content, which seems to invite derision. When women produce cultural content that is not gender coded feminine, even if the majority of their readers are women, they do get more respect. I’m thinking of authors like JK Rowling and Charlaine Harris.
I subscribe to The New Yorker (you get a lifetime subscription when you get your PhD in the humanities. It’s a secret bonus few know about.) and I cannot recall once in the ten years I’ve been getting it, a review of a Nora Roberts novel — or indeed any romance. I checked The New Yorker online database and again found no critical notice of any of Roberts’ books (I could be wrong here. Correct me if so.). Yet, they did a very long Profiles article on Roberts in June (you need a subscription to read it). It’s odd that a magazine which has never seen fit to review any of Roberts’ hundreds of books wanted to devote so much space to her career as an author. Then I read the article, and, like most articles about romance in literary venues, it engages more with her lifestyle and number of books sold — the “La Nora Phenomenon” — than her craft.
But Collins does point to strengths in Roberts’ writing, which is what made it truly shocking to this long time New Yorker reader.
EDITED TO ADD: Like here,
“Smark-alecks [like NR] make bad pupils but excellent students of human nature. Roberts is good at what she does not only because she is prolific but also because she can write zingy dialogue and portray scrappy but sincere characters”
“She is known for particularly believable heroes…”
“Her female characters frequently possess an entrepreneurial streak, and they are more independent than many of their peers, and certainly of their predecessors, even if some among them still have a propensity for crumpling like tissues at the sight of bodily fluids.”
“Roberts’ colloquial style can be inelegant, but it deflates the more vaporous of her scenes.”
“A self-taught writer, and an irreverent one…”
“Reading a Roberts novel is like watching a game of tennis between two very good players: it is not so much the outcome of the match but the back-and-forth between commensurate opponents that elicits the spectator’s pleasure.”
“When Roberts writes a book, she assembles a community piece by piece, a train-set village of her own invention.”
“Roberts would have made a keen satirist, were she not without condescension, or cruelty.”
“Hers are not Carrie Bradshaw fantasies.”
“Like campfire stories, Roberts’ books rely on verve and familiarity rather than on any particular polish or originality.”
“Roberts may be the most intuitive writer since Noel (Hot Lead) Loomis, who wrote several dozen Westerns straight onto a Linotype machine he kept in his house.”
“Roberts’s influences are myriad, and mostly popular.”
“Roberts’ writing, by her own estimation, had improved markedly since her early novels, which feature a lot of passive constructions and thesaurus words.”
“Compared with Nora Roberts, J. D. Robb is slightly more staccato and noirish, but Roberts says the voices are essentially the same. In both incarnations, she is spare, catchy and impressionistic. Her sentences are often clipped and she has a habit of turning nouns into verbs (‘two canine forms bulletted out’ the door). Her figurative language can be clever (‘Dobby’s face reminded Cilla of a piece of thin brown paper that had been balled tight, then carelessly smoothed out’) or it can be clumsy (‘They meshed like butter on popcorn, both lively and entertaining.’).
“Almost everyone I spoke with praised Roberts’ storytelling, her incantatory ability to engage the reader. ‘Storytelling’ also suggests a quasi-extemporaneous quality, the privileging of the thrust of the narrative over its details, and while Roberts’s narratives have momentum, they are not always painstakingly crafted”
“Another pitfall, when you’ve written almost 200 books, is repetitiveness.”
“The spunky-heroine voice that Roberts favors is winning, but it can seem like a fallback. … At other times, her characters … seem to hail from the Nixon era.”
“There is a kitchen-table quality to sex in romance novels which distinguishes them from pornography. … Fine, strapping fellows as the men are, they might not always be recognized by their human counterparts.”
“In Roberts’ early books, the sex could be rough and spastic.”
“The hallmark of Roberts’ sex scenes is narrative continuity — the hero and the heroine sleep together, and they don’t suddenly turn into wildly different people.”
The New Yorker reviews lots of popular films (and anyone who thinks snark in romance reviews makes them different from “professional” reviews has clearly never read Anthony Lane) and popular music (Sasha Frere-Jones regularly reviews such popular musicians as Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga). Heck, in this week’s issue there’s a story about a “dry cleaner to the stars”. It hit me as I was sitting in the theater watching Star Trek, a movie The New Yorker reviewed, glowingly, that this isn’t a divide between different publications. It’s a divide within the very same magazine. If the magazine can review the gamut of films, from Bergman retrospectives to the latest Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller, and the gamut of music, from Wagner to Madonna, and if it can recognize, in its Profiles section, that a romance novelist has real writing talent, then why isn’t there space to review a wider range of fiction?
