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Rereading old favorite romance novels
Aug. 15th, 2023 08:57 amI’ve been doing some rereading. So, SPOILERS run now, unless you have already read these, too, and like thinking about the structure of details in romance novels.
Lori Foster: Say No to Joe?
Jennifer Crusie: Manhunting, The Cinderella Deal, Getting Rid of Bradley, Strange Bedpersons
These are all books I already owned in kindle format. The Lori Foster is memorable because I think it was the first book that I bought on the kindle while owning it in paper because I was already in bed and too lazy to go upstairs, find the book, and get back into bed to read it. Obviously, I say lazy, but a more accurate snapshot would include observations like, if I left the room someone would ask me to do something and I was sick and my eyes were becoming less and less tolerant of reading and reading paper books in bed is always more tiring on the arms than the kindle. That was all years ago, but a lot of the same observations apply, much, much, much more so, and the ones that have not gotten worse have not eased up at all. After I got in bed with the lights off and the sun had gone down, every single member of my household came into my room to get something. T. wanted q-tips. A. wanted to use the bathroom. R. took a shower. It is not like any of these are problems. It is just an observation about family life.
Say No to Joe continues to have all the problems it always had, and all the fun that it always had. It’s a goofy instant family story with the romance revolving around the conflict between immediate chemistry and sexual desire and an unwillingness to act on it because of having Feelz right from the beginning along with the chemistry and not wanting to have one’s heart broken. Say No to Joe is delightful largely because Joe is consciously written as an impossibly perfect fantasy: tall, gorgeous, dangerous, member of close extended family, financially responsible, funny, good in bed. All too often, this kind of romance hero does not get a partner that is any remote kind of match: the woman is often anxious, short, not financially responsible, does not have a close extended family and not gorgeous in the female equivalent to the male gorgeous, whatever that might mean. But in Luna, he gets a lot of it. And Luna is delightful. The kids are well-written for this type of book as well.
Manhunting is still absolutely hilarious. The banter is top notch, and the speed dating on a weird vacation with a series of injuries is breathtaking. This one works on lots and lots of levels, and part of why I have never hated it is because of how the Valerie character is handled. She’s a bit of a cartoon, and is treated pretty badly, _and the heroine calls the person who takes advantage of her out on it_. She’s awful, and she does not get what she is angling for, but when she is treated badly, our heroine speaks up. So there’s that.
The Cinderella Deal continues to be one of the most bizarre books I have ever read. Fake fiancee stories are always weird, but this one takes it to a whole new level. While I cannot think of the names of any off the top of my head (feel free to comment and share if you can remember), there are Regency romance novels, including at least one by Georgette Heyer, that are Have to Get Married for Reasons but We Will Not Actually Consummate and when reasons expire, we will end it. Or maybe not end it, but people are allowed to have side pieces or whatever. But of course, in the romance novel, they never do have side pieces, because he is jealous and cock blocks and she has a magic hoo ha so he can’t consummate with anyone else. They eventually get together, usually because everyone else needs to be put out of the misery of that ambient sexual tension. This is basically that novel, but with some super odd components. Like, he is a literature professor who needs to finish a book and she is an artist of the painting and so forth variety and in the middle of a major transition in style, and the marriage gives them a bunch of constraints and space to complete major work. So the partnership is real and there right from the beginning and not just on a romance / attraction / sexual level. But simultaneously, it is NOT the kind of I Want to Solve a Mystery with You (JAK) or Be in Business / Support Your Career type partnership characteristic of a lot of romance novels. The side piece stuff also is better developed than in a typical novel of this type, and there are characters who see right through the fraud from the moment it begins. Finally, the person who created the pressure for the fraud gets punished. It takes a while — a lot longer than it should — but it does happen. I don’t know that I fully appreciated all of what was going on in this book on previous readings, and I probably have missed some still.
Getting Rid of Bradley is really amazing. A ton of 90s romance novels — including The Cinderella Deal and Strange Bedpersons and a lot of JAK — paint characters through their home style, and directly address gentrification and class conflict and so forth. And marrying someone for a house is absolutely central to the genre, all the way back to Elizabeth and Darcy. Finally, a husband / boyfriend prospect who is not functional in a relationship because he thinks of (his)wom(a)(e) as property is in a lot of books, and every single one of the Crusie novels, and in the background of almost all JAK novels as someone who needs to finally grab a clue and understand that It Is Over /Never Going to Happen. There are a range of tones to these characters and these situations, but Getting Rid of Bradley is one of the most terrifying, mostly because we don’t even _meet_ Bradley until late in the book, and for a lot of the book, it is just not clear which Bradley is committing which crimes. The book does not address whether the couple will be able to live in that house that she loves, given all the crimes that occur in that house. I think it was wise to NOT address that question, because it is pretty fucking impossible to imagine living in that house after all that happened there. OTOH, she loved that house. I feel like Crusie was quite cruel to her characters here, and I don’t really understand why.
JAK and Crusie both spend a notable amount of character rumination / background time on ‘60s era idealism, communes, etc. Manhunting operates on kind of a Baby Boom level; the rest operate more on a level of aging activists living in grim apartments in dangerous neighborhoods being rescued by people they want to hate for selling out but who make them feel so safe and who turn out not to actually be completely evil or maybe even are not evil at all. _Strange Bedpersons_ is very explicit about this dynamic, with an utterly bizarre character (not part of the couple) who is initially a flat 2d caricature of awful in a conservative way, except for the fact that our hippie heroine really likes his writing and the two spar delightfully in a dinner party, until she hears him read out loud from his forthcoming book and completely loses her shit. She is convinced that he is plagiarizing and goes on a tear to try to prove it. What she winds up proving instead is that he’s plagiarizing his younger self, and while he is old enough to recognize and remember her child self in her grown up self, it takes her longer. The reconciliation of all of that culture clash is utterly unhinged and in someways super cool but in other ways really, really, really problematic.
If you have ever wanted to understand Ohio, you might try rereading Jennifer Crusie novels from the 1990s. Not as romance novels per se, because they might be too distressing, but as a way of thinking about social class dynamics in middle and upper class Ohio towns and cities. They are pretty relevant on that level.
Lori Foster: Say No to Joe?
Jennifer Crusie: Manhunting, The Cinderella Deal, Getting Rid of Bradley, Strange Bedpersons
These are all books I already owned in kindle format. The Lori Foster is memorable because I think it was the first book that I bought on the kindle while owning it in paper because I was already in bed and too lazy to go upstairs, find the book, and get back into bed to read it. Obviously, I say lazy, but a more accurate snapshot would include observations like, if I left the room someone would ask me to do something and I was sick and my eyes were becoming less and less tolerant of reading and reading paper books in bed is always more tiring on the arms than the kindle. That was all years ago, but a lot of the same observations apply, much, much, much more so, and the ones that have not gotten worse have not eased up at all. After I got in bed with the lights off and the sun had gone down, every single member of my household came into my room to get something. T. wanted q-tips. A. wanted to use the bathroom. R. took a shower. It is not like any of these are problems. It is just an observation about family life.
Say No to Joe continues to have all the problems it always had, and all the fun that it always had. It’s a goofy instant family story with the romance revolving around the conflict between immediate chemistry and sexual desire and an unwillingness to act on it because of having Feelz right from the beginning along with the chemistry and not wanting to have one’s heart broken. Say No to Joe is delightful largely because Joe is consciously written as an impossibly perfect fantasy: tall, gorgeous, dangerous, member of close extended family, financially responsible, funny, good in bed. All too often, this kind of romance hero does not get a partner that is any remote kind of match: the woman is often anxious, short, not financially responsible, does not have a close extended family and not gorgeous in the female equivalent to the male gorgeous, whatever that might mean. But in Luna, he gets a lot of it. And Luna is delightful. The kids are well-written for this type of book as well.
Manhunting is still absolutely hilarious. The banter is top notch, and the speed dating on a weird vacation with a series of injuries is breathtaking. This one works on lots and lots of levels, and part of why I have never hated it is because of how the Valerie character is handled. She’s a bit of a cartoon, and is treated pretty badly, _and the heroine calls the person who takes advantage of her out on it_. She’s awful, and she does not get what she is angling for, but when she is treated badly, our heroine speaks up. So there’s that.
The Cinderella Deal continues to be one of the most bizarre books I have ever read. Fake fiancee stories are always weird, but this one takes it to a whole new level. While I cannot think of the names of any off the top of my head (feel free to comment and share if you can remember), there are Regency romance novels, including at least one by Georgette Heyer, that are Have to Get Married for Reasons but We Will Not Actually Consummate and when reasons expire, we will end it. Or maybe not end it, but people are allowed to have side pieces or whatever. But of course, in the romance novel, they never do have side pieces, because he is jealous and cock blocks and she has a magic hoo ha so he can’t consummate with anyone else. They eventually get together, usually because everyone else needs to be put out of the misery of that ambient sexual tension. This is basically that novel, but with some super odd components. Like, he is a literature professor who needs to finish a book and she is an artist of the painting and so forth variety and in the middle of a major transition in style, and the marriage gives them a bunch of constraints and space to complete major work. So the partnership is real and there right from the beginning and not just on a romance / attraction / sexual level. But simultaneously, it is NOT the kind of I Want to Solve a Mystery with You (JAK) or Be in Business / Support Your Career type partnership characteristic of a lot of romance novels. The side piece stuff also is better developed than in a typical novel of this type, and there are characters who see right through the fraud from the moment it begins. Finally, the person who created the pressure for the fraud gets punished. It takes a while — a lot longer than it should — but it does happen. I don’t know that I fully appreciated all of what was going on in this book on previous readings, and I probably have missed some still.
Getting Rid of Bradley is really amazing. A ton of 90s romance novels — including The Cinderella Deal and Strange Bedpersons and a lot of JAK — paint characters through their home style, and directly address gentrification and class conflict and so forth. And marrying someone for a house is absolutely central to the genre, all the way back to Elizabeth and Darcy. Finally, a husband / boyfriend prospect who is not functional in a relationship because he thinks of (his)wom(a)(e) as property is in a lot of books, and every single one of the Crusie novels, and in the background of almost all JAK novels as someone who needs to finally grab a clue and understand that It Is Over /Never Going to Happen. There are a range of tones to these characters and these situations, but Getting Rid of Bradley is one of the most terrifying, mostly because we don’t even _meet_ Bradley until late in the book, and for a lot of the book, it is just not clear which Bradley is committing which crimes. The book does not address whether the couple will be able to live in that house that she loves, given all the crimes that occur in that house. I think it was wise to NOT address that question, because it is pretty fucking impossible to imagine living in that house after all that happened there. OTOH, she loved that house. I feel like Crusie was quite cruel to her characters here, and I don’t really understand why.
JAK and Crusie both spend a notable amount of character rumination / background time on ‘60s era idealism, communes, etc. Manhunting operates on kind of a Baby Boom level; the rest operate more on a level of aging activists living in grim apartments in dangerous neighborhoods being rescued by people they want to hate for selling out but who make them feel so safe and who turn out not to actually be completely evil or maybe even are not evil at all. _Strange Bedpersons_ is very explicit about this dynamic, with an utterly bizarre character (not part of the couple) who is initially a flat 2d caricature of awful in a conservative way, except for the fact that our hippie heroine really likes his writing and the two spar delightfully in a dinner party, until she hears him read out loud from his forthcoming book and completely loses her shit. She is convinced that he is plagiarizing and goes on a tear to try to prove it. What she winds up proving instead is that he’s plagiarizing his younger self, and while he is old enough to recognize and remember her child self in her grown up self, it takes her longer. The reconciliation of all of that culture clash is utterly unhinged and in someways super cool but in other ways really, really, really problematic.
If you have ever wanted to understand Ohio, you might try rereading Jennifer Crusie novels from the 1990s. Not as romance novels per se, because they might be too distressing, but as a way of thinking about social class dynamics in middle and upper class Ohio towns and cities. They are pretty relevant on that level.