Passion on the Pages

By Paul Gray

What, Freud famously wondered, does a woman want? Well, one answer crops up in a survey commissioned by the Romance Writers of America and released last June: during the preceding year, 37.9 million females age 10 and over in the U.S. had read at least one romance novel. One what? The R.W.A. helpfully provides a definition: "A romance novel is a love story with an optimistic and emotionally satisfying ending."

Never mind, for the moment, that this definition could, with a little tweaking of emphases, apply equally well to Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The R.W.A. is not indulging in literary criticism here but rather offering its 8,200 members a blueprint for success in the contemporary marketplace. Because the people who find the keenest emotional satisfaction in romance novels tend to be their authors and publishers. More than half the mass-market paperback fiction titles sold annually in the U.S. are romance novels. Factor in hardback sales, and romances account for about 40% of the fiction total. Almost 1 of every 5 adult books sold is a romance novel. Those 37.9 million women readers could devour three romances every day of the year and still not exhaust the annual output of some 2,000 new titles.

Why are these things so popular with so many women and so scorned by book critics and reviewers, who are often, but by no means always, males? (Some of the sharpest attacks on romances have come from academic feminists, who find the "love conquers all" plots distressingly retro.) Romances may account for a sizable share of U.S. publishing profits, but they don't get discussed much in polite print or society. Even dedicated fans report feeling embarrassed buying them.

Other genres--mystery, thriller, horror, sci-fi--attract no cultural stigma, but those categories also appeal heavily to male readers. Romances do not, and therein, some of the genre's champions argue, lies the problem. "I cannot help but suspect," writes romance author Penelope Williamson, "that romance is so often ridiculed and denigrated because it is a literature written almost exclusively by women for women."

There is more than sour grapes in this charge, but less, perhaps, than the whole story. For romance writers labor under, and romance readers demand, a formula of childlike restrictions and simplicity. Here is how two romance authors, Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz, jointly define it: "The reader trusts the writer to create and re-create for her a vision of a fictional world that is free of moral ambiguity, a larger-than-life domain in which such ideals as courage, justice, honor, loyalty and love are challenged and upheld." Free of moral ambiguity? So much, then, for Homer, Shakespeare and Austen.

And so much for the other popular genres, in which good and evil are allowed to mingle. Think of all the seedy detectives and flawed spies. Romances must end happily; the spirited heroine must bring the male of her choice to heel--"civilize" or "tame" him, as romance authors like to put it--before the final clinch and fade-out. Defenders often point out that mysteries must also conclude in a predetermined manner: the crime is solved, the suspect unmasked. But that analogy won't wash, since the identity of the guilty party in mysteries is withheld until the end. Romance heroines and readers rarely doubt which man is in her sights or whether he will succumb.

It is impossible for contemporary romance writers to subvert or extend their genre in the way that, say, John le Carre upended conventional spy fiction when he killed off the sympathetic hero of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Fiddle with the romance formula--make the heroine a passive office temp with an eating disorder and the man of her dreams a philandering salesman with a wife and three kids in Cleveland--and the story suddenly resembles ordinary life.

Which is apparently the last thing romance readers want to confront in their spare time. The rift between those who dote on and those who disdain romance novels really centers on the question of fantasy and its proper place in adult imagination. Here again sexism may play a part. Patriarchs have traditionally fretted about their womenfolk's being ruined by a book. Flaubert's Madame Bovary graphically portrayed the ruin that ensues when a young female's head is filled with romantic fancies. Can it really be good, modern critics wonder, for women to be whiling away so many hours reading impossibly glamorized love stories? Which begs a question: What about all the time male readers spend on page-turning fantasies of casual sex or violence?

The romance genre will never have its Le Carre, but spy novels have never had a Nora Roberts--an author who has made the transition from paperbacks beloved by the romance cognoscenti to hard-covers marketed successfully for mainstream readers. "Nora is the standard that nobody's going to eclipse," says Kate Duffy, an editorial director at Kensington Books, America's largest publisher of romance novels--but not, to Duffy's regret, of those by Nora Roberts. "Authors don't know how Nora does it. She is unique. She is a phenomenon. She has a gift, an extraordinary talent. It just doesn't get any better than Nora Roberts."

It certainly doesn't get any more prolific. Since she launched her writing career in 1981, 134 novels have been published under her name and her pseudonym, J.D. Robb. Let's go over that again: 134 novels. Roughly 106 million copies of her books have been printed. Last year 14 of her titles appeared on New York Times best-seller lists. This year she will have seven new novels and six reissues published. Spoilsports who say Joyce Carol Oates writes too much have obviously never heard of Nora Roberts.

But they probably will, perhaps through the publicity campaign under way for Roberts' new hardback offering of this year, Carolina Moon (Putnam; 438 pages; $24.95). This novel is a romance tooled to attract readers of popular fiction who may not think, or know, that they like romances. It is longer than Roberts' formula books and offers a larger cast of characters. The central love story is buttressed by a second one between supporting players. And Roberts includes elements from other pop genres, including a paranormal ability and a long-unsolved murder.

But all this extra furniture does not clutter up the simple romance plot. After an absence of 18 years, Tory (for Victoria) Bodeen returns to Progress, S.C., the small town that she and her parents left in questionable circumstances when she was eight. The event that led to their departure was the rape-murder of Tory's best friend, Hope Lavelle. Thanks to her psychic gift, Tory told Hope's parents, the wealthy owners of Beaux Reves estate, that their daughter was dead and where the body could be found.

Tory knows returning to Progress will mean facing Hope's twin sister Faith and her elder brother Kincade, who is now the handsome master of Beaux Reves. Tory believes she has come back to found a gift shop and to prove that the dirt-poor child that townsfolk once knew has grown into a polished and self-sufficient businesswoman. But experienced romance readers will know that Tory's true purpose in the book is to hook up with Cade Lavelle and become mistress of Beaux Reves.

Despite its preordained finale, Carolina Moon builds a commendably brisk narrative energy and pace. Roberts' prose does not invite lingering. In fact, reading fast is the best way to get past such locutions as "Her breath came in pants" or this anatomically puzzling account of Tory and Cade together in bed for the first time: "His mouth all but savaged hers, ripping down to her gut with one jagged and panicked thrill."

Still, the novel offers a parade of diverting characters, nearly all of whom talk about sex constantly, and a comforting sense that no truly upsetting events lie in wait. Faith Lavelle, the dead twin's grown sister, seems to mean Tory no good. But then her veterinarian boyfriend gives her a puppy, and the evil twin becomes a wonderful woman.

If such a transformation does not strike Roberts, 49, as preposterous, it may be because her life has followed, in broad outline, the plot of a romance novel. Back in 1979, she was a housewife with two small sons living in a small house in rural western Maryland, when a blizzard dropped 3 ft. of snow outside the door. "Here I was," she says, "pretty much stuck in the house for several days playing Candy Land and rearranging the furniture. To keep sane, I decided to do something else."

An eager reader since childhood and an energetic dreamer-up of stories, Roberts decided "to take one of those stories out of my head and write it down." A friend had recently introduced her to romance novels. "So I was gobbling those things up, and I thought, 'I'm going to write one of these. They're easy.'" They were not, it turned out, that easy, and she endured a beginner's run of rejection slips. But she was hooked. "As soon as I started writing, it was like, 'Why didn't I do this before? What have I been waiting for?'"

Her eventual success contributed, she says, to the breakup of her already troubled marriage in 1983. But now comes the part that romance readers love: into Roberts' house and life walked a 6-ft. 7-in. carpenter named Bruce Wilder. They were married two years later and have lived, so far, happily ever after. He has made substantial repairs and additions to the original house and also runs the Turn the Page bookstore in nearby Boonsboro, which boasts a collection of the entire Roberts canon and has become a mecca to her fans, some of whom call themselves (uh-oh) Noraholics.

Roberts knows some people look down on her work, but with a closetful of shoes and Armani outfits and the ability to travel abroad with her husband whenever the mood strikes them, she doesn't worry much about negative opinions. "The books are about the celebration of falling in love and emotion and commitment, and all of those things we really want." Since she has them, it's hard to fault her optimism.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/Keedysville, Md.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Keedysville, Md.