Booklovers Anonymous

I own too many books.

I recently moved, and there’s nothing like moving to force you to face facts.  There were six large Rubbermaid bins full of books in the storage unit attached to my old apartment.  That’s in addition to the books stacked rightways, sideways, and any way they’d fit on my six bookshelves.  I own more bookshelves than dining room chairs.  I’m not sure this says anything good about my priorities.  I had to cull. 

If you're being forced by circumstances to reduce your book collection, I'm sorry.  And here's a handy, book-by-book flow chart to help you out!

How do you decide which books to keep?

In Defense of Language

I wrote a lot of bad poetry in college.  As part of this literary rite of passage, I went to a handful of poetry readings hosted by the English department, and at one of these, during the question-and-answer period, the poet on deck said the following when asked what advice he had for aspiring poets:  “Just sit down see and what you can do with the language.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t really grasped what language is.  A lifetime of schooling didn’t teach me that language isn’t just a set of vocabulary and usage rules:  It’s both tool-kit and rule-book, enabling and constraining, frustratingly insufficient and transcendently beautiful.  We struggle to express ourselves within its framework, but it never stays still.  It mutates constantly, and even words we thought we knew shift in meaning with every new reader and every fresh reading.

The more I use language for everything from text messages to novels, the more I’m struck by what a miraculous and versatile thing it is.  Which is why I’ve been dismayed by a few conversations I’ve been reading on a handful of popular blog posts discussing the quality of certain books.  There’s a recurring theme that it “shouldn’t matter” if a writer uses proper grammar or makes good decisions about words as long as “the story is good.” 

I understand the premise that in a novel, it’s the story that matters.  And if a bunch of misplaced modifiers and faulty parallelisms bug me, I don’t have to read it.  The trouble is, the misuse of language doesn’t just screw up a single story.  It has a reflexive effect on language itself.  A writer who uses words carelessly chips away at the integrity of our man-made, culturally negotiated system of expression, and that definitely, absolutely matters.

All of us who use language have the power to change it.  If enough of us adopt new slang or use new rules, those elements will be assimilated.  I love this about language.  I love that we can create new words and expressions that convey emotion and meaning (“jump the shark,” the verbification of “Google”).  But a writer is not just a consumer of language.  A writer is a caretaker.  A text to my mom about my new pair of black suede slouch boots (OMG so CUTE u gotta c them!) doesn’t have nearly as much power as a book meant to be read by the public.  People are gonna read that story, and it’s going to influence them, however subtly and imperceptibly.  Using words carelessly is like leaving soda cans on the ground at Yosemite.  It’s offensive when everyday visitors do it.  When the park rangers do it, it’s destructive.

Misusing language blurs the boundaries and crushes the nuances we could have used to do something interesting and fresh.  A new word creates a sharp, startling, useful new image (unibrow, agritourism), but a misused word just gets conflated with other words.  Take my (admittedly nit-picky) pet peeve: comprise.  Many folks use “comprise” just like they use “compose,” when in fact its meaning is closer to “embrace” or “enclose.”  To borrow Strunk & White’s illustration from The Elements of Style: a zoo comprises animals; it is not comprised of animals.  I see “comprise” misapplied so often, I think it’s probably already lost.  Just one more precision tool turned into a blunt object.

God knows I’ve been guilty of some pretty appalling abuses of language (see above: bad poetry), but I try to treat it like the commonly held commodity it is.  I don’t think that means we can’t take liberties to get our points across.  Taking risks, breaking rules, trying new things—that’s part of how language evolves, and that’s a good thing.  It’s great that language can change to accommodate the pressures applied to it by culture.  It just shouldn’t change because we’re too lazy or careless to use it well.

Big News!

You guys! I got some great news on Monday.  My book, Figs From Thistles, is a finalist for the 2012 RWA Golden Heart ® award!  I got the call at eight a. m., while breastfeeding The Small One.  I got very excited; The Small One got very confused. Ten minutes later I got pooped on.  Ah, the glamourous life of a writer.

Why We Need Romance Novels

I'm not new to defending the romance genre.  I have a number of friends and relatives who have expressed shock that I read (much less write!) "those books."  With the recent media attention over Fifty Shades of Grey (which I admittedly have not read), the conversation seems to be coming up more frequently.  Usually I just point folks to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books--Sarah Wendell is the reigning queen of romance apologia--but the current situation has made me so frustrated, I couldn't keep quiet.

We have a long-standing narrative tradition of punishing women who are promiscuous or adulterous.  Dido in the Aeneid, Emma Bovary in Madam Bovary, Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, Katherine Clifton in The English Patient, April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, Elizabeth King in The Descendants: all of these women engage in affairs, and all of them die, often horribly.*  Many of them commit suicide—Dido impales herself on a sword (hello, symbolism!); Emma Bovary eats handfuls of arsenic. More commonly in modern narratives, women don’t kill themselves out of grief or guilt; they die in painful, gruesome accidents.  In other words, they are symbolically dealt with by the author.

One could argue that it’s unfair to use adultery and promiscuity as proxies for sexual pleasure, but the point I want to make is that our society handles male and female sexuality very differently.  Female sexuality—and more importantly, female sexual pleasure—is at best mysterious.  In The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles), Charles Smithson evinces shock that the woman he has just had sex with could experience pleasure from the act.  In the mid 1800s, doctors brought “hysterical” women to orgasm as a medical procedure, as though the female sexual climax is so divorced from the act of sex it requires the intervention of a physician (see here).  And at worst, female sexuality is not mysterious, but dangerous.  From Anne Boleyn to modern cases of women stoned to death for sex before or outside of marriage, women have always been disproportionately punished for revealing themselves as sexual beings.  I hardly need to bring up recent legislative actions in Arizona and Virginia or a certain radio commentator's vitriolic attacks on Sandra Fluke.  

Unfortunately, sex actually is more dangerous for women.  It’s always been more dangerous.  There are the obvious risks and burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing**, but women are also more likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases than men.  Women who are raped face all of the consequences of their attacker’s actions, but making a man feel the unintended consequences of even a consensual sexual encounter requires a court order.  If a heterosexual woman wishes to seek sexual pleasure with a partner, the safest way to do so is within a committed relationship, but men are not constrained by the societal or physical dangers that sex poses to women.  In trusting herself to a sexual relationship with a man, a woman makes herself inherently and unavoidable vulnerable.  That's the world we very unfortunately live in, as I have been repeatedly and unpleasantly reminded in recent weeks.  How can this ever work without subjugating the woman?  By uniting a sexually self-actualized woman with a trustworthy man.  This is the kind of relationship that the best romance novels depict.

Many romance novels feature a hero who is utterly trustworthy despite, say, a promiscuous past or an excess of masculine sexuality. (A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James, The Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook, How to Knit a Love Song by Rachael Herron).  This type of hero is often an easily-recognized dangerous/powerful masculine archetype—a soldier, a politician, a warrior, a prince.  He unquestionably has physical or social power over the heroine, and yet, through the course of the narrative, he will consistently fail to exercise that power.  The heroine has nothing to fear from him.  Another common romance narrative features a promiscuous heroine who finds love and total acceptance from the hero (Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase, The Villa by Nora Roberts).  The hero would be socially permitted to dismiss the heroine as a whore or a slut (words that almost exclusively apply to women), but he does not do so.  Both possibilities share an essential core: the hero commits unconditionally and exclusively to the heroine.  He has the ability to subjugate or shame her, but he does not.***

The trustworthiness of the hero is a necessary condition for the second important theme of romance novels: the heroine’s journey to sexual freedom.  Romance novels often chronicle a heroine’s progression from a state of sexual uncertainty to one of sexual satisfaction.  In a way, this journey mirrors society’s slow acceptance of female sexual pleasure, with the often-maligned “virgin heroine” as the most powerful example of this arc.  Rather than a symbol of feminine purity, I think the virgin heroine is actually a symbol of safe vulnerability.  When a female heroine moves from a state of sexual inexperience (or a past in which sex was unpleasant or hurtful) to sexual pleasure, she is moving from a sexually constrained world to one in which she is free to experience sexual pleasure (Montana Sky by Nora Roberts, Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost).  In other words, she’s moving from a world in which her sexuality is ignored or punished to one in which her sexuality is celebrated.

Let me be clear:  Romance novels do not subvert our existing paradigm.  They don’t disproportionately punish men for their sexual crimes; they don’t create a world in which women may be sexually promiscuous without consequences.  Rather, they hold up a possible world within our paradigm, one in which women are able to seek sexual satisfaction with a trustworthy partner without fear.  The “happily ever after ending” is the most well-known “rule” of romance, but the heroine’s sexual satisfaction is even more critical.  This, I would argue, is why romance novels are described by their supporters as subversive.  The romance narrative is an unapproved narrative, but one that is, shockingly, very real and very attainable.  Relationships based on mutual trust and mutual pleasure are, in fact, possible.  Women can have sexually fulfilling relationships that don’t end with subjugation or gory death.  These relationships exist despite the horrors around us, and they should be acknowledged and celebrated, not ridiculed.  

Obviously, not all romance novels are subversive celebrations of female sexual freedom, just like not all novels in which promiscuous women die are examples of society symbolically punishing female sexual freedom.  Still, I think it’s worth noting that one of the most profitable genres in publishing is routinely ridiculed as formulaic and trashy, while genres like mystery and thriller—in which murder, rape and torture often feature prominently; see here—are seen as perfectly acceptable “escapist" or even "high-brow" fiction.  The ghettoization of romance fiction as “trash” is just one more way in which female sexuality is ignored and punished.

So, if you're enjoying Fifty Shades of Grey, or any of the other stories the modern romance genre has to offer, read on, and don't you dare hide it behind a newspaper on the subway.  

*Sometimes it’s the man who dies in the end (The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne).  But not nearly as often.

**These are also joys--I'm a mom, and I love my son.  But I've never heard of a man dying in childbirth or having trouble convincing his employer to give him time to pump breast milk.

***I fully acknowledge that there are other, less pro-woman romance narratives--not all romance is created equal.

Meaning What You Don't Say

!!! Spoilers ahead for the following: Downton Abbey, Intuition, People of the Book.  

On of my favorite authors, Jennifer Crusie, has a great essay on what television taught her about writing romance (check it out here), and one of her points is that in television, characters often don't say quite what they mean (Lesson #4: Mean What You Don't Say).  I’ve been thinking about this lately while watching Downton Abbey (streaming on Netflix!) and appreciating that famous British reticence as displayed by early twentieth century aristocracy.  At times, in fact, they’re almost too reticent.  When Matthew Crawley proposed to Mary, I had to think back:  When exactly did they get to that point?  The clues are so subtle, it was easy for a coarse American to miss them.  All the same, the lack of overt sentiment in the show makes every action carry more weight.  Mary's decision to take a jump while hunting with the alluring Mr. Pamuk says almost as much as her failure to kick him out of her bedroom later that night.

This isn’t to say that a well-placed declaration can’t be powerful, but some of the best writing gets at emotions obliquely, because that’s how we get at them ourselves.  It’s rare that people say what they really feel.  Hell, we often don’t know ourselves well enough to be that honest.  Part of the joy of a good story is participating in the mystery of what, exactly, is going on in the characters' hearts.  Showing emotion rather than  having it declared also gives a writer the chance to load up a scene with more detail and nuance than could be achieved with a simple, “Will you go to bed with me?”  To illustrate, here are two examples from the beginnings of two very different relationships:

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks*:

        He reached over then and wiped a smear of grease off my cheek.  I stopped laughing.  I reached for his hand before he could withdraw it, and turned it over in my own.  It was a scholar’s hand, to be sure, with clean, well-kept nails.  But there were calluses as well.  I suppose even scholars had to chop wood, if they could find any, during the siege.  The tips of his fingers glistened with the lamb grease from my cheek.  I brought them to my lips and licked them, slowly, one by one.  His green eyes regarded me, asking a question anyone could understand.

Zow!  There’s no “do you like me?” moment.  There’s no "do you want to come upstairs?"  There is only risk and the wordless communication that follows.  Even if you haven't met these two characters (and you should; the book is amazing), you can probably pick up on how different their lives have been up until this point.  They each approach this initial trial with their own tolerance for rejection.

Here’s the initiation of a very different sort of relationship from Allegra Goodman’s Intuition: 

            Then suddenly she was embarrassed.  She felt herself blushing, heat spreading under her skin.  The others were calling out to them from the table, and she would have run away if he hadn’t been holding her.  She closed her eyes for a second, trying to remember the steps.  She listened to the music and counted silently to herself: one, two, one-two, and then plunged in, as she might jump into freezing water.
            The pressure of his hand on her waist surprised her.
            “What are you doing?” he asked her.
            She looked up at him, confused.
            “I’ll lead,” he said.

I’ll bet you can see where this one’s going.  If you think about it long enough, you might be able to reconstruct the whole plot from those 100 words.  We have two individuals used to being in control, but one of them has a great deal more self-assurance.  It won't end well. 

Both of these examples are packed with emotion, and we get to infer what's going on from what the players do rather than what they say.  The authors could have gone about revealing those deeper themes in other ways.  In People of the Book, Brooks could have had her female protagonist think to herself, "I knew he wouldn't make the next move, so I did it for him, taking his hand and drawing his index finger into my mouth."  Goodman could have had her main character ponder the wisdom of dancing with this man, could have had her wonder whether she made herself vulnerable by accepting.  I think their restraint makes for more engaging stories.  

How do you like your emotion served?  Can it be too cold?

*p. 31-32, Penguin Books, 2008

**p. 65, The Dial Press, 2006