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.

Related posts:

1. What is Romance Really All About? [Tumperkin's first post at RRR, and RRR's first guest post...
2. I’m Interviewed at All Romance eBooks: 28 Days of Heart Click on the banner below (and scroll down the page)...
3. The Romance Insider, the Reader, the Fan, and the Academic Researcher Or why I don’t accept ARCs, how Romanceland is like...

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!

Related posts:

1. Monday Morning Stepback: Links, Cliques, and Randomness 1. Links of interest (It turns out I can live...
2. Monday Morning Stepback The Weekly Links, Opinion, and Inanity Post 1. Links of...
3. Monday Morning Stepback: Spring Break Edition 1. Links of Interest Post of the week: The Book...

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!

Related posts:

1. The Romance Insider, the Reader, the Fan, and the Academic Researcher Or why I don’t accept ARCs, how Romanceland is like...
2. Feminist Critique of Romance: Ur Doin It Wrong *I couldn’t have written this post without the help of...
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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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THANK YOU!!!!

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Part 1 here.

This post covers chapters 4-8

Chapter 4: A Variety of Readers

Roberts starts by noting that we make certain assumptions about genre readers: that smart readers jettison their critical standards when they read genre fiction, that all readers of a genre read it the same way, etc. But these are too simplistic.

In this chapter, Roberts offers what he calls “the minimal set of distinctions” one needs in order to understand genre readers’ relationships with their books.

His main point in this chapter is:

The people who read paperbacks are not the simple souls their critics make them out to be. They read across genre boundaries. They manifest intricate patterns of reading addiction, reading preferences, reading avoidances, and reading allergies. They are not easy to understand even when they are speaking about a single, favored genre.

A. Exclusivists: A myth about junk fiction reader which skews analysis of them. It is almost always false  that genre readers read only in their favored genre. Roberts notes this assumption is made especially about romance readers, and I think he is right, yet even Radway’s research suggested it is false for a large portion of romance readers.

B. Users: Read regularly in the genre, but also read outside it. In this section, Roberts makes reference to addictive behaviors of the user, and he is spot on. For example:

If our romance reader is like many of the rest of us, she may find herself standing outside the store a few minutes later with a sales slip in one hand and books in the other. She may feel that she is afflicted with an innocent form of kleptomania, as though she unconsciously steals books but then unconsciously pays for them. It is if course one of her reading addictions that is governing her.

C. Fans: Colloquially, “fan” is used to refer to ANY reader of a genre, but Roberts says the term should be restricted to apply only to those readers of a genre who correspond with one another. Roberts opines that very few genre readers are fans, and he cites Radway as evidence (because Radway’s subjects had no interest in talking with others about romance novels).

This is one example where the 1990 publication date shows — I think the internet has both revealed a strong network of fandoms in genre, and has created and enhanced them.

I chuckled to read that the first SFF fanzine, FSFNET: BITNET Fantasy-Science Fiction Magazine, was published at my uni — UMaine — in 1984 (p. 78)

D. Occasional Readers: This group of readers generates “the one book expert”, which romance readers have reason to be particularly wary of, because the one book expert on a genre is rarely complimentary of it. Roberts’ critique of the journalist who “tries one detective novel”, or the academic who “solemnly reads and annotates some six or twenty” novels and make sweeping (usually negative, usually false) pronouncements about the genre is spot on.

E. Allergics: In this section, Roberts relies ot some extent on Radway, who found a group of people in Smithton who were allergic to romances. He cites Walker Gibson’s theory that we are allergic to books that “make us into someone we do not want to be”, approvingly, but says there is more to it.

Roberts denies there is a “typical reader” even of one genre. when someone asks “What can readers be finding in the romance?” (and I was asked this question by a well known “lain fiction” blogger recently), the answer is “Which readers? which romance?”

Chapter 5: Of Fun, Escape and Daydreaming

In this chapter, as in Chapter 4, Roberts rejects of modifies certain assumptions made about genre readers, in this case, that they read for one of the three reasons in the title.

A. Having Fun

The idea that people read genre fiction because it is “fun” is problematic for 2 reasons: (1) because it falsely implies we don’t read other novels for “fun”, and (2) it is false even abotu genre fiction, which is often not “fun” in any usual sense of that term. (i.e. euphoric, funny, etc.)

Roberts wonders whether the happy endings of a lot of genre fiction (the detective story and the romance especially) account for this myth, but he cites Radways readers as ranking a happy ending third out of the reason they read romance.

Plus, this idea ignores the large numbers of unhappy and ambivalent endings in genre fiction.

And it fails to make a key distinction: between a “happy” ending, and a “satisfactory” ending. Many “happy” endings are not satisfactory to the reader, for any number of reasons. In romance, I can think of the chaos that ensued when JR Ward killed a heroine and turned her into a ghost. Technically, it was an HEA for the protagonists, but most readers were very unsatisfied.

Roberts rejects the idea that the ending of a junk novel has much to do with the narrative itself. Rather, he says argues that the ending of a junk novel is ” a conventionalized indication that the writer is abandoning the story”. I found this to be very interesting, personally.

In short, says Roberts, all we mean when we agree with outsiders that we read for “fun” is this”: “we have read them, we are reading them, and we will continue to read them.” (p. 95)

B. Reading As an Escape

This is often a criticism of genre readers, but Roberts replies that, in one sense, all reading is an escape. As C.S. Lewis wrote, Reading “involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to the things merely imagined or conceived.” Second, genre readers are better described not as running away from something but as running toward something.

Roberts notes we often misjudge one another:

If an academic woman reads Chaucer by day and the romance novel by night, the rest of us — the men, especially — may suppose that it is at night that her ultimate, character-defining taste is revealed, that if she turns in her free time to the Harlequin romance, her interest in Chaucer is mercenary or pretentious. (p. 99)

He says readers have a “preference hierarchy” and we need to know a lot about a reader — much more than we know about that woman academic — to understand it.

C. Daydreaming

The idea that we wrap our identities in a heroic central character. Roberts identifies Genreflecting by Betty Rosenberg as a proponent of this idea.

This is the Walter Mitty argument with which romance readers are so familiar is makes our brains bleed. Just this week over at AAR, Lynn is talking about our version of this, the placeholder heroine.

Roberts rejects this because much junk fiction is not all that happy, because it asks us to believe something about junk fiction readers that is patently false: that they are “deeply uncertain of their own identities”, and third because it begs the question.

Now, so far this is a great chapter, right? Then why does Roberts close it with this?

We probably will not go too far wrong if we think of paperbacks as the  … intellectuals’ Las Vegas. …  paperbacks are a haven from consciousness…” (p. 106).

The Las Vegas metaphor is supposed to tell us what is true in the daydreaming/fun/escape descriptions.  That, like in Vegas, we “rub shoulders” with different kinds of people (often unsavory people) than we ordinarily do in real life, that we can relax in our observation of “secular pieties”, a “place where the learned feel they can go to be bad.”

Chapter 6 Textures, Designs

In this chapter Roberts investigates the formal pleasures of junk fiction, something he thinks has been overlooked in favor of content-based pleasures.

A. Verbal textures –  this is the “form-in-the-small”, the sensuous values of art, such as texture, color, tone (here Roberts is quoting John Hospers’ Aesthetics entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan 1972)

Here Roberts seems to take back what he has said earlier about genre readers reading for genre rather than text. He demonstrates, in a host of examples from every genre except romance, broad stylistic variations from genre to genre, and form book to book within each genre. The values of tone and texture are vitally important to genre readers.

B. Design — this is the “form-in-the-large”, the “over-all organization that results from the interrelations of the basic elements of which a work is composed”

“The best writers are those who can honor a traditional design and always, somehow, surprise us.”

But it is a mistake to think a genre has only a small number of designs. In fact, there are hundreds in each genre, and they are often cross bred to create new ones in very good books. Sometimes writers take designs form other genres. He uses the example of Stephen King’s The Shining where King draws on real life designs of public outrage against mistreatment of young children and imports it into a gothic horror novel.

Sometimes genre writers sell themselves short on this score. His example here is Robert Heinlein who said famously that writers of pulp fiction are competing for beer money.  But readers of Heinlein love his stories and his story telling skills. Even when they disagree vehemently with what he says, they like the way he says it. (p. 24)

Roberts bemoans the lack of structural analysis of genre, but he points to Janice Radway as a good, if rare, example of it. He attributes this largely to the mistaken idea that readers of genre fiction are written by people who have no respect for their readers, and read by people who are too naive, ignorant or dim to know or care. (p. 125). Once we realize how sophisticated readers of genre fiction are, we see the need for formal analysis.

In fact, he says, paperback fiction is “form-intensive. It is as form-intensive as the sonnet, the villanelle, the English ode.” It follows that much of the pleasure readers derive form it are formal.

Chapter 7 Thinking with Tired Brains

Roberts lists three ways that genre fiction feed our minds. He takes back the compliment, though when he describes those minds as weary and tired. Ah well.

Here are the three:

1. Advice and information

We don’t read paperbacks for the information but we read them because of it. Some of the information helps us read other books in the genre (like learning about the ton in reading a Regency romance). Some of it is of practical use (a recipe in a Jennie Cruise book). Some of it is neither. Fiction can make us see things that no manual ever could.

2. Models of Deportment

Here there is a long discussion of the types of hero. The basic idea seems to be that there is a kind of hero we want to be, and a kind of hero we can never be but might like to be.

This is the kind of thinking found in such venues as the advice column at Smart Bitches Trashy Books.

3. Problems

Paperbacks directly engage their readers’ intellect in two ways:

a. Internal tensions within the narrative

b. By means of a problematic story  — the book’s interest lies not in solving the problem but in defining it. It is this that is most central to the concerns of my academic gang, the ethical critics, not #1 or #2, although #1 or #2 are always the first things people think of when they hear the phrase “ethical criticism” (the next is “censorship”). I actually think we have to be extremely careful about embracing #2 in particular. I will discuss my views on that in April when I give my talk “Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction: The Case of Romance” at the Popular Culture Association Annual meeting in April of this year.

As Roberts puts it:

Each story leaves us a little dissatisfied with what we had been before reading it. We are a little less smug in our opinions, a little more aware and so a little more thoughtful. The good stories do that to us: the poor stories do that to us.

Pulp fiction looks simple to people who don’t read it, but regular readers know is makes up “disturbed and thoughtful.” Roberts gets this exactly right. Note how far this view is for the idea that paperbacks are “dupe for dopes”.

Ok, so this was a great chapter, but then why does he end it this way:

Paperbacks as a class are written for minds wearied … The paperback genres are a device the human race has invented to permit it to think even when it is tired, so tired it does not suppose that thinking is any longer possible.

There is some distinction, according to Roberts, in the mental tools we use when we are thinking about a paperback versus a classic.  While I readily admit I read romance novels faster and with seeming greater ease than some literary fiction (Padgett Powell, Thomas Pynchon, Henry James), other literary fiction is a relative breeze (Julian Barnes, J. M. Coetzee, Dickens, Tolstoy, Sartre).

Chapter 8: Reading in a system

Roberts says that what we see in junk fiction depends on whether we are reading with story focus or genre focus. Genre reading is system reading. This chapter looks at some elements of the system (which is always changing).

Here are the three words people inexperienced in a genre use to describe genre books:

A. Simplemindedness — Roberts is so right here, noting that anyone can grab a selection of paperbacks and support this idea. In Romanceland we have so many examples of this. Too many to list. Some writer at Salon or HuffPo or Blogher is looking for a story idea and decides to “check out a couple of romance novels” and then finds what she was seeking and reports on it as it if it were news.

Roberts admits that they are simple. But the simplicity of stories in genre fiction is strategic: “every paperback genre works with complexities by means of simplicities” (p. 153).

He gives extended examples from SFF and Westerns. In sci fi, for example, the story of machine versus man seems very simple. But when you look closely at particular texts, when you understand the texts because you KNOW the genre, you see how subtle and complex are the questions being asked. Romance readers are familiar with the accusation that romances are simplistic. We even joke about it: “”Boy meets girl. Shit happens. They live happily ever after.” But that’s only a small part of the truth, and a very misleading one if it is taken as the whole truth.

I love this passage from Roberts:

The experienced readers of the traditions the books emerge from recognize that the books are hasty harvests from the riches of their genres, that they merely make evident to an unknowing public a small part of the unending and ever-changing debates that are the true lives of those genres” (p. 161)

Picking up the thread on “questioning” from the last chapter, Roberts argues that genre proceeds by means of simplicities which are opposed to counter-simplicities,with an increasing sophistication and redefinition of the question (p. 161). Pondering this would take me way off track, but it is a kind of whig view of genre progression, that is common enough in romance (we mock the bodice rippers of the 1980s) but also has its detractors (those who say we will never again have the meaty detailed accurate historicals of the 1980s, for example).

B. Predictability

Roberts makes the sound point that if each book in a genre were merely a retread, then people clever enough to learn how to read would simply keep reading the same book over and over rather than spending money on new ones. And, he adds, in a nod to our favored genre, “If romance is so simple, why do some writers fail to get their books published? Why do only a few writers sell so hugely?”

Roberts does allow that there are patterns in genre fiction., but quickly adds they are everywhere in all literature:

no one asks why Spenser, Byron, and Keats do not become bored with that underlying pattern repeated again and again. The patterns in vernacular fiction have the same character and purpose as those Spenserian rhythms … and the hundreds of other patterns in canonical literature that make monumental texts predictable too.

Roberts points out that genre readers are puzzled by the predictability charge because their favorite writers are not usually predictable at all. even when we recognize a pattern (the reformed rake, say), it is “rarely pure”. He writes, “We do not listen for that melody. We listen for the variations” (p. 166)

C. Absurdities

Genre readers know there are absurdities. In romance we talk about them ALL the time. The fast recoveries from all kinds of physical and emotional trauma, the HEA itself in many cases, the skills and abilities of the protagonists, not least the sexual ones of those virgins who have presumably never so much as held a man’s hand who are suddenly experts in fellatio, or the 45 year old hero who can make love 3 times in a row.

Roberts says these are genre conventions of a particular kind, “enablers”. he says they seem absurd the first time they appear in a genre, even to genre readers, but over time we get used to them. It’s not that we don’t KNOW they are absurd, it’s that we have traded outrage or embarrassment for another kind of important pleasure: the pleasure we take in

watching a genre’s stock of conventions change over time, a pleasure denied people who do not read with a genre focus. A genre’s enthusiasts watch it devise new character types, new settings, new techniques, new problems. watching this happen, we are watching the genre invent itself. We discover the new, watch it become standard, watch it become a cliché, and then one day notice that it has disappeared. Viewed as a system, a genre is like a ship always heading into strange waters.

That’s it for chapter 4-8. I enjoyed these much more than the first 3. The last 3 chapters coming up soon.

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These are the books that are handed out by pediatricians at well child checkups, that school teachers read aloud to their classes, that are adapted into plays and put on in local theaters. These are the books that many born and bred Mainers have been passing down for generations, the books that they have extra copies of at their “camps” (Maine speak for summer cottage). And they are books that have been important in the “literary culture” of a certain funny looking white house in Bangor Maine.

Here are they are:

Goodnight Moon was published in 1947. Margaret Wise Brown lived in Connecticut and New York, but she had a summer home, called “Only House” in Vinalhaven, Maine. This is a sweet, simple story of a bunny saying good night to the different things in his room. Our children’s museum here in Bangor has the “Goodnight Moon room”, a 5 and under play area which looks identical to the room in the book. Illustrated by Clement Hurd, discerning readers will notice that the position of the moon and the lighting changes as each page turns. Another favorite by Brown is Runaway Bunny, but I always felt that one was a bit ominous (the little bunny threatens to run away and the mom pledges to hunt him down if he does).

Robert McCloskey wasn’t born in Maine but was living in Deer Isle, Maine upon his death in 2003. Make Way for Ducklings (1941), was his first and most popular book. It features baby ducks in line behind their mother waddling down busy Boston streets to find a home in the Boston Garden. Our family’s favorites are Blueberries for Sal (1948), in which a little girl and a bear cub each accidentally follow the other’s mother while gathering berries on a hill, and One Morning in Maine (1952), in which Sal loses her first tooth. Our children’s museum has a life size model of Burt Dow’s boat, with rain gear, rubber boots, and plastic fish.

Published in 1982, this story follows the life of Miss Rumphius from childhood to old age. I love it because Miss Rumphius, after hearing her grandfather talk about the exotic places he’s visited, chooses a nontraditional life of study, travel, and beauty. I like it that the oddness of her choices — remaining single and childfree — is reflected in the society of the book, where local children sort of don’t know what to make of her.

I also love it that Miss Rumphius scatters lupine seeds once she settles into her seaside home. This book is frequently put on as a play in our area. Lupines are prevalent in northern Maine and the eastern provinces of Canada. Whenever children see lupines growing wild on the side of the road after reading Miss Rumphius, they just might consider what they can do to make the world a better place.

The author, Barbara Cooney, who died in 2000 at her house in Damariscotta, Maine, considers this book semi-autobiographical. I believe the original paintings for her books set in Maine (this one and Hattie and the Wild Waves) are on display at Bowdoin College.

This book, based on the lovely “Garden Song” by Maine folk treasure Dave Mallett, is a family favorite. I cannot read it without singing it.  The Garden song is one of the most popular folk songs in the US, covered by Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, John Denver, Peter Paul and Mary, you name it. You can see a video of Dave Mallett  performing it here (click the first video). My children have seen Mr. Mallett perform at their schools. He has been a wonderful contributor to the arts in Maine.

Here are a couple of newer books that our family considers classics:

Counting Our Way to Maine

This fun book, published in 1995, follows a family from its city home to a vacation in Maine. Each page counts the items they bring and see along the way. We start with “one baby” and end with  the “twenty fireflies” the family catches on its last night in Maine. The pictures are so detailed, you can linger over them for hours. The author isn’t from Maine, but she captures the feel of summertime here perfectly.

This book has special resonance for me, because our friends bought it for us when we were living, very unhappily, in Florida. I used to read it to my then newborn and dream of moving back to New England. It was a prophetic gift!

Thanks to the Animals

Maine is the  least racially diverse state in the US, with 95.3 percent whites (although there are other kinds of diversity). Author Allen Sockabasin is a Passamaquoddy, a part of the Penobscot Tribe, of which there are 3000 members in Maine. Adjacent to UMaine, where I teach, is The Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, with about 500 residents.  It would be hard to overstate the importance of Native American culture to Maine.

In this 2005 book, set in 1900, Little Zoo Sap and his family journey from their summer home on the coast to the deep woods for the winter. They travel on a bobsled pulled by big horses through the snow. When Zoo Sap falls off of the sled, the forest animals help him until his father returns to find him. The theme of humans as a part of the natural world is very Native and readers learn a little Passamaquoddy (the names of the animals) to boot.

We found out about this Maine author by attending a signing. Atwell’s illustrations have been described “a sort of Currier & Ives meets Grandma Moses.” In addition to its lovely illustrations, this quiet but enthralling book teaches a valuable lesson about the potentially devastating — ad restorative — effects of humanity on the environment. Atwell says: “There are so many talented children’s artists and authors that it is difficult to carve a niche truly one’s own in the world. My aim is to intrigue the child’s mind with a story they can’t predict, and do my best to make pictures that hold their attention. All the intangibles, I just hope for.”

That last line is a wonderful writer’s philosophy, isn’t it?

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In this post, I’m going to summarize the first 3 chapters of the book. (see this post for chs 4-8)

In the Introduction, Roberts explains what he means by the phrase “junk fiction” :

1. Canonical fiction — that part of the fiction of the past that still interests us) Ex. Dickens. Fielding, Eliot
2. Serious fiction — one segment of contemporary fiction written for a small highly educated readership. Ex. Woolf, Joyce
3. Plain fiction (best seller fiction) –most widely read kind of contemp fiction, the middle class of fiction. (Contains one genre: “social melodrama” — see John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance for that — but otherwise cross-genre). Meant to be read once, and not meant to be studied. Ex. Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
4. Junk fiction (also called genre fiction, vernacular fiction, category fiction, paperback fiction, etc.). Junk fiction is like plain fiction in that its readers don’t study it, but it is like serious fiction in that it requires its own learnedness

Roberts’ purpose in the book is to explain what readers get out of junk fiction, not just when it’s good, but when it’s poor. The “readers” Roberts has in mind are those who “have good taste”, i.e. enjoy and appreciate serious fiction as well as junk fiction. It is those readers who present the “paradox”.

In Roberts’ view, it is a mistake to attempt to import the methods of the study of literary fiction to the study of junk fiction. Classic criticism, includes the study of an author’s body of work, of themes, and a focus on big names and big titles. While we can study genre fiction with these methods, Roberts’ contends that other methods suit the medium better. In this book, he proposes different methods more appropriate to the material.

Chapter 1: The Stories of Our Times

In this chapter, Roberts makes the case that junk fiction mirrors our contemporary lives back to us. He uses the term “newspaper reality” for the continuously changing image of reality we put together from all the sources reporting on events we do not actually see for ourselves (p. 13). While this isn’t unique to junk fiction, Roberts thinks junk fiction is more closely tied to newspaper reality than other literary forms.

When we romance readers pick up an old category at a UBS and notice that the heroine smokes cigarettes at work or wears pantyhose, or says “golly”, we are reminded of the point Roberts is making.

A second piece of the puzzle is “literary reality”, the genre itself as refracted through junk fiction. As Roberts puts it (p. 17),

to the experienced reader, there is not a page in a new paperback that does not echo, answer, vary (or, sometimes, fatally ignore) pages written earlier. Everything that occurs within an intense, self-conscious, self-referential, and aggressively literary subculture has its exact parallel in paperback fiction.

Roberts’ emphasis is on the ways that stories in a genre talk to one another. He quotes James Gunn’s notion that to understand science fiction, you have to read about 100 books. While anyone can enjoy their first taste of a genre work, the real pleasure comes in learning the language the books speak to each other — part of that “unique learnedness” referenced above.

We also see literary fiction 00 because that is part of our reality, too — reflected in junk fiction. I’ve posted on this quality of romance fiction in Are You Smarter Than a Romance Reader?, a post on literary allusions in Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold.

Roberts writes that all good novels help us see ourselves and our times more clearly, and junk fiction is no exception. It’s one of the chief sources of the pleasure we derive in reading them, something traditional literary critics miss when they try to analyze junk fiction.

Obviously, this process is complicated. To use romance examples, it’s not just about verisimilitude in the contemporary romance (as when we wonder whether a poor heroine be wearing those expensive shoes, etc.), but the ways we reaffirm our own understanding, for example, of femininity today when we read and react to sex outside of marriage in a historical romance or the way we think about what free will means to us when we read a paranormal or a cyborg romance romance.

Possibly one of the most interesting points in the whole book for me is Roberts’ discussion of the way junk fiction creates characters. While nongenre readers think junk fiction is “unrealistic”, Roberts denies this, pointing to the way junk fiction embraces role identities as shorthand. He argues that the way we relate to one another today is largely through our roles (think about Twitter profiles: “wife, mother, friend, teacher, lawyer, reader, writer”, etc.) and genre writers build on these roles to create characters. It’s yet another way junk fiction reflects our reality.

Chapter 2 Of Low Taste

In this chapter, Roberts introduced the Table, which I have posted on, as The Dumbest Table I Have ever Seen. Roberts doesn’t argue for his table. He just tells us that divisions between kinds of readers are “generally accepted”. In my opinion, the divisions represented by the table are not just counterintuitive, but so contrary to my reading experience, that I have to wonder whom Roberts has been talking to. I also have no idea what work this table is doing for Roberts.

I’m honestly not sure what Roberts is up to in this chapter. It seems to be a mashup of observations about readers of junk fiction. On the plus side, throughout the book, Roberts makes points that no one but a real fan of genre fiction could make, and this chapter is no exception. For example, he refers to the guardians of disapproval every genre has:

The distress that some enthusiasts for paperback fiction feel when academics begin to move into their territory: pulp fiction has its gate guardians, too. This disapproval is worth special notice, for the serious readers who also read paperbacks must in some genres read against a sort of outward pressure that tells them they are not welcome. (p. 39)

He considers the theory that there is no paradox at all presented by serious readers reading junk fiction, because all fiction has the same preoccupations with basic themes of human existence: death (detective story), nature (the western), religion (fantasy), love (the romance), time (sci fi).

While this may be true, Roberts admits, it doesn’t help explain why serious readers read junk fiction, instead of sticking with serious fiction.

A second explanation — the dominant one, I would say, in Romanceland, and among academics working in popular romance fiction — is that junk fiction is actually very good fiction, and that the best of the genre fiction is as good as the best literary fiction. Roberts rejects it, though, because is assumes something false about genre readers, namely that they read for the same things serious readers read for. He’ll explain what those things are in a later chapter.

Again, he makes a point that only an academic who is a real fan of junk fiction would know:

most paperback fiction mistrusts [academics] and anyone else who reads serious fiction. For serious readers, to read in these traditions is rather like maintaining a cordial relationship with people who are always making it plain that they dislike you.

I see a bit of that online, and a bit of it in romance fiction (for example, the nerdy asexual useless male professor) but my experience has not been that this is the uniform attitude at all.

Another explanation Roberts rejects is that readers of junk fiction are ignorant, neurotic, or young. But ex hypothesi, some readers of junk fiction are just like Roberts himself: highly educated, normal and able to appreciate better books.

In the final paragraph, Roberts seems to put forward one last theory, to which he seems to assent: that human social contact today requires acquaintance with junk fiction, even if it is outside of books (TV, etc.). “If only in self defense”, he writes, “our psyches find ways of turning what seems dross into gold.”

Chapter 3 Book Types and Antitypes

Roberts introduces another table. 5 classes of serious books, 5 thresholds, 5 antitypes.

The antitypes are what junk fiction looks like to those with familiarity with literary fiction: the chthonic, the pretentious/manipulative, the inexcusably unintelligible, the illiterate, and the clownish.

Here are the types:

A. The excellent:
1. The Sacred — We worship this book. Beyond fault, beyond human rejection. If someone doesn’t like it, that person is in error. Ex. Shakespeare

2. The Classic — Demands rereading. Can be studied, Ex. James Joyce’s Ulysees, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Of note: Roberts contends that readers who come to genre fiction from the classics mistakenly think it is not good fiction because it doesn’t repay study.

3. The Readable — Again, showing his understanding of genre reading, Roberts notes that in the past, critics contended that paperbacks were easy, transient pleasures (think of the infamous “they are not books but more like Hustler or chocolate” comments by Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings a few years ago) but today it is acknowledged that junk fiction is often reread by its fans, and that fanship often involves “a simulated form of study.”

But he insists it is different from classics reading:

We do not take notes, we do not review earlier evidence, we do not talk the problem over with friends. We read alertly, we even reread alertly, but we do not study. I suppose that when we do begin to study a paperback, we have already unconsciously accepted it as a classic.

Again Roberts insist that there is a skill and competency involved in genre reading, including “familiarity with genre specific vocabularies”, and recognition of the ways genre books refer to each other, such that “Most of what seems inexcusably unintelligible in popular fiction is crystal clear to those who have learned how to read it.” (p. 60)

4. The Unreadable — Roberts notes that when we can’t finish a serious book, we say is is “unsuccessful”, but when we can’t finish a paperback book, we say it is “illiterate”.

As often happens in this book, I can’t figure out what his main point is in this section. He notes both that some books stink, and that that we all have our own private aversions — things we won;t read or can’t finish. All I will say about it is that I see bloggers in Romanceland talking about these “aversion thresholds” all the time. We are very interested, as a group, in DNFs, in what doesn’t work, in what we cannot tolerate (Incest? Historical inaccuracy The Too Stupid To Live heroine?) and we lump in personal, subjective aversions with objective judgments about the quality of the book just as Roberts is doing in this section.

Again extrapolating from his own experience and common sense, Roberts makes another point:

The reading of paperbacks is bulk reading. We read them buy the half dozen, by the dozen, by the score. We read them almost without noticing who wrote them or caring what else the writer might have published. Sometimes we continue reading, after discovering, a few pages into the first chapter, that we have already read the story … (p. 63)

For me. this is both true and false, both from romance reader to romance reader, and even in my own case, depending on my mood, the day, etc.

And just a bit later Roberts explains why this is:

The [genre] reader is reading not the text but the genre by means of the text. The reader is following the interplay among the texts, the changes is what is newly permitted, what is worth exploring, what can be abandoned. We can follow this byplay only if we are able to read a very large number of stories, which means that we must have a very high tolerance for inept writing. A high tolerance is possible only when we have low standards, that is, a low aversion threshold. (p. 63)

Roberts mentions science fiction’s Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap!” … But then, ninety percent of everything is crap!”

His interpretation of this law, which he thinks applies to junk fiction per se, is really interesting, but also not totally clear to me. What the law is really saying, opines Roberts, is not that 90% of a genre is crap, but that 90% of a genre will not be recommendable to people outside the genre — it’s not bad, but it will be unintelligible to them. Non-genre readers “won’t get it”.

But how to square that point with his companion point, that genre readers have “low aversion thresholds”? I took a low aversion threshold to refer to both a high tolerance for trying new things in the genre and a high tolerance for weak stories in the genre. So I am not sure how to interpret this point, and will have to think some more.

5. The Clownish — books that are so bad they are good. Roberts’ notes that it can be hard to distinguish between a clowning (a parody of clownishness) and clownishness itself. He uses Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle as an example of a clowning parody of modern romance, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an example of a parody of sci fi.

Roberts goes so far as to say that “a genre cannot exist until someone has parodied the patterns to which other writers are beginning to adhere.” (p. 67) And the best parodies are by the folks who love the genre the best, as we of course already know from our Purple Prose Parody contests and other clowning.

Roberts says a lot of interesting things about clownishness and why we ought to appreciate it. He says clownish writers appeal because they are always trying and failing to be writers, just as all of us, in some ways, at some points in our lives, are trying and failing to be human. His examples of subwriting, especially “subpoetry” had me on the floor laughing.

More here.

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Post of the week: The Book Smugglers’s first Cover Matters column takes on whitewashing.  It’s long and detailed and comprehensive and persuasive. I believe this important topic deserves nothing less. Go read it.

Georgette Heyer is on tour!

Beginning Monday March 1, 2010, Georgette Heyer will be going on a virtual tour of the blogosphere. Check out these participating blogs where you’ll find reviews of a number her works, as well as general information posts about this classic author.

An excellent post by Richard Herley, a author who has just concluded a 2 year experiment: he offered his books as free downloads, asking for payment if readers enjoyed them. The post connects up a wide range of issues, including how readers buy, why writers write, and how the digital age is changing reading habits. (from Books, Inq.). At one point, he worries:

People brought up on hyperlinks will not be receptive to the linear experience of a novel or short story.

Author Janet Mullany at History Hoydens explores the difference between good friends and improper relations in Georgian England. Of Jane Austen, she writes:

For Austen, true intimacy and love is between sisters, not friends.

(From BookNinja) Michael Schaub, managing editor of BookSlut, is interviewed by Willamette Week Online. Very funny. Among the interesting bits:

OK, yeah. I’ve gotten some nasty emails from writers whom I’ve reviewed negatively. There was this guy… Toby Young. He wrote a terrible book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was then made into a terrible movie. Basically, this guy is just a dick, writing about his experiences being a complete dick. I thought it was charmless and poorly written, and I said as much. It’s a real job hazard, having to read crap like that all the way through.

Keira at LoveRomancePassion is really doing yeoman’s work trying to keep up with and organize all the blogs in Romland. Check out 50 New Romance Novel Blogs. And did you know she has created a Google bundle with hundreds of romance blogs?

In big philosophy news this week, a letter by the founder of modern moral philosophy (and geometry and a lot of other things), René Descartes, was found at Haverford College in PA . In it, he talks about writing Meditations on First Philosophy, a text that I and every other philosophy professor in the western world will make you slog through if you take one of our classes.

The Tools of Change publishing conference happened in New York last week. Luckily I don’t have to spend any time telling you what I think, because Don Linn’s summation of the conference does it for me.

2. Great Taglines in Romanceland

I’ve been shopping for a new tagline for this blog, and just like when you are shopping for a new car, and you suddenly take a keen interest in all the other makes and models on the road, I have a new appreciation for great tag lines in romance blogging.

Here are a few I’ve admired recently:

Bodice Ripper Reviews: Honest Insightful and Funny, Dammit

Save Black Romance: It Tastes Better When its Chocolate…

Leontine’s Book Realm: Home of the Beefcake Preview Club and the Smutty Society

Moriah Jovan: All the things your mama told you not to talk about in public

Lurv á la Mode: A feast for the reading romanticist

Smart Bitches Trashy Books: all of the romance, none of the bullshit

Right now I’ve got “because litblogs aren’t just for literature”. I am self-consciously trying to create a space for folks like me (and most of you) who read romance and literary fiction, both. We’ll see if it sticks. [changed, temporarily, to "Rethinking Romance fiction"]

The theme creators call the banner design “flames”, and that’s what it looks like to me, but people are seeing … other … things. This is kind of a Rorschach test. Tell me what YOU see in my new header and I will predict what kinds of books you enjoy. (kidding!) [Changed to dirty brown.]

3. Random

I nuked my old blog, and did not do any forwarding due to various complications, not least my innate laziness and selfishness. You can find any old Racy Romance Reviews post, with comments, here at Read React Review, by using the search function (top right), but your old Racy Romance Reviews links won’t redirect here. I am very sorry about this inconvenience.

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I’m on spring break for the next two weeks, and for the first time in 8 years am not going some place warm. Expect a lot of posts as I don my slanket, brew a pot of tea, and park myself in front of my kitchen woodstove for a fortnight.

Happy week!

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A few quick things:

1. I plan to make this blog look better, eventually. For now, you will have to put up with quality content and inferior aesthetics.

2. If you would like to subscribe, please scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the RSS feed button.

3. If you enjoyed reading Racy Romance Reviews, I think you will enjoy Read React Review. But I plan to do more a bit reviewing outside the genre and more philosophy of fiction.

4. I am still working on a tagline. Suggestions welcome.

Thank you for reading. Thank you thank you.

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