Why We Read New Romances

Recently I pared down my collection of romances by one author, Lucy Walker. (Doesn’t sound like much, but that was 27 paperbacks off my shelf.) Lucy Walker’s romances introduced me to the Australian outback and made me thirst to visit the continent Down Under. But they also gave me a dual impression of life there. On the one hand, it all sounded fascinating. On the other, the chauvinism of the men and the passivity of the women did not make me want to have a romantic encounter with an Australian man. I should note that I encountered as reprints; they were written in the 1950s, when the fashion was for passive women who dated other men as a ploy to make their inarticulate boyfriends jealous enough to finally speak up and propose. I guess I needn’t have worried that the conventions of sheep station life of that era would hold true for my own romantic life years later, but I did get a very strong impression about Australia through these romances. I haven’t looked at these books for years now, and before giving them to charity I made the deliberate decision not to reread any of them. I’ve figured out why. I have an image in my memory of what those books were like, and I don’t want to disturb that image. This might explain why even though most of us romance readers have a pile of books we call “keepers,” we want to read new romances. After all, if you think about it, wouldn’t owning a mere five or ten romances do? To experience the pleasures of romance again, you’d just reread them. But that’s not how we behave. We cherish the old stories mostly in memory and we don’t want to mess with those memories. That aversion—that fear of tampering with a perfect memory of a golden moment—pushes us to read new stories to obtain the same dramatic thrills that the old stories gave us. It’s the fundamental reason why people read genre (or watch series television or go see Iron Man 2). We want more of the same, but not the same. It’s not merely a need for something new and different, although that plays a role, too. It’s a need to protect our prior experiences. This is true in many media, many forms of entertainment. We see a wonderful movie and we do like to rewatch it from time to time, but not too often. We might notice flaws we never saw the first time around. Instead, seeing this wonderful movie propels us to seek out yet another movie that might be wonderful also. The great British essayist Samuel Johnson said, “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” Reading a second or third or 500th romance is a case of experience creating hope. We loved the romances we read in the past, and we hope the ones we read in the future will be as good, will impress us, and will make us want to put them on our bookshelves and savor the memories they contain. Eventually, though, we grow into different people. We can’t connect directly with who we were when we first read the books ageing on our shelves. When that happens, it’s time to move those books along, find them a new home, so they can give some other romance reader a happy experience. Lucy Walker and I are parting company, but I will be visiting Australia later this year, and that’s entirely because I once read her romances.

Multi-Platform Publishing Workshop at the RT BookLovers Convention in Columbus, OH.

Join us on Thursday, April 29th at 10 AM for the Multi-Platform Publishing Workshop at the RT BookLovers Convention in Columbus, OH. Pat White, CEO and Publisher of Arrow Publications will moderate this panel discussion with bestselling author Lucy Monroe and representatives from Arrow Publications, Samhain Publishing, and Barnes & Noble. Bring your business card for a drawing to win a Barnes & Noble nook eReader. On Friday, April 30, 2010, join Arrow's Pat White and Valencia Wood, Director of Media Development at RT's eBook & Graphic Fiction Expo from 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM to find out more about Arrow's iPhone App Program.

Distracted By Sexy Men

This post has been hijacked. I planned to talk about mad scenes and the 19th century belief that women were hysterical, unreasoning creatures. Lucia di Lammermoor has her famous mad scene. Elvira in “I Puritani” has hers. My latest example was Ophelia’s mad scene in “Hamlet,” the opera. We don’t see mad scenes in romances anymore because—well, because they all must have happily ever after endings today. It would have been interesting to talk about the “dark night of the soul” moment that romance heroines experience today instead of mad scenes. But that post was not to be, because something else happened as I watched “Hamlet.” “Hamlet” is not what I’d call a romance, nor is it a story I seek out deliberately. It’s most famous as Shakespeare’s superlative revenge tragedy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I fell in love. Oh, not with the story. It’s still a miserable tale of adultery, murder, suicide, and more murder, although the majority of the deaths in the Shakespeare play do not happen in the opera. Polonius gets to live, for instance. No, I am newly in love with Simon Keenlyside, the baritone who plays Hamlet. Of course his singing was top quality, but he did such a terrific acting job and looked so good doing it that I wondered why Hollywood has not come calling. Or does Hollywood not bother anymore? Can sing, can act, looks great, plus has a cool British accent and an intensity that is perfect for film. During the intermission interview, as he was nonchalantly wiping huge amounts of fake blood off his face, he impressed me with his intelligent approach to the role. This is a serious artist at work. But I’m not the only one who noticed that this guy is hot. There’s a site called Barihunks that proclaims its interest in “The Sexiest Baritone Hunks from Opera,” and lists Keenlyside as a top contender. I agree. Which got me thinking about Jonas Kaufmann. This opera hunk has been hanging out in Europe throughout his career, but next year is finally coming to this country. I got a sneak peak at him by going to a movie theater that showed “Carmen” live from La Scala via satellite. (The very same technology that brought Miley Cyrus live to multiple movie theaters.) Jonas Kaufmann is the warm and fuzzy, sympathetic lover type. Carmen, the spirited gypsy, makes mincemeat of him as Don Jose (until the final act, of course, when he kills her). Kaufmann has been acclaimed for his interpretation of the doomed Don Carlo and I’m excited that it will be another HD simulcast next season at the Met. But I’m also excited because he is hot. John Relyea caught my eye when he played Mephistopheles in “The Damnation of Faust,” an otherwise boring piece that’s more about the chorus than it is about acting. Leather pants make the man. Erwin Schrott, diva Anna Netrebko’s main squeeze, is yet another operatic stud who’ll willingly show his pecs in the cause of drama and great singing. He looks so sensitive and sincere in this pic, but that's because he's playing that famous seducer, Don Giovanni. Don Juan, to those of you who've never been inside an opera house. He looks considerably more threatening at other moments, but you won't see them unless you see the show. There are some amazingly good-looking men currently singing operas. Maybe you should check out an opera house, or a movie theater that does opera simulcasts or satellite broadcasts, and enjoy all this male beauty.

An Embarrassment of Men

It should be an embarrassment of riches. A typical romance heroine—a virginal young woman with a big problem that keeps her from enjoying love and life—suddenly finds not one, but three boyfriends. Yes, Sookie Stackhouse, the Louisiana barmaid heroine of Charlaine Harris’ paranormal romance series now on television as “True Blood,” definitely starts as a standard romance heroine. She’s young, she’s attractive, but she’s a telepath. That totally kills her relationships with men because she can hear exactly what they’re thinking. (Ick!) Until she meets Bill the Vampire, whose mind is a blank to her. She loves it, and soon loves him, too. And they become lovers. That ought to be enough to make a young woman happy, you’d think, but these days, not so. It is not enough to have found true love. There must be some potential next boyfriends in the picture, too. Just as Sookie is getting involved with Bill, her boss, Sam, starts to show interest in her. He’s a shapeshifter who likes to take animal form as a collie. But wait, there’s more. Eric, an older and therefore more powerful vampire than Bill, also thinks Sookie is attractive. Although maybe as a snack, not a long-term love. Vampires do tend to think of humans as food. But he’s managed to steal a few kisses, too. Isn’t it just typical that there’s a long drought in Sookie’s life, and then too many men? There’s something attractive about a woman who already has a lover, perhaps. The “Jessie’s Girl” syndrome of longing for the woman who is taken. But what about the heroine’s feelings? In romances over the last fifty years, there has been the standard of the heroine having to choose between two men, one of whom offered a life of wealth but shallow pleasures, and one who offered a life of work but the virtue of sincerity. Naturally, the heroine always chose the poor-but-honest young man. Then we had a long period in romances in which there was only one serious candidate for the heroine, even if he acted like a domineering jerk most of the time. Her only other choice was a far less manly type of man, one who was never described in attractive terms. Of course she always chose Mr. Big. And then romances morphed into tales in which there still was only one man, but he was a nicer person, so the heroine did not seem to be acting like a cretin when she chose him. But in all these scenarios, the heroine definitively chose just one man. Now, although we still have books being published that are exemplars of all these prior romance situations, we’re seeing something different. In Twilight, the heroine falls for a vampire but also meets a werewolf who likes her. And she has other boys after her, too. In the Sookie Stackhouse novels, Sookie’s attractiveness increases as she gains more vampire blood and becomes stronger and more beautiful. It’s logical enough, but it leaves her with an incipient dilemma, which man to choose? Author Charlaine Harris makes it easier on Sookie by having the other men take advantage of her and surprise her with their advances. I haven’t read the entire series, but I am beginning to wonder just how far such surprises will go. The surprise aspect keeps Sookie from suffering moral ambiguity over the event itself, but it leaves her with guilt—which she conveniently decides to examine later—over responding to being kissed by Sam or Eric instead of by her lover Bill. This is a new romance situation, that of the lover-in-waiting. It isn’t merely that it tests the limits of sexual fidelity, which it of course does. It also tests the limits of being able to sustain multiple serious relationships. Humans do not mate for life (more or less) by mere chance. We do it because life is too confusing otherwise. Power being equal between men and women (the women not being economically dependent on the men, which is the case in most polygamous situations), the vast majority of people choose single relationships, not multiples. Why is this? Because you are a different person with each person you know. Sometimes slightly different, and sometimes vastly different. Your interactions are different, and your reactions. With one man, a woman might get along very peacefully, while with another, she’s always in a fight, and so on. By choosing a mate, we are choosing the reflection of the person we want to be most of the time. And by changing mates through divorce, we’re changing our minds or acknowledging that the relationship has changed and the reflection no longer works for us. In societies with easy divorce, serial choices happen, but each choice is still a single choice. So what does a romance heroine do when faced with the possibility that she can have a serious relationship with more than one man, right now? She acts like Scarlett O’Hara and decides to think about it in the morning—or never. She waits and sees. She lets each man show her more of who he is, so she has a better chance of determining which one offers her the most possibility of a lasting, happy relationship. But she does not pursue deepening the relationships on offer. She remains steadfast with her original lover. For a while, anyway. Perhaps I need to read more of Sookie’s adventures, to see if she decides to try to manage multiple relationships at once. My money is on it not going smoothly, if so. Most people have enough trouble just negotiating the potholes of one primary relationship. Add in more, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Or a trashy television talk show.