List Mania

Someone I know just completed viewing all of the movies on acclaimed critic Roger Ebert’s list of the best movies ever. At my library book club, each year the librarian gives us copies of nationally compiled lists of the best books to read. And at this time of the year, most magazines, newspapers, e-zines, blogs, and more will trot out lists of the latest items we should know about, buy, watch, experience, etc. In that spirit, I’d like to contribute a list of the top romances every romance fan should read. But I am not going to. Why not? Because everybody’s lists are skewed. Either they’re skewed towards too much new material, for instance, listing 25 vampire-and-werewolf paranormals in a list of 100 all-time best romances (!), or they’re skewed in an old hat direction, giving Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and Margaret Mitchell far too much prominence. Not only that, but fans of historicals tend to want to overpopulate the list of romances with historicals. And the same with fans of contemporaries. It’s not just us, though. I was looking at two different lists of the top ten popular songs of the year and I did not recognize any of the titles or artists. Even though I compulsively listen to the radio and switch channels constantly to find new and different music. Everybody is in their own little world, it seems, and it doesn’t often intersect with mine. So my list, if I ever compile one, is going to include my picks for the most influential romances, not the “best.” This might mean that the bestselling romance by an author does not get on the list because an earlier book by her was more influential. A good example would be the Gothic novel by Victoria Holt, Mistress of Mellyn. This book was a bestseller when it came out in 1960, and it continued to sell well for many years. It might even be in print today somewhere, although its author, Eleanor Hibbert, is long dead. She published many more novels under other names, and some of her Jean Plaidy historicals are now back in print because of the resurgence of interest in the Tudors. I don’t know which of her books sold the most copies and I certainly can’t predict which will eventually sell the most, given the current reprinting program. But Mistress of Mellyn was the influential classic that brought the Gothic novel to stardom. Similarly, although Shanna, by Kathleen Woodiwiss, was a landmark book in 1977 because it was the very first trade paperback historical romance and was an enormous bestseller, her previous book, The Flame and the Flower, published in 1972, was the breakthrough, the book that started the bodice-ripping (for once the phrase is apt!) historical romance trend. Also ran Rosemary Rogers, who wrote Sweet Savage Love, published in 1974 (which had even more bodice ripping), likely sold more copies of her second and third novels, too, but nobody even remembers their titles anymore. And the definition of what is a romance keeps shifting, too. Suspense elements okay? Or not? Comedy okay? Or not? Additionally, there’s the issue of determining whether a romance was influential as a romance, or as a work of literature, or more. Take the romance classics of literature, for instance. Most of these will be mentioned in college if you take any English Lit courses. But I can’t recommend them as best all-time romances. For instance, Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740. It’s considered the first English novel, but it is a weird, lascivious, morally bankrupt tease of a poor-girl-holds-out-for-the-ring story that today is only worth reading because it’s so way over the top. And because it elucidates 18th century British morals and lack thereof, which is more of historical interest than romantic. After you’ve gotten the initial flavor, feel free to skim to the end. Just don’t miss the good part when the lecherous master gets pretty Pamela to spend time in bed with him on some pretext or other, and the spunky gal has to Fight for Her Virtue. A hoot. And what about all those lovely Jane Austen novels? Yes, they’re romances, but they are also comedies of manners. We’re in a period of Austen imitators that owes very little to verisimilitude to the truth of her times, or to comedy of manners, and much to a kind of prurient interest in Darcy’s sex life. Like most fan fiction, these novels are destined for obscurity. Meanwhile, should all of Austen’s novels be on the list? Or just Pride and Prejudice (1813), the one that is preeminently a romance? Some lists trot them all out. Georgette Heyer was in part an Austen imitator, though she actually started off owing more to Jeffery Farnol (The Broad Highway, 1910) and the Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1905) than she did to Austen. Without both strains of influence, though, we wouldn’t have had the wonderful The Grand Sophy (1950), Heyer’s romantic comedy of manners par excellence. So, surely Heyer rates. But which of her dozens of books is the epitome of romance versus comedy of manners? Or should there be a distinction drawn? The Sheik, by Edith Hull, is a “forcible seduction” (aka rape) saga from 1919 that started an entire popular romance trend and was the basis for Rudolph Valentino’s movie career as the first American heartthrob. Many writers rushed to imitate this kidnapped-and-raped-by-a-sheik story, and most sheik stories today still involve an alpha male who holds a western woman captive, even if forced sex is no longer part of the standard plot. A very influential book even though most romance readers of today, myself included, have not read it. It should be on the list, for sure. Would my list include any recent romances? Yes, but here things get trickier. It’s almost impossible to be sure of how influential, and thus how classic and important, a novel is until it has aged a while. Outlander, for instance, by Diana Gabaldon (1991), was not written as a romance and author Gabaldon has specifically denied that it is one. But romance fans found the book and call it one anyway. But is it? See if it keeps showing up on lists 20 years from now. Which paranormal vampire romance is the breakout book? Which werewolf romance is the one every other writer imitates? MaryJanice Davidson’s humorous vampire tales, such as Undead and Unwed (2004), have spawned imitators. But nobody would call Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) a romance. Where’s the intermediate novel that pushed this into a major subgenre? Does Anne Rice get credit for the erotica subgenre? She wrote erotica as A.N. Roquelaure. Or should it be Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures (1993), introducing her Anita Blake series? But Anita Blake doesn’t get to experience any sex until the sixth novel in the series, according to my buddy, Wikipedia. So is this series paranormal or erotica? Or paranormal turned erotica? Or is it current fave J. R. Ward, who writes paranormal erotic romances (it says so on her own website)? Lots of people in the romance world are talking about her hunky vampire heroes and hot storylines. Right now, anyway. And the jury is still out on how influential the vast number of evangelical Christian romances may be. Does anyone consider them part of the main stream of romance? Or are they just an offshoot that goes nowhere? Who is writing the romance that is influenced by an inspirational but that is not an inspirational? You see why I couldn’t compile a list. I know too much about the past, and I can’t tell the future. On the cusp of the change from this year to the next, we all try to make peace with the one and look forward to the other. If a list helps, make your own, or read somebody else’s. But don’t sweat the choices. The only books that should be on your list of influential romances are the novels that mean a lot to you.

Why Do I Read Romances, and What the Heck is a Romance, Anyway?

Despite a complete lack of encouragement from my family, or from my social and educational milieu, I was drawn to romance novels in my early teens. My acquaintances were reading serious literature. Really, they were. I had more than a passing familiarity with serious literature and high culture, but I was drawn to stories about girls and women. And most stories about girls and women, beyond children’s books, had romantic elements. Although they often were in disguise. Then one day I saw a novel that did not take me on a pirate adventure on the high seas. It did not solve a Gothic mystery in an old mansion. It did not educate me about some notable figure in history. It was simply about a young man and a young woman who met and fell in love, and encountered obstacles before they came to a happy ending, including a marriage proposal. I loved it. I sought out all similar books. Eventually, I discovered that most romances never got near a public library. But they had a long publishing history and were flourishing as paperback originals. Thus the beginning of my huge personal library of paperback books. Even when I eventually found some romances in hardcover, I preferred to own them in paperback, to match what I already had. Why was I drawn to romances? Maybe because they always had a happy ending. Which was ironic because the major romance I knew about was Romeo and Juliet, a story that ends with everybody dead. And what’s so darn special about romance, anyway? Start with the basic premise: The heroine meets someone whom she comes to value, who excites her because he represents new possibilities in life, who inspires her to emulate his courage, and more. And then the heroine must overcome obstacles to be with this person, and grow in the process. Finally, the heroine’s quest is successful. The man she thought would never look at her loves her, the man who scorned her has come to admire her and admit he cares, the man at her side in a battle, or on the other side, has proved his worth to be by her side the rest of her life. I think of this as a very uplifting storyline. I like romances even though today our view of romantic behavior is not the simple one of a teen age virgin marrying and having babies (and dying young) as the be-all of her existence, as life so commonly was in the past. Many of us have serial romances, getting deeply involved with several people before we commit to one indefinitely. Or, losing a committed relationship through death or divorce, and seeking a new one. And we often have complex careers, or complex problems to overcome; women are more and more the actors in their own lives, not mere reactors. But the notion of true love persists, even though the likelihood of spending one’s entire adult life with one person in wedded bliss with no problems at all is small. I still like it. The romantic ideal still appeals to me. And so I read romances. Oh, and there’s the optimism thing. Romances don’t typically end with dead bodies, or the main characters going to prison, or people falling into depraved and self-destructive habits. They don’t end with the bad guys winning. They don’t end with a question mark, as if the writer has simply given up on trying to find a solution to all the problems besetting the characters. Romances might start with negativity, but they inevitably vector to the positive. I like that. A romance doesn’t focus on the decay of a heroine, but on her striving to become a better, happier person, sometimes by fighting others, and sometimes by fighting herself. When a romance is written honestly, it’s impossible not to root for the heroine and hero, and be happy that by the end they find happiness together. But after a long period of there being lots of straightforward romances, we have entered another confusing stage in publishing. There still are plenty of romances being published. But now there is a wide range of novels with female protagonists that may or may not have strong romantic elements. Plus, the definition of what is a romance is ever shifting to accommodate new trends. For instance, The Touch of Twilight, an urban fantasy novel by Vicki Pettersson. Is it a romance? It doesn’t look like one, and there’s nothing to suggest a romance in the back cover blurb. But who knows? There might be some romance inside. We can see from the cover that it stars a female. Who has a knife in her hand. Cool. Then there’s Veil of Midnight, by Lara Adrian. Similar kind of title, but this one is called a paranormal romance on the spine, and a man and woman are embracing on the cover, which is a universal signal that this story contains romance. But how much romance? On the other hand, Cursed, by Jamie Leigh Hansen, just has a man on the cover. But it too is billed as a paranormal romance. Which of these three books from three different publishers is the most romantic? We’ll have to read all three to find out. Or, what about 8 Sandpiper Way, by Debbie Macomber, which is billed simply as a novel, a nod to her bestseller status? The blurb at least suggests that the story is about some marital concerns and includes a reunion for another romantic pair. Is it a romance? I’m not sure. Is No Good Girls, by Jean Marie Pierson, a romance or chick lit, in other words, a quest story involving several young urban women? And what about Unlacing Lilly, by Gail Ranstrom? It contains a strong skullduggery plot in period costume, and at one point, the hero gives the heroine the 19th century version of the Vulcan nerve pinch. There’s sex in this book and a happy ever after, but is it a romance? And so it goes. I’m back to sifting my way through novels again, looking for the romantic themes that interest me. But the good stuff is out there. And bottom line, all romances are inspirational. They show that a woman can find the person who is right for her, as well as solve big problems or win a battle against difficult odds. Or just get lucky. Romances end happily. Although there is a well-defined school of social thought that claims that in real life most stories end in failure, romances presume success. In a nation whose byword is success, it makes sense that these novels are popular. Romances are book-length affirmations that goodness exists, that true love exists, that evil can be defeated, and more. Read a romance today. Or whatever it’s being billed as by the publisher. It might help you find the strength to make a positive difference in your world.

Laughing at the Classics

Romance comics were invented in the 1940s and hit their peak in the early 1950s. They continued to sell well into the 1960s but died a miserable death in the early 1970s when the majority of young women in America simply did not want to think of themselves as anguishing over a date, or a first kiss, or a marriage proposal the same way they had been just ten years before. Of course they still anguished. But doing so was not fashionable. Especially as the women’s movement had revved up. There was some serious fronting. Romance comics could be silly, but in the early days at least, they often dealt with real problems. Whether to stay in a dead-end job in a dead-end town, for instance. What to do about that pesky sister or best friend who kept stealing your boyfriends. Whether to risk an office romance, when maybe you were being conned by some married coworker who didn’t wear his wedding ring. Chances of that happening weren’t good in a small town where everybody knew everybody. But in a big city, it often happened. It still happens today, but women have a new line of defense: they can check guys out on the Internet. They read their Facebook or MySpace pages, or their blogs. They Google the guys to see if old girlfriends have written unflattering reports, or accused them of being players. Of course the biggest lies told in a romantic relationship are the lies you tell yourself. Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Or else you’ll cry. Or smash something. And that’s when laughing at romance comics is a welcome idea. It is easy to laugh at old romance comics because they became a cliché. They were drawn in a very distinctive, lush style and often were overwritten and thus extremely emotional. I’ve complained before in this blog that dissing these romance comics is like shooting fish in a barrel. Too easy, and basically a cheap trick. Dated material that you read with no sympathy always comes across as stupid. While reading these comics, I’ve often wondered if real girls and women ever behaved this way. Since the stories were 99.9% written by men, and long before I was around to see the same world they did, the jury is out on that speculation. The writers may have been accurately describing what they saw. They may have been far off base. They may have been copying what they saw was popular in other media, such as in romantic movies or romance novels. Who’s to know for sure? Robert Kanigher, for instance, wrote many issues of many comics, Wonder Woman chief among them. And even though he was responsible for some of the silliest Wonder Woman comics—the ones that defied science or logic because they featured three iterations of Wonder Woman at once: herself as an adult, herself as Wonder Girl, and herself as Wonder Tot, all together in adventures with “their” mother, Queen Hippolyta—well, even though Robert Kanigher perpetrated these on the world, I loved them when I first read them. And I still love them. Kanigher had tapped into a genuine female family dynamic. He had a family of his own to draw ideas from, of course. You don’t have to be a woman to write credibly about the women you have known, including your own wife, daughter, or sister. That said, I was attracted to Truer than True Romance, published in 2001, a romance comic spoof, because the wiseacre text that replaces the original text was written by a woman, not a man. And the project had the full cooperation of DC Comics, which opened its vault to provide the original art that allowed author Jeanne Martinet to make mock of the romance comic genre. Although there are some hilarious moments, this concept is better in snapshot form than in story form. Individual panels can be totally killing, for instance, the one about the girl with the very short haircut who is having an extreme bad hair day. Entire stories, stuck with the visual continuity of a straight romance from the past, tend to come across as bizarre. Martinet tries her best to write new text that takes advantage of the excesses of this old genre. But the whole isn’t bigger than the parts most of the time. Except when the heroine of one story, now titled “Loving Gay Men,” apparently has a psychotic episode and imagines a happy ending love scene with a swan. Now that was weird enough to be interesting. The woman with the fetish about not checking her luggage on an airplane was kinda neat, too. Surreal and funny. But 15 pages about a girl who is very pretty yet empty inside dating a guy who is the same? It was hardly a hoot on the first page and it never got any better. And of course, that’s the problem. These rewritten romances are bad romances to begin with. Try rewriting a good one. That might be very interesting. With the technology available even on cheap PCs today, we all can rewrite any old comic to our heart’s content. We can even snatch panels from other comics and create our own pastiches that have the romantic moments for which we often wait in vain, comic books being what they are today. Imagine taking a romantic moment from an old comic and just dropping it into the middle of a new one. You don’t have to draw to make comics anymore. (Just don’t publish them. Art is subject to copyright.) I’m looking forward to the day when I can make this happen with movies, too. The movie makers already can. But I want to do it at home for fun. I’d make Han Solo tell Princess Leia that he adores her. Maybe even in the first Star Wars movie. Definitely in the second.