Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art,
puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal.
And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive
rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be
fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must
delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre
writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis
does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of
Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They
are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it.
Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel,
remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too
feminine to be salvageable. The comic becomes the graphic novel, science
fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love
story can be nothing but itself.
It was not always so; the English novel once carefully examined the feelings
of young women who sought and eventually found refuge in the form of wealthy
husbands. As women made social and political gains, that narrative could no
longer be written in the same way, yet no new account of female experience
really replaced it. Fiction about that specific realm retreated either into
the fantasy world of the romance novel, or into its modern counterpart,
chick lit, which transplants a version of the story into a contemporary
urban setting, where the protagonist only gets her happy resolution after
much drinking and shopping. For many decades now, the detailed treatment of
conventional love and its happy endings has been all but exiled from serious
fiction. Long after Jane Austen came Georgette Heyer, and the love story
never found its way back.
The romance novel’s exclusion is made more obvious by publishers’ attempts to
disguise its true nature, and many books are pitched awkwardly halfway
between literary fiction and bodice-ripper. Short Books, originally a
publisher of non-fiction, has begun putting out novels of this kind,
claiming in their press handout that they “just couldn’t say no” to
submissions of “such originality and quality”. However, the essential story
remains that of a plucky young woman, poor, or at least a misfit in some
way, who struggles to make her way in the world, facing loneliness and
adversity, before at last being rewarded with a conventional happy ending:
successful love, and perhaps babies. The world she strives in is often
slightly different from our own, either an earlier period or an exotic
locale, and ideally both, as in Hong Ying’s The Concubine of Shanghai –
early twentieth-century China – or Betsy Tobin’s Ice Land – Iceland, 1000ad.
The cover of Andrea Barrett’s The Air We Breathe (which is set in a TB
sanatorium) has a sepia photograph of a lone woman looking out over a body
of water.
Happy endings are now risky for an author, as is the privileging of romantic
love and relationships over everything else. The five novels under review
seem determined to make a virtue of this myopia. Hong Ying’s narrator
summarizes the political events of the period she has chosen in under a
page, and concludes that the only way to understand Shanghai and “the
unmistakable flavour of 1925” is through “the people that I write about”.
Andrea Barrett’s characters, a group of sanatorium patients in the
Adirondacks during the First World War, narrating in the first-person
plural, begin by defending their overwhelming interest in relationships as
the result of enforced isolation and inactivity – “we gossiped as eagerly as
we drew breath” – and end with the realization that “we could have learned
what we needed about the world and the war simply by observing our own
actions and desires”. Though not untrue, this is unambitious. These books
are for the most part not badly written; yet their authors feel they must
build excuses for their trivial preoccupations into the narratives.
Barrett’s novel is uneasy in tone; it cannot decide what it is aiming for, at
some moments moodily imagining time “clotted like blood in a bowl”, at
others uncomfortably entangled by the mechanics of the plot: “Ignoring
whatever was going on with Miles and Naomi, and also Irene’s remark about
Leo, Eudora followed Irene out the door”. Hong Ying knows that the scraps of
history or politics she pastes in around her romping concubine are just
touches of local colour, but The Air We Breathe is freighted with so much
detail, so much research into the period and the surroundings, that it seems
to be yearning to be something other than a love story. Barrett knows all
about tuberculosis, and she brings in relativity theory, explores notions of
collective responsibility, quotes whole sections of Mendeleev’s Principles
of Chemistry, grafting it all on to a sentimental tale starring the
wonderfully named Eudora. Eudora is a Cinderella type who endures long hours
of demeaning work, uncomplainingly mopping the tubercular blood from the
floors, and sweetly assumes that her more attractive, selfish young friend
will interest the brooding male protagonist, who shares Eudora’s interest in
chemistry and stares lustfully at her in the basement laboratory. This is
the occasion for descriptions of “smooth-bellied glass vessels and the
sinuous tubing pulled fine as thread, the purring, nearly invisible flame of
the Bunsen burner”.
As the case of the lovestruck chemists may suggest, romances are in some ways
more like pornography than crime novels or thrillers. In their purest form,
they are wholly instrumental, manipulating the reader’s emotions and
providing reliable effects, without encouraging different interpretations.
The romance novelists of today do try to complicate things, with moments of
oddness and ambiguity. This is best seen in their treatment of relations
between women, especially those between older and younger generations, where
combinations of admiration, envy, jealousy, support, understanding,
curiosity, contempt and a confused kind of lust are allowed to coexist. In
The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller, the central relationship, and by far the
most interesting one, is that between Meri, a young, recently married woman
still aware of her humble background, and that she “has nothing, and nothing
is coming to her”, and Delia, the “deeply lined” but elegant, “patrician”
woman who lives next door and is married to a famous senator.
The tensions between the two women cannot be properly resolved, and at last
they are instead rather spectacularly (if disappointingly) exploded. Meri,
in a series of scenes involving Delia’s husband and her own “spurt[ing]”
breast milk, turns the older woman into an old-fashioned rival and uses her
best weapon – youth – to destroy her, before moving on into her own happy
family resolution. Despite the pleasing “Chloe liked Olivia” element, the
older generation is almost always eventually humiliated and supplanted by
the younger; perhaps that is meant to add an enjoyable poignancy to the
happiness of the young – Madame Emerald, the ageing ex-proprietor of a
brothel where Cassia the concubine made her start in Shanghai, bravely
advises her that a woman begins to age as soon as “she starts to pity
herself” – but more likely there simply aren’t enough happy endings to go
around.
The complicating factors in these books sometimes accentuate the conventional
restrictions that do remain in place. A baby is meant to resolve the
frustrated, chatty love story in Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti, but
by the time one has reached that point, all the small problems the two
protagonists have piled up between them have started to seem insurmountable,
and it is a relief that one doesn’t have to stick around and find out how
the fragile little family fares. Mazetti’s is a book unusually concerned,
for a romance, with the quotidian workings of love; here it isn’t merely a
feeling but a series of things you are willing, or not willing, to do for
someone else. Though Shrimp does vanquish a love rival to get to Benny, the
usual epic obstacles aren’t otherwise in evidence. We simply see how hard it
is, in a pragmatic, mundane sense, for a relationship to work, and for
people to communicate with one another out of their own petty isolations.
When baby abruptly trumps all this at the end, it feels like an awkward jolt
back into a quainter genre.
Hong Ying gives her heroine several happy endings, none of which quite works
out, until eventually she and the narrator, a self-proclaimed “feminist
writer” who has been studying Cassia, decide to “work out an ending for
ourselves”. This seems to be the resolution of an earlier moment in which
Cassia accosts a feminist speaker, asking why her speech about equality
makes no mention of sexual relations, and whether she thinks men should be
allowed to dominate women in that arena. Despite hints that Hong Ying may
have wanted to subtitle her novel “Tales of a sex-positive proto-feminist in
1920s Shanghai”, the author has chosen to pose for the book’s cover in
revealing concubine gear, her skin blurred as if with Vaseline on the lens,
the title scrawled in pink lettering beneath her. As if she has had second
thoughts, there is a different author photograph on the back, in which she
is covered up in a demure cheongsam, eyes cast modestly down. Inside the
book, as in all the books here, great emphasis is placed on the women’s
bodies (usually voluptuous), and their desires (barely satiable), how they
“want and want and want”.
The novels do try, at times, to struggle free of their own skin. There are
flashes of self-awareness, as when Madame Emerald and Cassia are described
as being “over-sentimental” in order “to hide something from each other”; or
when Cassia reflects that the “sentimental love plays” in which she stars
are irresponsible, that her stage tears are “merely water moistening the
stone on which real knives were sharpened”. When one of the amorous chemists
writes the other a farewell note in which he says “I love you” for the first
time, Eudora feels that he is damaging the “delicate and interesting thing”
that has developed between them, that the conventional words “only served to
hide everything worth talking about”, their individual feelings crushed by
the sentimental formula.
It is not entirely clear why efforts to take romance out of its ghetto haven’t
worked (unless it is because the publishers don’t really want that; they
want the appearance of seriousness but their interest is still primarily
commercial). The genres that have made the leap – John le Carré’s spy
thrillers, J. G. Ballard’s science fiction, Raymond Chandler’s detective
stories – have the same sweaty, mass-market paperback past as romantic
novels: churned out swiftly and regularly, repeating their familiar
structures with the details changed for novelty’s sake, they have all been
sneered at by the literary establishment, and devoured in great quantities
by loyal addicts and bored train travellers. One thing holding popular
romance back may be that it is aimed so explicitly at women. Women are used
to reading things not written especially for them. Getting men to take an
interest in female-focused fiction, no matter how well disguised, will
always be trickier.
Crucially, romance doesn’t seem dark enough. The geek boys have emerged from
their bedrooms and become acceptable, even admirable, because their
fantasies are allowed to be nakedly steeped in power, and the misery of not
having it, whereas girlish love stories deal with similar feelings under
several stifling layers of cotton candy. Science fiction lends itself to
political and social allegory, filled with lurid fears made real, but the
romance novel knows you must be perky to survive. It encodes female fear –
of helplessness and destitution, of violation, of ageing and abandonment –
so that all that is left in plain sight is its inverse, the narrative of
love, motherhood, and wealth, which, if not ideal wish-fulfilment, has so
often proved to be the safest bet.
Hong Ying
THE CONCUBINE OF SHANGHAI
288p. Marion Boyars. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 7145 3150 2
Betsy Tobin
ICE LAND
368pp. Short Books. Paperback, £12.99.
978 1 906021 14 6
Andrea Barrett
THE AIR WE BREATHE
304pp. Hutchinson. £17.99.
978 0 091 92 094 4
Sue Miller
THE SENATOR’S WIFE
320pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £10.99.
978 0 7475 9483 3
Katarina Mazetti
BENNY AND SHRIMP
224pp. Short Books. Paperback, £12.99.
978 904977 41 4
Lidija Haas works at the London Review of Books.
