I always hated reading books in school. I’d take To Kill a Mockingbird home and read it all that night and then go back and have to search the pages for the answers to Mrs. Dart’s worksheets as we read at the torturously slow pace of one chapter a day.
I still do that — read books as quickly as possible, but the books I read now are usually what is politely called “genre fiction” and colloquially “trashy romance novels.” But I’m trying, with my friend’s online book club, to put some class back in my diet. I tried so hard in February that I ordered about $40 worth of used books from Half.com (including some fun stuff like Anne Stuart’s The Road to Hidden Harbor) and accidentally had it sent to our old Florida address. Media mail, which isn’t forwarded by the post office. I hope the miscreant drug dealers back in our ghetto are enjoying Leif Enger and Jhumpa Lahiri and Susan Napier.
So I didn’t read So Brave, Young, and Handsome, but enough people told me they loved Peace Like a River that I got it from the library, where I was also able to inter-library loan Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. I think it’s great that people get paid to write stories down. I just think that overdue library fines should count towards supporting writers, as well as being a tax-exempt charitable contribution.
Unaccustomed Earth turns out to be a collection of short stories, which always seems to me to be a bit lazy on the part of the author. On the one hand, it’s nice that I can finish an entire piece during lunch, but on the other hand, if the author didn’t care enough about the characters or find them interesting enough to develop a full-length novel around them, why should I? Of course this doesn’t apply to L.M. Montgomery’s sentimental short stories about orphans and true love.
Unaccustomed Earth isn’t bad, for a literary book. I find myself getting irritated by the stay-at-home mother angst of the protagonist of the title story. (Am I that wishy-washy and predictable? Don’t answer that.) At one point the narrator says of Ruma, who was a successful attorney before giving birth: “It was the house that was her work now: leafing through the piles of catalogues that came in the mail, marking them with Post-its, ordering sheets covered with dragons for Akash’s room” (6).
It’s a bit agenda-y to me. Maybe a bit ambivalent, but mostly agenda-y. Ruma’s happiest moments in the story come when her father, who is visiting for the week, occupies her son all day in the garden, so that Ruma has the house to herself and is able to get some urgent paperwork done.
It reminds me of a marketing line in the brochure of the botanical gardens we took the kids to on Saturday. The chipper PR people extol the wonder of discovery as “not something you read about or watch on TV. It’s something you do” and something, apparently, that you do only under the protest of your mother, as they continue: “Hey, we consider dirty hands to be a sure sign of fun (sorry, moms).”
I can’t imagine being remotely ambivalent about being a stay-at-home mom if my work were marking catalogues with Post-its and ensuring that my kids never got their hands dirty or had any fun.
{Who WRITES these things?}
Lahiri is a fine writer, though. Her images are memorable. In another story, where the angst-y caregiver (though not stay-at-home) parent is the father, she describes the uninspiring pattern on a wallpaper as “squiggly gray lines . . . as if someone had repeatedly been testing the ink in a pen and ultimately had nothing to say” (84).
The exploration of marriage in that story is intimate, and the proprietary resentment that the caregiver-parent feels towards the necessarily-more-detached (emotionally and/or physically) parent is stunning. Don’t we stay-at-home mothers feel this? When your husband has an evening thing, does he think to ask if you’re free to watch the kids? (mine doesn’t). And when you have an evening thing, do you ask him about “babysitting” first thing (I do).
That story ends with sex, and it’s surprisingly (detailed-ly) rendered, if thoroughly marital. Other, non-marital relationships are also explored in other stories.
So here’s the thing about trashy romance novels versus literary fiction. When I read a good romance novel (and here I include The Blue Castle, Pride and Prejudice, Ain’t She Sweet, and What the Lady Wants) — When I read romance novels, good romance novels, I feel again that heady glandular intoxication of first love. Romance novels are a place where obstacles are overcome, differences are compromised just enough, conflict is resolved, and desire, longing, and need culminate in marriage and exuberantly hopeful commitment.
When I read literary books, I feel the strictures of being committed to one person, the strainings for something else out of life, the yearning to explore other possibilities. Literary works are a place where relationships fall apart, or where the cracks that can be ignored for so long suddenly become unbearable. A husband who drinks too much at a party or a wife who flirts with someone else are no longer sympathetic. An air of stifled repression or stark rebuttal of the suburban dystopia (Am I still talking? I have no idea what I’m saying here. Is it sounding worthy of literary critique yet?).
In short, literary books are about the death or deterioration of relationships, and romance novels are about their birth or growth. Literary books point out everything that is inherently flawed in the human need for companionship, and romance novels celebrate our desire to be connected and grounded in one another, especially in a soulmate.
Is one of the forms more “true” than the others? Where literary books succeed in communicating ambivalence and uncertainty and endless searching, I suspect they are. But is death any more “real” than birth? Death is certainly usually more self-aware and examined. But I like birth. I like closing a novel, coming back from some escapist fantasy, and feeling renewed and recommitted to loving on the people I am stuck with, even if they do like to get their hands dirty.
Jane
(April’s book is The Book Thief. I’ll let you know how it goes. It’s considered YA, so maybe I’ll read it with Sally.)
(From Some Kind of Wonderful)
Keith: You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.
Watts: Yeah, but you can tell how much it’s gonna cost.
Comment of the Day from Memarie Lane:
“I must disagree, there are plenty of literary books about the birth of love. I just finished one. Unfortunately it turned out to be about lesbians.”
Subscribe by email
I spied some nifty Harlequin Nascar books at the grocery store yesterday. Shall I send them along? (via media mail, of course.)
[Reply]
i borrow 50 books per week from the library. (i have kids that read at 4 different reading levels.) since most books cost in the 20 dollar range, i don’t mind paying fees to the libraries. if i end up paying 20 dollars per year to them, i’m still saving roughly 50 thousand dollar per year…
[Reply]
VERY well written, Jane! And correct.
I think I too like books of birth, rather than death. Though my genre’s are different than yours, I think your ideas apply.
Thank you.
[Reply]
Jane – you’ve hit the nail exactly on the head re: literary fiction vs. romance novels. Your line comparison of “pointing out” flaws vs. “celebrating” connections is brilliant. You are a great writer, did I ever tell ya that?
Here’s the difference, for me, between “real” books and trashy romance novels: I check out real books from the library; I buy the trashy stuff when it’s in a sale bin at the grocery store or when I’m running through an airport. A few times I year, I buy “real” books at B&N, so that when my in-laws come to visit, I look deep. I hide the trashy stuff under my bed, and when it overflows, scoop them all up into a paper bag and drop in the library’s “donations” box. That’s warped.
MUST READ… “Dream House” by Valerie Laken. I’m about halfway through and love love love it! I went to college with Val, and it’s freakin’ me out that she was reviewed by NYT!!!
[Reply]
p.s. I have a typo. Strike “line” from the second, um, line.
p.p.s. I totally had to look up “suburban dystopia.”
[Reply]
Great point!
My BFF and I were talking about books the other day (as we are wont to do), and I mentioned another friend who doesn’t like books who have sad endings. Like The Great Gatsby. (Although I must say, the real sad ending there would have been if Gatsby ended up with Daisy. She didn’t deserve him! She could never live up to the image of Daisy in his mind anyway! Holy crap, I feel a literary novel coming on!)
My friend spontaneously mentioned The Book Thief as falling in this category, and said it was one of the best books she’s read in the last year. We have almost the same taste in books, so I’m def. going to try and track this one down.
[Reply]
I must disagree, there are plenty of literary books about the birth of love. I just finished one. Unfortunately it turned out to be about lesbians.
[Reply]
Jane,
I totally agree. I love reading, but as an escape, maybe to make my life seem not so boring (as I write this, I have my current novel sitting in front of me and thoughts of getting the living room clean at the back of my mind). I love being home with my kids (when I am not hating it) and want what I read to reflect positive feelings. I get enough negative from my own psyche… And I have to heartily agree with your opinion on Some Kind of Wonderful. It DOES cover all of life in an amazingly short time span! Watts is full of wisdom, especially at the end when she tells Keith, “Well, you’re stupid. I always knew you were stupid.” Sums up everything, right there… Thanks for the post. I loved it!
[Reply]
I would agree that Lahiri is no Montgomery, but I found Unaccustomed Earth to be searing and beautiful. Perhaps it is a tenet of the confusing mid-life years, where we realize that we don’t belong anywhere, that no one’s life is as easily resolved as the novels we hold so dear, and where even in relationships we feel so alone, but I thought this book really spoke to everyday hurts. Not the kind of hurts we find in Montgomery – orphans whose early troubled years we skim over, landing softly in the middle of schoolroom wars and vanity mishaps, but the ordinary, every day loneliness of responsibility, of being so busy you forget to be in love with your spouse/significant other or to rejoice in your children’s vibrance rather than be overwhelmed by their ability to create havoc. I found this book to be uplifting in the knowledge that we are not alone in our loneliness, in our travels on unaccustomed earth, but that we all yearn for something that (I, at least, believe) is promised to us not in this life.
Feel free to disregard. (And please know that the one book I refused to leave home when I left for college was The Blue Castle. I adore that book.)
Maybe this is my own form of sentimental drivel.
[Reply]
Last night I remembered again why I prefer romance. It is nice to escape the harsh reality of literary works.
In response to your comment that a book is usually romance or literary I would have to disagree. As I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns, a book I would say is “literary,” I was happy there was a bit of romance at the end of all the “literaryness” because otherwise I would have been seriously depressed after finishing it.
[Reply]
Oh, man! I wondered whatever happened with those books. That seriously stinks. I never could find it where we live either. Maybe I’ll have better luck with this one. Oh, and I agree with you 100%. I like to read about relationships growing, not dying. I am still laughing at Memarie Lane but don’t know her well enough to know if she’s joking…
[Reply]
I don’t think Death is more real than birth for the purpose of literature; I think birth is harder to write about deeply than death is.
I love, love, love The Blue Castle and another one called The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter. *sigh* My book group read The Book Thief several months ago and I loved that one, too. I think it may be one of the favorites of all of the wide-range of sisters in the group.
[Reply]
Coral Rose — You make some very good points, and Lahiri’s writing was, indeed, beautiful. She did capture the loneliness, and the day-to-day frustrations, and I did love how she explored the caregiver parent’s special struggles through both female and male eyes.
I admit that I am spoiled — by books where Something! Happens! on every page. So it is hard at first, and then a treat, to read something slower, yet just as rewarding, in a different way.
Laura Williams — You’re absolutely right. My favorite, favorite romances are those that are as well written as “literary” books. All the ones I linked to here are, imho. I could add Much Ado About Nothing, A Room With a View, The English Patient, the rest of Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, and many more. (On the YA side — The Witch of Blackbird Pond, etc)
[Reply]
Sarah in Georgia — I’m glad you all liked The Book Thief. It sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it? And yet I’m excited to give it a try.
[Reply]
shannon
when are you going to read the glass castle? it’s a book about a truly bad mother. you could totally blog about that…
[Reply]
I read because I love to read. I can’t call it escape because I prefer tragedies and deeper reads. I like to pull out humanity, examine its flaws and beauty, and find it redemptive in some way. When I want an easy read I go for sci-fi and mysteries. I have learned that most people do not share my taste, though. “A slow read” is not necessarily a bad thing for me.
I really liked the Book Thief. And The Glass Castle. And Peace Like a River. And A Thousand Splendid Suns, too.
[Reply]
Jane – Is it really true that literary books are about the death of relationships and romances are about the birth of them? What about The Catcher in the Rye? Isn’t that book about Holden’s healing? What about Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley? Sure, these are only two examples, but I think a lot of literary fiction is about the quest for human intimacy — sometimes that quest is fulfilled and sometimes (all right, admittedly, more often) it isn’t, but is your presentation of literary fiction too reductive?
On a side note, thanks again for linking (repeatedly) to my blog. I’m still figuring out the whole blogging thing – what voice I want to use in my writing and what kind of posts will generate discussion. I know it’s ambitious, but someday I’m even hoping to reach ten comments on a single post.
[Reply]