The Bog of Lost Scholars

Elizabeth Lowell, A Woman Without Lies. I’ve read more romance novels in the past couple years than I had since middle school (thank you, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books). Some of them have become favorites, but a large number of them, even though well-written, don’t do anything for me. This book is helping me articulate why.

There are a lot of really good things in this book. Angel and Hawk are interesting characters, as are the secondary characters. The descriptions of fishing and of stained glass work are fascinating. The storyline is generally plausible; the characters’ interactions make sense based on their histories. I kept reading because I wanted to see how the couple would overcome their differences and get together.

So what don’t I like about it? I don’t like reading characters when they’re thinking about their emotions[*]. I don’t like the author’s telling me what the character feels instead of showing me. I especially get annoyed by passages to the effect of “she instinctively knew that he felt more for her than he was showing”. And in the romance genre, these things are acceptable parts of the style, so I run into a lot of books that annoy me.

[*]Actually, I need to clarify this. I love passages like

“From such a connection she could not wonder that he should shrink. The wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a blow as this. She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.”

or

“Like was surely not an adequate word for this hash of delight and anger and longing, this profound respect laced with profound irritation, all floating on a dark pool of old pain.”

(Austen, Pride and Prejudice, and Bujold, A Civil Campaign.)

They’re beautiful words; they make the character’s feelings clear; they stop after at most another paragraph or so. Once the author makes her point, she stops beating me over the head with it. In romance, on the other hand, it seems much more acceptable for the author to say “See? Here’s what this character’s feeling. You in any doubt? Okay, I’ll reiterate!”

And the romance authors I enjoy the most seem to be the ones who do the least of this, who are writing a story about a relationship but showing me the growing love between the leads rather than insisting that the love is there. Take another recent read, Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It. Cruise makes it obvious that Tilda and Davy are falling for each other, and shows why they’re a great pair; I get to learn about the characters as they learn about each other, and when they finally break the remaining barriers between them, I’m as thrilled as they are.

And when they think about their feelings at all, they do it in unique voices; they sound like themselves, not like any of a hundred other characters. Lowell has a few passages where Angel thinks of her feelings in terms of stained glass or Hawk in hunting metaphors, and that works for me, but when they think in more generic terms, I start skimming. That’s probably the biggest thing right there, actually. If your characters must spend paragraphs being introspective, at least make them think in their own voices, not thoughts that could be cut and pasted into another novel without editing.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Passage. Read as soon as it got here; later went back and reread favorite parts of TSN: Beguilement and entirely reread TSN: Legacy, followed by a reread of Passage.

While I think that what Bujold’s doing with an American-based landscape is interesting, I’m from a different region than the one she used, so it doesn’t resonate with me like it does with readers who grew up in Ohio and surrounding regions. But I find the society fascinating, and I very much like how there aren’t easy answers. The problems that Dag and Fawn deal with are huge ones, unlikely to be solved in their lifetimes, let alone within one book (or four).

Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle. I didn’t finish this book, though I read large chunks of it. The author has some really good points, that apply just as much (if not more so) to American society as to his own British. Why should we look at any apparent idleness with suspicion? Why is it more important to look like we’re busy for eight hours than to accomplish something really useful in four and enjoy the rest of our time?

And yet….

The book would have worked better for me if H. had been clearer about idleness as “doing what you choose to do, and yes, that activity might actually resemble work” (which does appear in some spots to be what he ultimately means) rather than idleness as “doing things socially considered fun” (hanging out in pubs, lying in bed doing nothing, smoking, boozing). Many of the activities he talks about as examples of how to enjoy idleness would drive me batty with boredom. It’s quite possible that an evening of knitting for the joy of the yarn and the desire to see the final project (and not because I really need to finish this project for a deadline) would fit right into his definition of idleness, but if it doesn’t, well, I’d much rather spend an evening knitting than an evening drinking beer in a pub.

Also, I come away from this book with the strong impression that he’s speaking to men, not to women. For example, he brushes off the work of childrearing with “train them to get their own breakfasts on weekends as soon as possible”. That’s nice, but in the intervening years, the kid has to be nursed or bottlefed, diapered, bathed, kept from poisoning itself, civilized into a reasonable human, etc., etc. As a mother, especially as the mother of a mentally disabled kid and a single mother until recently, I don’t have much chance for real idleness, and certainly not for any mental activity that requires long stretches of focused alert mind, because if I didn’t do the work of caring for my child, no one else was going to take up the slack. (The chapter in which H. sings the praises of skiving, slacking on work and enjoying watching someone else do it instead, raised my hackles to say the least.) The chapter on sex, too, is clearly aimed at men, with a token wave of “yeah, women just lose all interest in sex once they’ve got some kids”. (Speaking as a mother who still has a sex drive, I’m more than happy to while away a lazy afternoon or evening in my husband’s arms, but we both need to be sufficiently caught up on sleep that we don’t drop off as soon as we get some quiet, and without a babysitter, we’re pretty well limited to “after the kid is in bed”, which is perilously close to “time we nod off”.)

In other words — an interesting concept, and I would love to see such a book written by a mother, but H.’s take didn’t work for me.