A Tale of Two Romances

Two novels. Two romance novels. Both offered for free as promotions of newer books in the series. Both published in the same year. Both with the same high rating on Amazon. Both set in Texas. Both set in rural Texas. Both involving recent widows. Both have a handsome man return to town.

And by about page 4, you know both are completely different.

I’ve said (admitted) (confessed) that I read the occasional romance novel. And I see a lot of promotions for free ebooks on Amazon (including my own on Fridays during January; that means today). I downloaded two novels, thinking that both of them were Christian romance novels. One of them was. One of them was not.

But it had been some time since I downloaded, and so over my long Christmas vacation I perused my Kindle. And found Cathy Bryant’s A Path Less Traveled, the second novel in her Miller Creek series. It falls into a sub-sub-genre – Contemporary Christian Western Romance (it’s set in Texas and the heroine lives on a ranch, so that makes it western, I suppose). It’s a simple, straightforward story.

Published in 2010, it wasn’t considered for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. But that wasn’t the author’s intention. Bryant wanted to tell a romantic story, and she succeeds admirably. Great literature, no. A good entertaining story, yes.

A young widow still grieving for her dead husband is trying to make a go of a design business in a small town. She’s not succeeding. Financially, she’s in over her head. She has a young son that she’s trying to be both mother and father to. Each day gets a little more desperate, but she stubbornly refuses to share her problems with family and friends. And then a lawyer comes to town for a wedding, a lawyer with his own personal baggage. He connects with the young boy. He wants to connect with the boy’s mother. She, however, is as stubborn as a Texas mule.

About the worst thing I could think of to say is that the reader sometimes wants to slap the heroine’s face and say “Girl, get with it!” But the story is a family-friendly type of read. It has 141 reviews on Amazon.

Then there was the other romance novel (if you want to know the title, email me; I don’t voluntarily publicize bad writing). I mistakenly thought that it, too, was a Christian romance. By page four, I hit the first “damn!” in the narrative. And I thought, well, I knew some Christian publishers are getting more edgy. By page seven I knew that no Christian publisher I had ever heard of was getting this edgy.

For the first four chapters, unconsummated lust – lust and nothing but lust – dripped off the pages. The writing was stilted. The writing, in fact, was superfluous.

I stopped reading. And then I looked to see how many reviews it had on Amazon.

More than 500.

I thought about what the editor H.L. Mencken once said: “You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Or underestimating bad taste, I would add. Or our appetite for coarseness.

That’s an old-fashioned word, coarseness. But it’s a good word to describe our culture. Our public rhetoric. The language we commonly use. The language even we Christians are commonly using. I once sat in a training seminar at my own church and heard a visiting pastor use language that he apparently thought made him cool, relevant and millennial. It didn’t. It was offensive.

If you want a nice, entertaining romance novel about rural Texas, read Cathy Bryant. Forget the coarse thing. We all be better off.

Photograph of the Texas state flag by Summer Woods via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Pair of Blue Eyes

I have long associated Thomas Hardy with novels – The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbevilles and Jude the Obscure. What I was only vaguely aware of was his poetry – with 10 collections published during his lifetime and at least eight after he died in 1924. His novels fall into what would be the “Later Victorian” period of English literature; his poetry largely in the Edwardian period.

I’ve read two of his novels – The Return of the Native (high school required reading) and Jude the Obscure (extra college reading). Recently I started reading his poetry, and one volume led me to an early novel he wrote, A Pair of Blue Eyes. I found it on Amazon – and the Kindle version is free.

It is a romance, and it reads as much like Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens as it does Thomas Hardy. It was first published in 1873 in Tinsley’s Magazine, and it was the first novel Hardy published under his own name (two previous novels did not sell well).

A young architect, Stephen Smith, is visiting a small town in Wessex, responsible for the renovation of an old medieval church. He stays with the local vicar, and promptly falls in love with the vicar’s daughter, Elfride Swancourt. But there is a problem. Stephen comes from a lowly background – his father is a stonemason and his mother a former dairy maid. Despite Stephen’s education from a much-loved mentor, the vicar will have none of it.

Interestingly enough, this is the novel believed to have given birth to the expression “a cliffhanger,” because there is a scene in which a character literally hangs off the edge of a cliff.

The language is old-fashioned. The story is old-fashioned; its class considerations seem odd today. Hardy spends a great deal of time and attention on describing the setting, and the countryside of Wessex becomes almost a character in its own right as well as an important element for establishing mood.

I have found myself totally charmed by the story. Almost 140 years after it was first published, it is still a compelling, interesting story. It is also a kind of artifact, because Hardy uses references that his readers would have been familiar with but might seem more obscure to modern readers. How many people today would understand his description of the shadow of a tree on a country lane being as long as “Jael’s tent-nail?”

A Pair of Blue Eyes is also autobiographical. Hardy trained as an architect. He met his first wife in Wessex. She was considered of a better class than he was. After her death, he would write several volumes of poetry about her, and revisit the area where they first met and fell in love. But that’s another – and surprising – part of the story that I’ll be writing about next week at The Master’s Artist.

In the meantime, I am thoroughly enjoying this old-fashioned romantic love story, full of all the elements Victorian readers held dear.

Illustration, top: from the original publication of A Pair of Blue Eyes in Tinsley’s Magazine, 1873, by artist James Abbott Pasquier; via The Victorian Web. Illustration, middle: Thomas Hardy in his younger days. Illustration, bottom: the cover of a contemporary version of the Hardy novel.

Two Novels and Their Endings

Last week, I read two books that are clearly romance novels, and clearly aimed at women readers. They both have the theme of responding to and dealing with significant personal loss. Maybe this tells you more about me than it does about the books. While I’ve haven’t dealt with the kinds of losses these books are about, for some reason I’m attracted to stories about loss.

Neither book is a first novel. Both are good stories. I saw how one would end almost from the beginning. In the other, the ending was far less obvious and consequently far more intriguing. (No, I haven’t reviewed them on Amazon or mentioned them by name on this blog. And I won’t. I read a lot, and I only review and write about the books I really like. Cowardly? Yes.)

But both share a similar issue. The issue is not large enough to take away all the enjoyment of reading the stories, but it’s an issue nonetheless, and one I've run across before.

The issue is this: The ending gets in the way of the story. It’s as if the story is too long in the telling, or the author wants to keep telling the story, and suddenly the so-called word limit for the genre kicks in and resolution has to happen fast. So things get compressed. It’s like riding along at 40 miles an hour in a car, but you have to reach your destination within a certain time limit, and you’re running late, so you almost floor the accelerator. Some call it APD – accelerated plot development.

In one of the novels, resolution is developed in literally the last chapter, with no hint that it’s coming. In the other, resolution comes in the second-to-last chapter – but the last chapter is anticlimatic and superfluous. I had the distinct impression with both books that the authors loved telling the stories and wanted to keep on telling them, but their editors called a halt, and a quick rewrite created an ending. Or the original manuscripts were too long for what’s considered conventional for the genre.

This issue isn't typical of the genre, but I’ve seen it here more than in others, the others (for me) being literary and suspense. Examples of contemporary romance that I've read that avoid this problem include any novel by Charles Martin, Bonnie Grove’s Talking to the Dead, Susan Meissner’s The Shape of Mercy and Chris Fabry’s Dogwood. I don’t know if any of these authors had the ending in mind from the beginning or not, but at least at some point in the writing, the ending became clear and they began to write towards it. The writing is better for it, and it makes a better story. Martin, Grove, Meissner and Fabry know what they’re doing. (And while awards don't necessarily connote quality in any field, I would be remiss not to note that Chris Fabry’s Dogwood just won a Christy Award, a well deserved Christy Award.)

It’s caused me to go back and look at my own (unpublished) work, and make certain that there is indeed an ending I’m writing towards. Or do I want to keep telling the story?