I recently read an article by a psychology researcher who thought she could explain why women read Harlequin romance novels. Such articles often intrigue me and this one, in particular, drew me in because the author and I share the same name (Mary Anne) - albeit, she doesn't spell hers the way my namesake Granny told me I had to spell mine. Dr. Fisher concluded that women read romance because they're looking for a cad who becomes the dad.
Most of the articles trying to "explain" women's love of the romance genre make me want to throw something at my computer screen. The other Mary Anne's piece didn't make me mad so much as it made me pity the author. First of all, as a researcher, she should have known she couldn't base an understanding of a vast and complex genre like romance on one atypical type of book of the genre. It makes all her conclusions laughably wrong. For example, based on her study of Harlequins, Fisher decides that romance novels are too short and characters are therefore too underdeveloped. Certain types of Harlequins are intended to be short fast reads that get the reader in and out fast. But not all Harlequins are short - some of the publisher's imprints are long, slow, luscious reads. So Dr. Fisher bases her conclusions one type of one imprint from one publishing house. I hope she does a better job with the psychological research she gets paid for.
Fisher concludes that romance novels are "candy for women's brains." She concludes that they allow the reader to live vicariously through the heroine and fall in love with the hero but without any of the consequences. Of course, she also thinks that the plots revolve around the woman trying to decide if the hero is "Mr. Right." So, at least Fisher is consistently wrong.
Romance novels are, in fact, many different things and a reader will reach for a novel based on the experience she's looking for. Some may be brain candy but others are hot chocolate for the soul or salt and pepper, salsa or onions and peppers to season a slice of life. And lets not forget the ones that are just dessert - a big old slice of strawberry cheesecake. Romances are intimate experiences where a writer takes a reader on a journey that the reader will paint with the flavor of her life and her outlook.
No, Dr. Fisher, not all romance novels provide skimpy descriptions of the heroine and detailed descriptions of the hero because the reader will imagine herself in the heroine's place. Some romances, like mine, will provide a few general details about the descriptions of the hero and the heroine because we want the reader to draw the character in her mind the way she imagines him or her.
My basic problem with the other Mary Anne's piece is that she imagines herself as being so very much smarter than the writers and the readers that she can profile all of them. She can't just acknowledge that much of the genre is so far beyond her understanding that she'll never get it. People who think they're smarter than everyone else like to do that. If they encounter something they don't get, then they'll pull out one tiny piece of it, label it, and pronounce that one size fits all. Who among us doesn't know that one size NEVER fits all?
But Dr. Fisher's piece got me to thinking about the flip side of her query. I know that the reasons readers read romance are as varied as the way writers write the books. No, based on an experience I'm having with a novel, I wonder - what makes us put the book down and close it without finishing? Perhaps that's as varied as the reader and the writer too.
A while back I got a bad review for my book, Brotherly Love, on Amazon. That reader found that there were few decent characters and felt the book was written so that it made her feel guilty for wanting the main characters to end up together. She thought the book contained some "unnecessarily graphic" rape scenes and advised readers not to "bother" with the book. Bad reviews are always tough for writers, including me, even though we should know better. Mentally, I know that I'm not writing "pablum" so for some people my books won't digest well.
I wonder if that reader finished the book? When a book doesn't connect for me I know I can't finish it. And sometimes, it doesn't connect for a particular reader even if the author is very talented and wrote a hell of a book. That's happened to me with one I'm reading now and have just decided to close and walk away from. And when I tell you about the book many of you will have read it, will have possibly read some of the author's other work and enjoyed it all very much.
The book I'm about to put away without finishing is by a fellow South Carolinian - Dorothea Benton Frank, who seems to be a fine writer. It's called Bulls Island and is about characters from Charleston, a community right down the road from my home in Myrtle Beach. My family and I love Charleston, so I thought I'd love the book. But the story is about a girl who's been dating the scion of a rich Charleston family for many years. When they finish college they decide to marry and bring her family to have dinner with his because historically, there's been bad blood between the families.
At the dinner the hero's mother acts so vile and nasty that the heroine's parents leave suddenly, in the middle of a pouring rain storm. The mother dies in a car accident caused by the bad weather. The heroine leaves the area and the hero and moves to New York because she can never marry into that woman's family. That woman killed the heroine's mother, or so she thinks. The heroine moves to New York without a word to the hero and has a baby she never tells the him about. The hero lets his mama play puppetmaster and ends up diddling some female bait she waves in front of him and so marries the girl. The hero and the bait have no children and the bait turns out to be a spineless alcoholic.
The heroine rears her son in New York and doesn't even tell her father or sister about the kid. She tells her son that his father died in a car wreck with both of her parents. I haven't read what, if anything, she told the kid about his father's parents. Anyway, the heroine gets a big deal job involving real estate projects and financing and one day gets called into her boss's office and told she's going back to Charleston to manage a project developing "Bulls Island" with a local real estate family. (Yes, the hero's family).
While that's going on, back in Charleston, the hero's wife is falling further into the bottle. He learns that the heroine is coming back to work with him on the Bulls Island project. On the same night that his daddy has a heart attack he finds out that his mama has been having an affair with his daddy's business partner for years. He wonders if that means he can have an affair with the heroine.
While the heroine is dealing with having to go back to Charleston and face all of her lies, she also dealing with her son going away to college. She picks this time to start dating an Italian guy she describes like a mafia prince, considers to be a joke, and finds way, way beneath her socially and intellectually. Yet the heroine ends up bedding Mr. Mafia who sends her 4 or 5 dozen roses after each mattress mambo and reaches the point where she intends to kiss him off. After all, she was just playing.
Okay. That was the breaking point for me. It was the stupidity that was just too much. Got to put the book down, which is a shame. I wanted to read the writer's descriptions of Charleston but never got back there with the heroine. These people are all too stupid and self centered for me to tolerate.
I had trouble right from the get go. The dinner and death of the heroine's mama was hard for me to take. Why didn't the hero stand up, tell mama she was being a prize bitch and she could stop right now and apologize or he'd walk away? Even if the hero didn't do that voluntarily, why didn't the heroine put him to the test? They'd been together for 8 years. She should have stood up at the dinner table and told the hero to handle mama or he wouldn't be handling her anymore.
And the heroine flits off the New York without ever sitting down with the hero and telling him about her feelings, the whole situation and especially the baby. Yeah, his family's been in Charleston for years and he would be walking away from generations of legacy. But if they were so much in love, she should have given him the choice. The heroine never even tells her own family about the kid and she lies to her son about his family. She walks away from her father and sister just when they lose her mama. To top it all off, the heroine treats the Italian like the hero's mama treated her family. Enough is enough.
But it's only enough for me. Like that reviewer who didn't like Brotherly, my life and my experiences make it impossible for me to like - or even to finish - Bulls Island. I find the hero to be a wiener, the heroine to be a self-centered bitch and all of them to be terminally stupid. I could have even tolerated the dinner and death with something akin to mild indigestion and finished the book if the heroine had pushed the hero to choose and then he chose wrong. I can tolerate the hero being a prick, but I can't tolerate the heroine being a stupid, self-centered liar.
Back to Ms. Fisher's piece - maybe she did get some of it right. Women generally expect men to behave like they're motivated by their egos. We get that. But we expect more from our heroines because we expect more from ourselves. I can deal with the improbable -- I adore the improbable - but I can't deal with the pathetic.
So yeah, Dr. Fisher, I'm fine with the hero being a cad as long as the heroine is woman enough to teach him a lesson.