The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post:

Links of Interest:

Some of us are having a good discussion over at Katherine Beutner’s blog about romance pedagogy and scholarship. Click over to see what DA’s Robin, author Jeannie Lin, author Carolyn Jewel, moi, Eric Selinger, and others have to say.

Author Lionel Shriver, in the Guardian, “I write a Nasty Book and They Want a Girly Cover on It“, another take on the Franzenfreude, with a focus on book covers, titles, and marketing in general (via @redrobinreader, who weighed in herself here):

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I’m not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss. By stereotyping my work’s audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress.

See also The Franzen Kerfuffle and the “serious Reader’ at PW (via @superwendy):

To me, the questions raised by the kerfuffle over Franzen’s reviews gets at something I’ve long watched with relish, covering this business. Within the industry there’s a feeling that anything that gets anyone reading is good, yet, filled as publishing is with people who love books, people who think books are important, people who think they’re not simply churning out popular entertainment but also high culture, there’s an intense jealousy about what becomes popular.

Tess Gerritsen also weighed in, writing a direct response to the article by Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult that started it all:

You really don’t need the New York Times. You don’t need Michiko Kakutani or Janet Maslin or three whole fricking pages in the Book Review. Because you have something far, far better: readers who actually buy your books.

Finally, check out this discussion at Jennie Crusie’s blog and a lengthy comment from Crusie here. (thanks again to Robin!):

One of my profs said, “Jenny, you write so well. Have you ever thought about writing literature?” I said, “No,” because it was easier than explaining that literary fiction is just another genre, not God’s Library. The people who say, “I write for the canon” have forgotten or never knew that the canon doesn’t read. People read. Fiction is not beautiful writing although that’s wonderful; fiction is storytelling. It’s putting narrative on the page that moves and transforms people, and because there are many, many different kinds of people in the world, there are many, many different kinds of fiction.

Kindle 3 reviews are popping up. Here’s Sandy at All About Romance with a very concise review and Jane of Dear Author getting her geek on with not just a detailed K3 review, but a second review dedicated to the Kindle cover with integrated light. I love my Kindle, and am so spoiled by the comfort and feel of reading on it that I will not read paper unless there is no alternative.

The Fall Quarterly Conversation is out, and it reviews two books I intend to read:

1. J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature edited by Peter Singer and Anton Leist.

2. The Novel: An Alternate History Beginnings to 1600 by Stephen Moore.

Moore’s analysis of so many previously unheard of (to me) early novels, carried out over nearly 700 pages, collapses the centuries between this or that novel—such that the books written about are simultaneously of our time and the time of their creation—and dismantles the long-taught divisions of genre. We see that the history of the novel that older British critics (and critics from other countries who followed them) came up with is mistaken. The hoary tale that the novel began with Defoe, Swift and Richardson, going on to Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and so on, is a fabrication that has robbed us of experiencing, or even knowing about, a wider world of literature than English fiction, and a considerably older heritage of the novel than previously posited.

Author Pam Rosenthal has posted a discussion of the paper she gave at IASPR this summer, The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre.

For fun, When a Book Makes Sweet Sweet Sex to a Computer, The resulting Offspring is a Blog. A short funny video on “what is a book”.

Another funny link, from Media Bistro, Roald Dahl’s report cards, now appended to the end of a newly released Penguin edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My favorite: “This boy is an indolent and illiterate member of the class.”

2. Blogger Fragmentation

One of my favorite blogs, The Reading Experience, is kaput. But Daniel Green’s comment about what he plans to do next gave me pause:

Maintaining a single blog no longer seems to me an adequate way to cover all of the subjects, and address the various audiences engaged by those subjects, that interest me as a critic, although I continue to find the medium itself entirely adequate for writing about literary subjects. I hope not to fragment my attention so thoroughly that readers find the multi-blog approach incoherent, and I certainly do not intend to burden readers’ attention with posts in competition with each other, but the old practice of alternating briefer commentary with longer reviews and essays with shout-outs to other blogs has come to seem counterproductive.

I have noticed this fragmentation happening in Romanceland. Keishon started a mystery blog. KMont started a food blog, as did bloggers from Dear Author and Smart Bitches. In a slightly different case, some bloggers, like Katiebabs and MagdalenB, have started professional blogs/websites for their author identities. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I have five blogs — one for my cv, one for bioethics, one for my course in ethics, one for my kids, and this one — most of which are skeletal at best.

Is this the way it is going? Are we at the end of the multipurpose blog? Is the occasional blogging detour no longer legit? What do you think?

Personal Update

There’s lots going on but the two main things are (1) my kitchen is being redone, beginning Wednesday. Floors, cabinets, lighting fixtures. appliances, even a fancy dancy desk/bar/book shelf thingy. We are major trend buckers in not having hard wood, but rather, ceramic tile installed. We thought it would be fun to see how many seconds it would take in winter for our bare toes to freeze to the floor.

Our house is an open floor plan — and by that I mean, it was built in 1930 like all the other houses in Bangor (referred to as “the Bangor box”), but in 1958, someone decided to knock down all the first floor interior walls, leaving only a chimney in the middle. So, you have to walk through the kitchen to get to any other room. Needless to say, I am terrified. Luckily, my mother lives up the street, so we won’t starve.

And (2) The blog redesign looks like it is finally going to happen. I don’t know how this will affect things for readers, but I apologize in advance if there are any problems.

On the Blog this week:

Post: “We are all mean girls now”
Review: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Post: On Historical accuracy
Review: (mother and son joint review) The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
Review: The Dragon’s Bride by Jo Beverley and/or Match Me If You Can, Susan Elizabeth Phillips

HAPPY WEEK!!

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I read my first Higgins recently, her 2009 release,  Too Good to Be True. I enjoyed it. I quickly read two others, Catch of the Day (2007) and Just One of The Guys (2008). And I’ve started — but haven’t finished (I need a break, for reasons I will explain below) Fools Rush In (2006).

You can hardly find a contemporary writer whose is more embraced by the mainstream romance community than Higgins. By my count, Kristan Higgins now has seven books in print, all with Harlequin. COTD won the RITA for best single title contemporary, as did TGTBT. The Higgins covers all feature romantic couples. Higgins books are reviewed in Romantic Times, on most romance blogs, etc.

But even though this defies all logic, I do not think Higgins writes romance novels. I think she writes women’s fiction.

Higgins novels (please understand this is the shorthand I am going to use for “the 3.5 Higgins novels I have read”) start with a heroine who is unhappily single. They are written from the heroine’s first person point of view. The heroine really wants to find (or, in cases where she has identified him already, get with) her true love, feels she is getting old, and envies her happy-with-spouse-and-children sister or brothers. She then hooks up with the wrong guy or guys — often comically, but sometimes with a fervor that takes her right into TSTL/unsympathetic territory. At the very end, she hooks up with Mr. Right.

And when I say “at the very end”, I mean it. Higgins heroes aren’t around much in her books.  The heroine spends so little time even thinking about the heroes that I don’t even get a sense of who they are through the narrator’s eyes. So, for example, in TGTBT, the hero went into business with his brother, to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, but the brother stole the money and ran, leaving the hero in debt, and in prison. In COTD, the hero had an early failed marriage and a teenaged daughter. In JOOTG, the hero had a troubled childhood, and, later, a broken engagement. These events are Very Big Deals. But the reader never gets to see, really, how these past events are overcome by the heroes. Higgins heroes have no – or almost no — character arc.

The journey to the HEA is hard to discern from the heroine’s journey toward self-acceptance, whether that means acceptance of her unorthodox or boring career choice, her unfeminine or otherwise unspectacular appearance, or something else. I believe it is this factor that has led so many to read these unquestioningly as romances. But I think it’s the heroine’s journey to self- acceptance that matters. It happens to involves, partly, a romance, but it could have involved anything else — scaling Mount Everest, fighting cancer, defeating negative influences, etc.. For me, a true romance novel convinces the reader that the ONLY way for that heroine’s character to grow was to fall in love, and specifically to fall in love with the hero.

All of the heroines have difficult families which pose the biggest barrier to their self-acceptance. These family relationships are, in my opinion, more central to the books than the romances. Higgins heroines have especially difficult relationships with their sisters. In TGTBT, the heroine’s sister actually stole her fiance. In COTD and FRI, the sister is the “beautiful/perfect” one, while the heroine feels inferior. There’s no sister in JOOTG (as the title implies), but it’s the relationships with the four brothers and the parents that delay the HEA.

One common way to define romance is to use the industry definition from RWA. According to that, first, a romance requires:

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

In my view, there is a difference between the heroine’s search for love and “two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work.” Higgins books are about the former.

Second, a romance requires:

An Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

I would say this condition is met, with reservations. As I’ve said, a lot of the Higgins books are about other relationships — the parents, the sisters, the brothers — and these are often going very, very badly. People are left at the altar, cheated on, and some of these marriages end in divorce. So while, as a reader, in feel optimistic about the hero and heroine, there is so much pessimism in the other important relationships, that it is hard to feel optimistic overall about love. This is perhaps more true to life, but less true to the spirit of the genre. I don’t know if “emotional justice” really triumphs in Higgins’ fictional worlds. In this, she reminds me of Jenny Cruisie.

So those are the formal elements of romance. But there is also a set of informal expectations readers have, to which I now turn.

One informal expectation is that contemporary romances which are not inspirational let the reader in on the developing sexual relationship of the h/h, with varying degrees of explicitness. Failing that, the reader is let in the sexual tension which builds in an unconsummated relationship. With Higgins, there is neither sexual explicitness, nor sexual tension. She closes the door on the hero and heroine when they enter the bedroom. Other writers, like Julie James, have done well with the more subtle approach to sexuality, but James excels at sexual tension, which serves just as well.

Again, while it is not a de jure requirement that the hero and heroine stop sleeping with others after they meet, it is uncommon to have, as we do in JOOTG, the heroine sleeping, regularly, with another man, and accepting his marriage proposal, 77% of the way into the book, while the hero is also sleeping with someone else, with whom he has a long term relationship. Again, in TGTBT, the heroine makes out with her former boyfriend toward the end of the book — after she has started sleeping with the hero — and kind of enjoys it. In FRI, again, the heroine is sleeping with another man regularly, well into the book, long after she has met the hero. This is probably more realistic, but less romantic.

Putting all of these things together, I contend that Higgins breaks both formal genre rules and unofficial genre expectations, and she breaks too many, all at once, to count as a romance writer.

So what is she? A women’s fiction writer.

Here is women’s fiction writer Marilyn Brant on the difference between Romance and Chick Lit:

I used to be a book reviewer for Romantic Times, and I read quite a few of both. My way of differentiating between romance and any other genre is that, in romance, there is one hero and one heroine. The protagonists may have had multiple relationships in their past, but neither of them becomes seriously involved with anyone else once they get together. The romance requires a relationship arc, which results in a happy ending, in addition to an individual character-growth arc. For chick lit or light contemporary women’s fiction, the heroine’s romantic interactions are often elements in the novel, and they may even play a major role on occasion. However, the main focus of the story is on her personal journey to greater self-understanding. Whether she ends up with a man or not is irrelevant, but she needs to have learned something from her experiences over the past 300-400 pages and, in my opinion, be in a better place (mentally, spiritually, etc.) than she had been at the beginning of the book.

For romance, the HEA is a necessary condition for everything else. In women’s fiction, while there may well be an HEA, the other elements of the book don’t require it — it’s contingent. Kristan Higgins is a very funny writer, a compelling writer, a writer I feel happy comparing to Jenny Cruise and Susan Elizabeth Phillips in certain respects. When she focuses on the romantic elements of her plots — that first kiss, the HEA — I am riveted. If she decided to write a straight romance, I am pretty sure it would be one of the best romances I ever read. But she hasn’t, in my opinion, written one yet.

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The Weekly Links, Opinion and Personal Updates post

Links of Interest

In general, I am not a great fan of DIK (Desert Island Keepers), but I liked the post from Renee about taking reading breaks.

Carolyn Jean of the Thrillionth Page has an interview with Steve Savage on Urban Fantasy Heroines’ Debt to Star Trek.

Super Wendy is making a list of librarians in romance novels. Not to be outdone, I am making my own list: of philosopher heroes and/or heroines in romance novels. It is currently an empty set, but give me time.

Harlequin has launched Try Harlequin.com. In this publisher’s typical ingenious fashion, they are encouraging readers to try new lines by giving away free books.

M/m author Ann Somerville is finding herself arguing that free and self-published doesn’t mean inferior at her blog.

It’s funny about free books. I download free Kindle books regularly, but rarely read them. Why is that? I spent some time noodling around, and it looks like there are two theories about “free” as a marketing strategy (I don’t think Ann’s choice was strategic, but I think a lot of the free books are). Theory 1 says you are shaping consumer behavior. First you offer a good for free, then you offer a discount, and finally, when the consumer is good and hooked (or convinced of its value) you offer it for full price.

The opposing theory says that if you offer a good for free, you may not be marketing to your best clients. Such “buyers” may not value the good. They have no intention of ever paying money for it. In the book realm, the corollary might be “they will stick this in the bottom of their TBR and never get to it.” A lower percentage who own the free book might actually read it, compared to those who paid and are thus more highly motivated.

On the other hand, if way more people own it, as a result of it being free, then the total number of readers who try this author or this book might be higher.

Which do you think prevails in romance?

From Galley Cat, a discussion of whether writers should pay for reviews in Publishers’ Weekly, Kirkus, and ForeWord. I’ve been thinking a lot about this particular argument:

This GalleyCat Reviews editor called Sutherland to confirm her comments, and she added these thoughts: “In the literary world, free (poverty) seems to have been the only criteria for integrity. Yet, people happily pay doctors and lawyers for a diagnosis–plenty of conflict there to enourage [sic] clients to come back for more. What critics of our pay for service miss is what they accept about lawyers and doctors – namely that reputation means a lot to a professional–and the path to your door will grow weeds fast when you prove to be a sellout.” (Via Self Publishing Review)

I am not sure whether I oppose the practice of paying for reviews. But my gut reaction is that this is a total fail as an argument, in part because the payment for services is how the economy of medicine works, whereas ad and subscription revenue is what keeps PW etc. afloat (although I do not deny her claim that there is a dangerous incentive in medicine to treat more when it earns more). Second, the relationship of physician to patient bears little resemblance to the relationship between book reviewer or book review publication and author, and the comparison suggests an attitude towards writers that is problematic.

From the Awl, Drink or Die. One study shows that “proficient” drinkers live longer than teetotalers, maybe because they are more social. I don’t know exactly what it takes to be a proficient drinker, but feel sure I make the cut.

In the world of poetry, there is a kerfuffle over the New England Review‘s and Ploughshares‘ decision to charge a nominal fee for e-submissions. Steve Fellner critiques the practice. An editor of the NER (and my former classmate) C. Dale Young, responds.

Beth Fish Reads is starting up an Audiobook Jukebox, a clearinghouse for audiobook reviews.

As promised, Sunita posted a terrific article on the Harlequin Mills and Boon line over at Dear Author. And with 75 comments, many including suggestions for great titles, it’s a terrific resource.

Did you see the news about Obama getting an early copy of the new Franzen to read on his summer break? If you have ever wondered what presidents read in their first summer in office, here’s some interesting info.

Kerfuffles that could have been:

Mrs. Giggles seemed to be doing her best last week to start up controversy, first with a post on Ravenous Romance, then with a post asking for secrets on Carina Press. Few takers.

Erstwhile blogger Candy Tan showed up to write a terrific post on Scott Pilgrim.I parsed the comments for clues as to her past whereabouts and future plans, and here is what I can say for sure: Candy took up the accordion, became the leader of a new musical movement to fuse the polka with glam rock*, fell off the stage wearing platform heels at a show in a cantina in Mexico and woke up in a beach front mansion in San Diego, as the special (platonic) guest of a certain dot.com millionaire whose reading tastes ran from Deepak Chopra to Tony Robbins. It took several months of deprogramming to get her to stop deconstructing phrases like, “If you can’t, you must, and if you must, you can” and “It’s not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.” Beyond that, I really can’t speculate.

*Now defunct. But you can still find her rendition of “All the Young Dudes (Stole the Keeshka)” with vigorous Googling.

Sarah of MonkeyBearReviews ranted a bit about the hypocrisy of folks who have embraced the Kindle 3 despite swearing off Amazon in the past. Personally, I couldn’t be happier to have more Amazonians on board.

Personal

I went to Vermont for a wedding this past weekend. Truly wonderful. My favorite line was from one of the toasts or readings (can’t remember which) to the effect that marriage isn’t just about choosing the right partner, but about being the right partner.

Lovely spot for a wedding, huh?

I started teaching today. Love being back in the classroom. (Just remind me I wrote that when it comes time to grade something.) This semester it’s Contemporary Moral Problems, Biomedical Ethics, and Feminist Theory. I am also coordinating the department’s colloquium series (The power!!) … on a very small budget (The stress!!).

On the blog this week:

I am obsessed with Kristan Higgins. Am working on a theory that she is not really a romance writer. Stay tuned.

Also look for a review of that Atwood, and of a romance novel in which art work that depicts a dragon nearly raping a maiden is featured prominently.

HAPPY WEEK!!!

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The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post. Brace yourselves: the personal update this week is actually kind of interesting.

Links of Interest

My heroes of the week: Grad student whistle blowers. I’ve been avidly — not to say gleefully –  following the Marc Hauser story. Unbelievable. And yet … not.

Pop Philosophy is Taking Over Bookshops (via @jafurtado). Yet my idea for a popular volume on Philosophy and Romance has been rejected by three presses.

Is Lady Gaga A Feminist? Five Questions for Philosopher Nancy Bauer

Lately, I have noticed that advertising in blogs has migrated from the sidebar to the body of the posts. And not just the end of posts, like posts from The Millions, but the whole post. The most recent example is a “post” advertising diapers at Books on the Knob. I love the info about free books on BOTK, and I support her by clicking affiliate links when I can. I just hate the migration of ads into content. I know I can click past it, but it feels different to me than the sidebar links.

@sonomalass, whom many of us know from Twitter and her blog hopping, finally has her own WordPress blog, Another Day in Paradise.

Katiebabs is talking about how to stop sites that steal your content. Her post has links to some websites that can help you discover if your content has been scraped. Although I am sorry this happened to Kate, the post is very helpful.

Did you know there were over 70 indie presses for romance? I do now. Check it also for an interesting batch of comments on what indie presses owe to authors by way of promo.

OUT-fail: You all know about this already, but for my own records: The Out magazine article on straight women writing and reading m/m romance. The Gawker follow up. Visit Teddypig for his response, and for  links to the Lamda Literary response (with 50+ comments). A response from Gehayi (also from Teddypig). Erastes’ own response. I am sure there’s lots more out there. If you have any links to suggest, feel free to do so in comments. I don’t have any comment, except to say that there has to be something between wholesale dismissal of the entire subgenre on the grounds that all of it is sexist fetishizing of male homosexuality, and wholesale embrace of it on the grounds that anybody can read and write whatever they want, and that fiction is make believe so it doesn’t matter anyway.

Culinary Carnivale has a new feature: ebooks I would have bought, listing the ebooks that were just too damn expensive — even more than their paper counterparts. I pass up several ebooks a month for the same reason. If we all do it, will publishers get the message?

Male and Female Ability Differences Down to Socialisation, Not Genetics, from the Guardian. Except for the title, this article on researcher Cordelia Fine, and her forthcoming book, Delusions of Gender, doesn’t fall into the usual false nature/nurture dichotomy:

“All sorts of ridiculous conclusions about very important issues are then made. Already sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.”

It will give you a ready response the next time you are at a playground and a mother says of her boy, “He just came out that way!”

Check out this interview with Wicked Gentlemen author Ginn Hale at Fantasy Cafe.

Read But Not Reviewed

I read Ava Gray’s Skin Game after Tumperkin posted about it, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I also recently read and enjoyed Pamela Clare’s latest I-Team book, Naked Edge, so I guess I’m back in the game as far as rom suspense goes, after a long period away.

Another book I read and really enjoyed was Kristan Higgins’ RITA winner, Too Good to Be True. This was an odd reading experience. I was totally into this book, and thrilled with it while reading it. I liked it so much, that I immediately bought several other books by the author. But whenever I try to write a review, it comes out sounding negative. A recent post from Kati of Katidom on The Last Minute HEA helped me nail one reason: Higgins’ characters don’t get together until the very end, kind of like in old school romance where the hero says “I love you” and the book ends. I think I’ll do a post on a group of her books, like I did with Susan Napier.

When the setting hits too close to home

I often notice readers saying they can’t read books that feature a heroine whose career is the same as their own. but how about the setting. Can you read a romance set in — or even near — your hometown?

Speaking of Higgins, I tried to read Catch of the Day, a 2007 Rita Winner, about a woman who owns a a diner and a lobsterman in Washington County, Maine. The problem I had with this one was that I live pretty close to the setting of that book, and, to me, it is not a romantic setting. On the front page of my newspaper this weekend was this headline: Drugs Weigh Heavily on Maine’s Poorest Area, Washington County. Here’s how the article begins:

Nicholas Ames has been a fisherman, a carpenter and a crewman for the Maine Department of Transportation. He is a son, a brother and a father.

Ames is also a drug addict.

Washington County is very hard hit economically, by the exodus of major employers, mainly paper mills, overfishing and tighter restrictions on fishing, and the aging of the population. Illicit drug use is very high, partially as a result of these economic problems. Of course, there are wonderful love stories that happen in Washington County. But the place described in the book bears so little resemblance to the area I know, that I just couldn’t get past it. This is 100% reader bias, I realize, and no fault of the author. I am sure to pick up the book again soon.

I also joined Goodreads. I am not sure I have the energy for another social networking endeavor, but if you blog and have a Goodreads account, I’d be curious to know how you balance or integrate them.

Personal

I went to Boston for the weekend to meet my husband’s family for my father in law’s 80th birthday. At 2:00am on Saturday, the fire alarm went off in our hotel, and we raced down 7 flights of stairs to the smell of smoke and no fewer than 10 emergency vehicles lined up on the street with firefighters, cops, and EMTs running to and fro. Several quick thinking guests grabbed their terry cloth robes from the bathroom. At least two brides grabbed their wedding gowns, trying to keep them off the dirty stairwell floor and later using trees as makeshift hangers. I grabbed only my kids and my purse, leaving me stuck in my ratty gym shorts and braless in an old college t-shirt. If anyone ever asks me what I would take in a fire, I now have a definitive answer.

After about an hour standing half clothed in the chilly night air, we were herded into an adjacent hotel’s ballroom, where we stayed — with tablecloths for coverings — for the next four hours. Here’s a pic of my boys asleep on the floor. It was quite an adventure. The Boston Herald reported that there was an electrical fire, which they took hours to put out. No one was hurt, and we ended up having a wonderful weekend anyway.

Someone tweeted that this sounds like a great premise for a contemporary romance. I agree. But since I am not likely to write one, I thought I would brainstorm a few ideas and let you guys take it from here:

1.  Blaze: Heroine, who lives in San Diego, is in Boston for a wedding. She recognizes that she was invited to serve as bridesmaid mostly because the bride  — a real bitch –  has so few real friends, but is game, and looks forward to returning to Boston, the home of her undergrad alma mater. A fire alarm goes off, and they have to evacuate the hotel. As she holds up the train of the bride’s gown (the bride is clutching the bodice with all her strength) and races out the door, she notices a gorgeous male firefighter. She’s mortified when the bridezilla starts screaming at him for information. Angry, the firefighter answers bridezilla’s questions with a brevity bordering on rudeness. As he turns, he catches sight of heroine in her ridiculous pajamas, gives her a once over, and dismisses her. Suggested title: “Hot for Her”

2. Medical: Elderly woman collapses in the stairwell when trying to exit a burning hotel. Dashing male doctor comes to her aid. Gorgeous female med student comes to his. Together, they save the elderly woman and go their separate ways. Until she is a resident in his hospital 4 years later. (Can turn into a Blaze by having them go out for a drink and a quickie after the rescue. Can turn into an erotic romance by having them do it right in the stairwell).

3. Suspense: Heroine is a journalist who happens to be staying at a Boston hotel when it burns down (luckily no one is hurt) Hero is an undercover FBI agent based in Boston who is on the scene within seconds of the alarm sounding. He’s sure it’s terrorism — he has been following this particular terror cell for years — but won’t reveal anything to the press. She wants to get the story of her career… (Can turn into erotic romance by having her lock him in an elevator and … well, you know)

4. Inspirational: The heroine and hero bond while delivering bottled water, handing out blankets, and leading prayer groups in the ballroom/refugee camp.

5. Paranormal/chick lit mashup: Hero is a werewolf/valet parking guy who set the fire by making mad wolf love to some random person in the hotel’s parking garage. Heroine is a human bride-to-be whose wedding is delayed by the fire, giving her fiance time to rethink and call it off. She drowns her sorrows in the hotel bar (once it reopens), and then in the arms of the werewolf hero (he shows up later). Conflicts abound: the human/nonhuman pairing, the class differences (heroine is an upwardly mobile stock analyst), the big secret of how the fire started, and we can throw in a scene where the human fiance wants her back.

6. Erotic: After spending time in a park, everyone is ushered to a nearby hotel for shelter. A few people sleep through the move, waking hours later to the lawn sprinklers soaking them to the skin. Two people notice how their clothes cling sexily, and decide to make the most of this bizarre moment. They don’t plan on seeing each other again but …

Ok, I’ve used up all my creative energies for at least a month, feeble as they are. If you successfully use any of these, all I ask is that you name one of the characters — it can be a pet gerbil, I’m not picky (but I draw the line at sex toys) — Jessica.

FYI: Persuasion is the next Romance Roots Read. I aim to post on it end of September.

HAPPY WEEK!

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This is the book that convinced me I don’t read Jo Goodman solely for the romance, because there was almost no “romance” in this one, yet I still really enjoyed it.

I’ve been listening to Goodman’s Compass Club quartet on audio, read expertly by Jenny Sterlin. The series revolves around four friends who were schoolmates together at Harrow, sworn enemies of the Bishops, a rival group.  As adults, they occasionally work for the British government through their contact, the mysterious Colonel Blackwood, and end up battling the nefarious Society of Bishops. The stories occur contemporaneously, which is great fun for the reader.

Everything I Ever Wanted is the third second book, the story of Matthew Forrester, Earl of Southerton (“South”) and actress India Parr. This book is very much like the second book (All I Ever Needed), in that the hero and heroine are both very good, nearly perfect, people, but the heroine finds herself dependent on some horrifically bad people and is reluctant — mainly to protect the hero, but also due in part to shame and learned helplessness — to reveal exactly who is oppressing her and why.

In both books, the conflict in the first half was mainly waiting for the heroine to Spit. It. Out. In the second half (maybe 1/3), it was external conflict –  getting the heroine’s situation fixed by neutering the villain.

If this make me sound critical, I don’t mean it to — I have now read four books by this author and I considered each one a delight. I love her writing. I feel liked I’ve been whisked back to Regency England more convincingly than most other historical romance authors I read. I also love the dialogue and the intelligence of the heroes and heroines. I guess we all have our fantasies: as I said in my review of All I Ever Needed, mine is living in a world where everybody is this good, smart, this interesting, this witty, and this well-spoken. Sigh.

I happen to also enjoy careful psychology in my romances, and in this book, as in All I Ever Needed, most of the action is really in the thoughts and dialogue of the hero and heroine. I find myself hanging on the edge of my seat to hear what the next move in one of their conversations is. It’s very detailed — some might find it labored — but I love it:

Smiling weakly, she accepted the glass and drank. “He thinks I’m guilty, doesn’t he?”

“It would be truer to say that he is still willing to be convinced otherwise.”

The laughter that bubbled to India’s lips held not a whit of good humor. She glanced at South uneasily.

“There is not very much difference there.”

“There is enough, India. Help me prove where your innocence lies.”

She did not know what to say to that. Had there ever been a time she could lay claim to innocence?

Yes, of course there had, but it was so very long ago that it seemed more often another person’s life. The glass in her hand was cool, and she held it against her temple for a moment, easing the growing ache just behind her eye.

“Is it a megrim?” asked South.

India shook her head and lowered the glass. “Nothing so wicked as that.” She looked up at him and asked frankly, “Why would you want to help me? If you are honest, you know you are only a little less certain of my guilt than the colonel. How can that be enough for you to want to do anything on my behalf?”

He hesitated. It was not merely that he wondered what she was prepared to hear, but that there were those things he was not necessarily prepared to admit. “Quid pro quo,” he said finally.

“What?”

“You may call it quid pro quo.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You extended your trust to me once,” he reminded her. “I would offer the same to you.”

“I see.” Was she disappointed? India didn’t know.

This novel verges into horror at points. The revelations of who has India under his thumb, what he did to her, and why he did it, shocked the heck out of me. I am not sure I have ever read anything darker in a romance novel. Even more interesting, and disturbing, was India’s compassion and defense of her tormentor.  She may have gone beyond the fine line of feminine stoicism and empathy and right into abject victimhood. I would have been happier if she showed more anger, more spark, more interest in her own welfare. Even her acting career seemed not to matter to her.

I said in the beginning that this isn’t much of a romance, and it isn’t. I honestly have no idea how these two fell in love, or when. I don’t think there is a single line of mental lusting, or even internal thoughts about love towards the other person. When they have sex, it’s about as sexy as an ob/gyn exam. India says “You will have me now.” And he does. End of story. I kind of like being let in on the feelings on the h/h when I read romance.  If you really enjoy courtship and sexual tension in your romances, this is not the book for you.

Everything I Ever Wanted worked for me as a compelling story about interesting characters. I look forward to reading the other two books in the series.

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I purchased this book, which was published by Lethe Press in January 2009 and is available in e and paper editions, in November last year for my “8 Days of Ham/mukah” celebration of m/m romance. I had a hard time reading 8 books in 8 days, let alone reviewing them, and put this one aside. I brought it on a road trip from Maine to the midwest earlier this month, and by the time we got to Niagara Falls, I pretty much didn’t want to get out of the car if it meant I had to stop reading this book, 150,000 gallons of water per second be damned.

If you are sick of historical romance referring only to 1810-1820 London, and only to the upper classes, sick of m/m romance referring only to erotic romance, sick of lengthy, explicit sex scenes wedged into your historical romance in places they don’t belong, sick of authors telegraphing every interesting, potentially conflict-creating aspect of a character on the first page (i.e. Character development for idiots with attention deficits), then you will enjoy this breath of fresh air.

Here’s the blurb:

New York, 1919. His career as a concert pianist ended by a war injury, Sutton Albright returns to college, only to be expelled after an affair with a teacher. Unable to face his family, he heads to New York with no plans and little money–only a desire to call his life his own.

Jack Bailey’s life has changed as well. After losing his parents in the influenza epidemic, he hopes to save their beloved novelty shop–now his–by advertising on the radio, barely more than a novelty, itself.

Sutton lands work in Jack’s corner of the city and the two conclude they couldn’t be less suited for friendship. But when Sutton loses his job, Jack gives him a place to stay. Sutton returns to the piano to play for Jack and finds the intervening months have healed him. The program promises to rescue Jack’s business and Sutton’s career…but success brings its own risks for two men falling in love.

This blurb does what blurbs are supposed to do, but it doesn’t communicate at all how slowly the story unfolds or how richly the setting is developed. When the book begins, Sutton is being awakened by a pounding on his mice infested 41st street hotel room’s door. He’s kicked out, and ends up, after wandering around a public park on a rainy night, in jail for the night. The next morning, down to his last nickel, he nurses the past dregs of his diner coffee, practically begging the waitress for work. We know he’s low, but we don’t know why. We know he comes from money, that his heart was broken back home, and that he’s just returned from the war.

As we come to know him, we find that Sutton is kind, even tempered, sensible, and infused with the optimism of a young man who has lived a life of privilege. And he’s transparent. As Jack says, “How you feel always shines right out.” Sutton’s struggle is figuring out how to be a good man, a good son, a good lover, in a world completely changed by both political and personal events. He wants to make the right decisions, but how? He thinks:

It would be so much easier if life provided sheet music to help him make sense of its dynamics–or even a few notations for finding the most harmonious chords. But life refused to oblige. He could only improvise.

When Sutton is sent on an errand to Bailey’s Emporium next door, he meets a whole new cast of characters. There’s Ox, a good hearted brute, and Harry, the accountant/manager, and others. Jack is the owner of the shop, which he inherited from his parents. Jack also fought in the war, and unlike Sutton;s physical injuries, his are psychological. Jack is irrepressible, a live wire, impulsive, cynical in some ways but boyishly eager in others, an enthusiastic party boy, with a darkness inside caused by the loss of his parents, his hard scrabble life since then, and his war wounds.

The conflict between Sutton and Jack is nothing new: Jack is afraid of commitment, and doesn’t believe, deep down, that he deserves unconditional love. This is typical of his view on life:

“A fellow can’t have everything.” Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets to ward away the chill. “Win something you want and you can be sure the next day you’ll lose something you have. It’s getting so I don’t want to wish for anything else.”

The fact that Sutton is the son of a wealthy industrialist only gives external validation to Jack’s lack of a sense of self-worth. Sutton’s issues have more to do with finding his place in the world after his dreams of becoming a concert pianist were dashed by the war. Jack and Sutton begin an affair, and Allen effectively communicates the intense sexual attraction between them, without opening the bedroom door to the reader.

Often readers who like gay male romance will say they appreciate not having to worry about gender politics in their romance reading, and I never understood that until I read this book. Sutton comes to see that finding a lasting love, a life partner, is the key to his happiness. He really is sort of content to bask in the unpredictable fireworks show that is Jack, to help Jack achieve his dreams, to support him in his recovery from the war, to just be a lover in the truest sense of the word, almost as an avocation. I think if Sutton had been a woman, this might have troubled me. But I found it very moving in a male character.

Here’s how that kind of love looks to Jack:

Jack hadn’t thought of love as a promise before–a promise that, even when the world was falling down around him, would stay kept. But without Sutton saying a word, he knew that there would be comfort when he couldn’t sleep tonight. And tomorrow and the day after, there would be a home to go to, even if it was no more than a pair of arms around him and a head tucked close to his in the darkness.

On the other hand, these guys don’t have heart to hearts. They communicate like men often do — wordlessly, saying more by what they don’t say. I hate romances, whether m/f or m/m, when a very masculine male character starts saying things at the end that would never come out of that guy’s mouth. Dr. Phil talk. Oprah talk. Not just flowery talk, but depth psychology talk that suggests a level of self-analysis that is totally foreign to these  live-in-the-moment men.

One thing I noticed was that the tone tended to be very similar from page one to page last, or maybe I mean the pacing felt very regimented. I think I may have been looking for more drama in the dramatic scenes, even if the characters themselves tended to shy away from it.

But this was an incredibly sweet, romantic story, made even better by the fascinating cast of characters Allen develops, including Jack’s ramshackle “family” and his slick night owl friends. From diners to jazz clubs, to back alley fisticuffs, to impromptu bicycle rides to the dump, to makeshift concerts in the crowded curio shop staffed by a live alligator, to heavies trying to control the neighborhood, I was fully immersed in this world and glad to be there.

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to leukemia research.

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(Part 1 here)

This post assumes you have read it. Here’s a cheat summary if not.

Did I enjoy Dracula? The first four chapters, when Harker is visiting Count Dracula on business in Transylvania, were terrific. Gothic, tense, absorbing. When Harker cuts himself shaving, when he looks out the window and sees Dracula scaling the castle wall like an insect … that’s great stuff. Then I noticed that Harker started doing things that were unintelligent, like breaking into locked rooms that his scary host has told him to avoid, but, remembering that as a 21st century reader I know what all of Dracula’s odd behaviors signify, while Harker doesn’t, I tried to be charitable. Another great scene is when the ship carrying Dracula, the Demeter, arrives in the midst of a great storm (the Gothic flourishes are so fun) on the English shore, with the crew is disappeared and the dead captain, clutching a crucifix, tied to the wheel. There’s a lot of great story telling here.

The novel is an epistolary one, meaning it is written as a series of letters, and sometimes news clippings (more on this below). I guess the book was originally conceived as a play with one of Stoker’s good friends as Dracula.  The effect is to mute the action, because as a reader you are never “there” when the good stuff is going down. It has already happened. I guess the fact that the letters are written from the point of view of characters who only know part of an unfolding series of events might enhance the suspense, but I found most of the vampire slayers so incompetent that it didn’t work that way for me. Surprisingly, there isn’t all that much action, perhaps because had the story been staged, complicated action sequences would have been too difficult to enact. There is talking. A LOT of talking. I would guess the ratio of talking about what to do to actually doing it is 10 to 1.

I did enjoy the book, although I was always reading it through the lens of all the other vampire stories I consumed first: Stephen King, Ann Rice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampire romances, etc., and a lot of the time I was thinking about how this version was similar to and different from those others, as well as about big picture themes like gender and sexuality, science versus superstition, etc.

There is so, so much to say about this book. But here are a few things I wanted to talk about:

0. Writing

These people are obsessed with writing things down. I know it’s an epistolary novel, but still! They even write about writing. This journal entry from Mina is typical:

There may be a solemn duty, and if it come we must not shrink from it. I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required.

Yes, because the typewriter is just the thing to foil the undead!

Also from ch 14:

I am so glad I have typewritten out my own journal, so that, in case he asks about Lucy, I can hand it to him.

I am sure there’s a lot to be said about the power of the written word, about publicity and privacy, about writing as exorcism, as therapy, etc. But my super intelligent reaction was “WTF”?

1. About Mina

She is strong and smart, but she’s also got that masochistic streak — and not the fun kind. After nearly being killed in a traumatic encounter with Dracula, she says:

“And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!” Her husband groaned again. She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one, and went on.

She also gets kicked out of the Scooby Gang after their first meeting. It’s like Stoker changes his mind mid stream. At the end of Mina’s Journal in chapter 18 we get this muddled logic from Van Helsing:

Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain, a brain that a man should have were he much gifted, and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination. Friend John, up to now fortune has made that woman of help to us, after tonight she must not have to do with this so terrible affair. It is not good that she run a risk so great. We men are determined, nay, are we not pledged, to destroy this monster? But it is no part for a woman. Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors and hereafter she may suffer, both in waking,from her nerves, and in sleep,from her dreams. And, besides, she is young woman and not so long married, there may be other things to think of some time, if not now. You tell me she has wrote all, then she must consult with us, but tomorrow she say goodbye to this work, and we go alone.

2. TSTL

So what kind of a brains do Van Helsing and his crew posess? Hmmm…. well, Mina starts exhibiting the same symptoms Lucy had, and Dracula lives thisclose, yet nobody thinks for a second that Dracula has gotten to Mina. Is it because of her “man’s brain”? They notice she is tired, and send her to bed. Over and over. Finally, Renfield enlightens them, they arm themselves and rush to Mina’s room, where they have this exchange:

Outside the Harkers’ door we paused. Art and Quincey held back, and the latter said, “Should we disturb her?”

“We must,” said Van Helsing grimly. “If the door be locked, I shall break it in.”

“May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady’s room!”

*headdesk*

3. My favorite scene

Of course, it’s when they do break in and find Mina with the Count:

His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion.

How many dissertations were launched by this tableau? So many overlapping metaphors and allusions. Mina as mother giving her blood. As suckling babe. Sex kitten.

Dracula even sounds downright Biblical when he says:

And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later on my companion and my helper.

4. The menages

Dracula escapes  (of course) and then there’s this weird moment between Mina, her husband, Jonathan, and Van Helsing:

Then she raised her head proudly, and held out one hand to Van Helsing who took it in his, and after stooping and kissing it reverently, held it fast. The other hand was locked in that of her husband, who held his other arm thrown round her protectingly.

Mina has already shared her literal marriage bed with Dracula. So how many people is she married to, exactly?

And that isn’t even the first suggestion of a threesome in this book. There was this exchange earlier, when Van Helsing was transfusing Lucy. He mentioned Holmwood’s notion that exchanging blood makes Lucy his bride:

Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride… If so… Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.

Everyone says Dracula is a book about transgressing boundaries — geographic, gendered, sexual, bodily, material and spiritual. So why not have three — or 4 –  people in a marriage?

5. Bloodsucking = sex, blood = semen.

I always knew that there were these linkages, but I never realized how darned obvious they would be. Then again, perhaps they are obvious to me because I am a 21st century reader. For example, this one from Mina, after her episode with the Count in her bedroom:

When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the – Oh my God, my God! What have I done?”

What? Some of the WHAT? I am dying to find out what she meant, because I have NO IDEA. !

And when Van Helsing says not to tell Arthur that other men have given their blood to Lucy, it’s because he might get jealous (chapter 10)

No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.

6. The gang rape of Lucy

But all of this pales (heh) in comparison to the top scene for the kind of deep analyses favored by a certain type of highly educated literary critic   — the stabbing of Lucy. Lucy had been beautiful, the perfect chaste, virtuous woman, with no fewer than three suitors. But somehow — and it was never clear to me in reading the text — she was susceptible to Dracula. She had to have invited him in at least once, naughty girl. Or maybe she thought he was a homeless person in need?

Eventually, after multiple fuckings blood suckings, she is turned, and starts killing infants. This makes sense. If the perfect woman is maternal, then the opposite of the perfect woman is a baby killer. I loved it that Lucy went around killing babies and trying to seduce everyone. Terrifying stuff.

The more evil she is, the more beautiful and the more alluring. Or is that the reverse? From Chapter 16:

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said, “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another.

In other words, they are all getting off. Together.

As horrible as it is to the men, several of whom are in love with her, and one of whom — Arthur — is engaged to her, they must go to her grave and kill her. Here’s how it is described:

Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercybearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it.

Whew. I need a cigarette. How about you?

7. Dracula as alpha male

Ian Holt, a Dracula authority and coauthor of a sequel, has written that:

There have been many schools of thought on why Dracula and vampires hold such sway on the masses. In my opinion, the root is that Dracula represents freedom. Dracula is not bound by the rule of law or man’s self-imposed morality. He has the strength of ten men. His powers over the human mind allow him his pick of women. These are all powerful fantasies to many an adolescent boy.

For women, Dracula represents the ultimate alpha-male. Wealth, power, will and strength define him. He exists on a higher plane than human men, appealing to the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality.

Holt here assumes that female readers place themselves in female character positions in the novel. We know better than that. But does Dracula represent the alpha male? Is this a romance, with Dracula trying — but failing — to find his soul mate? I know that’s how the 1992 film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola understood him, but I don’t see it in the book at all. While I find a lot of sex in this book (assuming a depth reading) I don’t see much romance. I was never sure what motivated Dracula, exactly (he’s upset that his former glories are former. He wants control and power, but over what, and why? Or maybe I am not supposed to ask why someone would want control and power), but it’s not love.

It is easier for me to connect Dracula with the alphhole heroes of the past in romance than with the vampire heroes of today’s romance novel. The obsession with consent and coercion, with moral and sexual purity, with control of women, was there in Old Skool romance.

Consider these passages:

With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so, `First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet. It is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!’

And Mina, confused about her complicity:

I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. (chapter 21)

Women engaging in sex against their will, or their better judgment, impossibly alluring men, the attempt to find happiness with the average Joe, all of that is echoed in some ways in older romance novels I have read. And not just older ones: the idea that female sexuality is dangerous, fraught, powerful, debilitating, and in some way bad for women (and men), is still with us in many a romance novel today.

But, to get superficial for a minute, Dracula was not good looking, a prerequisite for a romance novel hero. Here is Harker’s description when he first meets him:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Except for the strength and vitality, and the “cruel-looking” mouth, there’s little here to compare to romance heroes of today or yore. But Dracula is the strongest, the most free, the most alluring and intense. And that’s who the hero is in most romance novels.

There’s so much more that could be said about this book. For example, I was very interested in Van Helsing as physician/researcher, and of course in Dr. Seward and his patient in the asylum, Renfield. I think I am going to use Renfield as a case study the next time I give a hospital talk on waxing and waning decisional capacity! But this is long enough.

Have you read Dracula? What did you think?

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An interview with my spouse, Stephen M. Miller, Ph.D., F.R. Hist. S.. He’s a historian specializing in the British Empire (the “F.R. Hist S.” is the Royal Historical Society to which Stephen was elected a couple of years ago. I swear he doesn’t normally use it, although he may or may not have asked me to shout it during intimate moments).

Before we start, he wants me to say that he has absolutely no expert knowledge of Victorian fiction and is being dragooned into this. Also, we’re assuming you have read it. If your recollection is rusty, here’s a character list.

In this interview, we talk history. In my next post (coming later today), I talk Dracula as fiction and relate it to romance.

Jessica: Is this an imperial novel? What about the theory that Dracula represents the Other in that political sense?

Stephen: Well, I would say yes and no. There were lots of improvements in transportation in late Victorian Britain, among them the introduction of electric trains in the London underground system in the early 1890s. Railroad expansion is occurring rapidly throughout Britain and most of the continent.  Remember when they are trying to catch up with Dracula, he says there are three ways they can go after him, land, sea, and railroad?  That was a bit odd because Eastern Europe was well behind the north and the west in linking its cities via rail.  But of course there were some lines, and Stoker mentions the Orient Express whose service was about ten-fifteen years old when he wrote the book.  These improvements made it easier not just for Britain to go out to the rest of the world and subdue large tracts of it but it also made it easier  for the rest of the world to come to Great Britain, and that was a  very scary notion, albeit it opened up exciting possibilities as well. All in all, the world seems smaller, and thanks to improvements in communication (telegraph, submarine cables), it got smaller still.  Technology — like electricity, lighting, use of gas — would have been on people’s minds at the time, but there was little of that in the book.

But I think Stoker uses these advances as a device to set up the book, and then kind of leaves it.

Although there are some references to empire, and it’s written in an era in which empire would have been in the minds of the British public, it is not, in my opinion, an overt book about the empire. To read it that way assumes a level of subtlety in Stoker’s writing which in my opinion he doesn’t possess. One of the things Stoker often does is repeat for emphasis any point he is trying to make. If he is trying to say something, the reader knows it.

So, for example, to speak of Eastern Europe … they only meet one Jew in the book. If it’s about Eastern Europeans, there are few if any references to them in London, but there would have been many recent immigrants about. Although there are references to gypsies in Dracula, and references to Slovaks, there’s very little about their culture. If someone was really interested in the Other coming, they would talk more about that. So to me, it is more of a setting.  This is not Joseph Conrad or even Haggard writing about setting, for example, in which the setting takes precedence regardless of the author’s intent.  This is Stoker re-telling a well known tale, and the road to Transylvania was well-worn before 1897.

There are a few references to India, which suggests that Stoker had some knowledge about the empire. There are no references to Africa. In late Victorian Britain, the British army was engaged on the average in two to three wars a year. Most of those were fought along India’s frontiers and in Africa. Some of the other big events going on would be the French threatening British interests in Egypt, which would bring Britain to war in the Sudan against an Islamic theocracy (again). Stoker was writing at a time when Islam would have been feared, yet there is no mention in the book. The British public held certain beliefs about the followers of Islam, most of which today we would consider prejudicial and inaccurate. Yet war and religion do not appear in the book.

J: Yeah, why don’t they get a priest? Why are no characters going to church? Wouldn’t the church have been important to Londoners at that time?

S: Those are good questions. There is no doubt that the Church of England’s influence over British society is in decline, but it is still a force, especially among the respectibility-seeking middle class.

J:  I found it really interesting that the person in the book who seemed the most religious was the one who worshiped Dracula, Renfield. He has the ecstasies, blind unselfish devotion, all the hallmarks of a kind of intense religious experience. While Van Helsing and the gang use religious artifacts like the host, they do so in a very detached, scientific way, almost draining all the spirituality out of them.

What do you make of Van Helsing’s nationality, by the way? Van Helsing is the one who realizes that natural science alone will not defeat the enemy. He is open to supernatural possibilities.

S: That is a mystery to me. The British viewed the continent as very different, but the border is pretty open. The British elite travel throughout Europe. Many speak French, German. The British and German royal families are closely connected. From the 1870s especially (until the buildup of the German navy around the time Stoker is writing), there is a strong interest in all things German and much sympathy.

J: Does Van Helsing have to be from the Continent to recognize what Dracula is? Is Stoker trying to say the British are of such pure mind they can’t even contemplate a Dracula?

S: Maybe*, but the problem with that theory is Morris, an American, doesn’t recognize Dracula. Stoker praises Quincy Morris for his “American” traits, like his spirit. So perhaps he is trying to say that Dracula represents the old Europe. They do talk about a few of the old battles that Dracula participated in. Oddly, those were battles in which Dracula fought Muslims, so in that way he would be viewed as a protector against Islam. So we don’t want to read too much into this … because in my view it doesn’t all cohere on this level of analysis.

*You have to hear how he says this. It sounds like “maaaaaaaaaay -bee and he’s always looking down when he says it. I have been married to this man for almost 15 years. “Maybe” is his way of saying “God you are clueless.”

J: How about economics?

S: The Great Depression (not what most people in the US think of, but one that affected industrial Europe from 1873-1896) was coming to an end. It had been caused by excess capital and led to a decline in interest rates, causing investors to look for new sources overseas, rather than investing at home. Economically, though, things in Britain were fairly good at the time. That said, the landed class are not as wealthy as they once were. The reason to include the elite character — Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming) — is not so much for his money, but for what he represents. In a way it’s like a throwback — the Christian gentleman. Arthur has to help them, by bankrolling the vampire hunt, but his title is just important, as is his moral fiber. He’s the one who ends up freeing Lucy’s soul.

In 1897 London, it would have made more sense to have an industrialist, a banker or merchant in that role, but in this book money is portrayed as kind of negative.  Dracula pursues and talks about money in away Stoker seems to criticize, to find ungentlemanly.  There is no Dickensian condemnation of utilitarian middle class virtues, but more of a praising of the virtues of the upper class.

J: So when we look at the Scooby Gang: in Harker and Seward he has science, in Van Helsing, a kind of spiritual openness, in Arthur, a pure knight of Old England, and in Morris, a fresh fighting innovative spirit from the New World. Now what about Mina? Is she a kind of ideal in Stoker’s view?

S: Maybe, but Mina is much too strong a character to represent the ideal Victorian woman, She would have to be seen as a new ideal, an ideal for a very small educated class of women, that ten years later will be the ones that take to the streets to fight for the vote. She’s almost like a Florence Nightingale. I don’t think of that as an ideal for Victorian women.

J: I think we disagree about Mina, but thanks a bunch! You are the sweetiest.

S: Wait don’t you want to hear about what I have to say about guns and why all the men know how to use them though none are in the army?

J:  NO!

S: O.K.  Now you have to read Graham Greene’s The Human Factor.

J: Er — I have to wash the cat.

S: You promised!

J: *sigh*

Marriage, compromise, you know the drill.

Part 2 here.

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A guest post by @JanetNorCal

I’ve been thinking a lot about James Carville and his motto when he was helping Bill Clinton get elected (and I know this dates me): “It’s the economy, stupid”. Ultimately an author’s books trump any and all social media.  You may love the author on Twitter, but DNF her books. You may hate the views she shares on her blog, but love her books. The bottom line is: “are her books worth reading?”

Obviously this is the merest scratch of the surface and it’s just my opinion. Many an online friend feels very differently. Without further ado, my thoughts today!

Do:

a) Share your opinions and expertise and let us know a bit of what’s behind the curtain.

b) Talk about the life of an author. I’ve read authors say I’m agonizing over which computer to buy or I’m tracking down the perfect pair of shoes before a book signing.

c) Be equally friendly to everyone, as much as you’re able. Try to exude an air of approachability.

d) Join the conversation whether it’s reality TV or a new movie or whatever is trending (just keep spoilers in mind).

e) Share your life in pictures sometimes: a great sunset, your new pet, super muffins … and make your twitter background personal and give us a glimpse into your world.

f) Have fun with twitter: make me forget you’re marketing.

g) Social media is rough and ready and no one’s grading your spelling and/or grammar. If your words are too slick, mannered or Haiku*esque, they won’t sound authentic.

Don’t:

a) Don’t constantly retweet your author (or blogger) friend’s request to get to 1,000 or 2,500 or whatever followers. So sick of those!

b) Retweeting retweeting starts to feel like spam when it’s all book and author related, again, especially if it’s your friends. If I wanted to follow them on twitter, I would.

c) WIP. Once in a while fine, all the live-long day, nope.

d) Reconsider being really really snarky and potty-mouthed. Occasionally, fine, but a steady diet of that impresses me not.

e) Don’t rip other authors a new one – this is a very subjective comment because who am I to say what anyone should say about their fellows. I can only say that even the appearance of piling on can be rather off-putting

f) When authors wear a number of different hats and share their expertise I wonder if I’m hearing from the former principal or the best seller or the hog farmer – for me it can be heavy-handed.

g) Probably no need to mention this but just in case: do not reveal plot spoilers when you have access to ARCs

If the metaphor of twitter and Facebook as the communal water cooler is a valid one, then perhaps the difference is that everything online is public rather than ephemeral. Even if one deletes a regrettable post, there’s often a record after the fact. The words of Henry Ford, quite possibly apocryphal, keep running through my head: “Never complain, never explain”. If you comment on a review that is unfortunate, if you enter into a very volatile discussion, if you talk about personal matters, you run the risk of having your words misconstrued or getting involved in a morass of back and forth that can be ultimately very unpleasant. Ultimately, it’s all a crap shoot.

Thanks Jessica, for letting me have the floor. Which is now open.

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