Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

To me, prose becomes purple instead of merely descriptive or lyrical when the author does any of the following:

1. She is a habitual noun- and verb-molester. It’s a sickness. She can’t leave the naked, quivering, defenceless word alone; she must assault it with modifiers, gleefully thrust in multiple adjectives and adverbs, and violate it merrily with superlatives and bad metaphors--not unlike what I’m doing to this paragraph now.

2. The descriptions, while elaborate, are almost always quite painfully mundane. The wind is “cruel and biting,” bare branches are “gnarled, grasping fingers,” the eyes are “sparkling orbs,” old women are “withered crones,” words are not spoken, they’re “rasped passionately.” Nothing new is offered; you’re drowned in a sea of descriptions that have been used so often, they’re well-nigh meaningless.

3. When the prose isn’t mundane, it’s jarring. The phrase “alabaster mounds,” when used to describe breasts, often makes me think of large lumps of cold, dead marble; probably not the effect the author wanted to achieve. And I won’t even tell you what I think when I read words like “slick love grotto” or “passion-bedewed portal,” though the phrase “gag me” does feature prominently in these thoughts.

4. To these authors, more = mo’ betta. The old maxim to make every word count holds no meaning to them, neither does the concept that over-described objects can interfere every bit as much with a reader’s visualization as under-described objects.

Take, for instance, this passage from the beginning of Laura Kinsale’s The Prince of Midnight. In this passage, S.T. first realizes that Leigh, the heroine, is actually a woman dressed as a boy:

He was certain of it. Abruptly and utterly certain. The soft, husky voice that didn’t rise and fall in ordinary tones, but stayed stubbornly gruff; that skin, those lips, the slender build--oh, she was a female, the sly little cat. She had the face to carry it off, too, clean and striking, marvelous, with a full jaw and dramatic brows, and enough height and carriage to pass for a youth of sixteen.

In my opinion, descriptive, but not purple. Now witness what adding and/or changing some modifiers can do to the passage:

He was certain of it. Abruptly and utterly certain. The soft, husky voice that didn’t rise and fall in ordinary tones, but stayed stubbornly gruff and raspy; that creamy skin, those beestung, lush lips, the slender build with the deliciously rounded bottom that was far, far too luscious to be male--oh, she was a female, the sly little creamcat. She had the face to carry it off, too, clean and striking, marvelous, with a full jaw and dramatic, winged brows that soared on her smooth alabaster forehead like angels in flight, and enough height and carriage to pass for a devastatingly beautiful youth of sixteen, a youth worthy of being sculpted by no less a master than Michelangelo.

One paragraph of this sort of writing is one thing, but a whole bookful of it? GAH.

I’m not going to be all PC and say that “there’s no such thing as bad or good, it’s all personal preference.” OK, it’s somewhat personal in that the purple line in the sand is located differently for different people. But once that line is crossed? Purple prose is bad writing. Bad, bad, bad.

I also don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with liking it. Shit, I like Doritos, and it’s certainly not haut cuisine, nor do they have any sort of redeeming nutritional value. I even acknowledge that they look, smell and taste kind of disgusting (especially the Cool Ranch flavor), but I don’t care, I love ‘em anyway.

Same thing with purple authors. When I’m in the right mood and when the author gets the shade of lilac just right, I enjoy reading purple prose, much in the same way I enjoy a really silly blockbuster in which the most taxing thing I have to do is trying to decide if Keanu’s semi-pained frown is indicative of his character’s inner turmoil, or whether he needs to up his Metamucil dosage.

More often than not, though, I can’t stand purple prose. It drives me nuts; the inner editor in me longs to drag out the red pen and slash out all the unnecessary modifiers. With lascivious, wanton abandon, even.

Sarah’s Part of the Rant:

My purple prose master, the author to whom I kneel when I search for the overwrought, overwritten, and overblown, is Beatrice Small. In fact, while going through books to keep or to donate this weekend, I pulled out the sequel to “Blaze Wyndham,” which is hands-down my favorite purple book, which follows the saga of Blaze’s daughter Nyssa. I put it in the ‘Keeper’ pile, as I don’t own a copy of Blaze Wyndham so Nyssa will have to do until I find one.

Hubby asked, “Why are you keeping that book?”
Sarah: “Because it is the most purple book I own.”
Hubby: “Purple?”
Sarah: “Yeah. Purple. The prose.”
Hubby: “Huh?”
Sarah: “Stay right there.” Flips to page where Nyssa has sex. (Of COURSE Nyssa has some sex! What would a purple be without some nookie?)
Sarah: “Ahem: ‘He deposited his love juices into her moist canal.’”
Hubby: “WHAT?! You can’t throw that book away! You have to keep that!”

Phrases like that define the purplest of the purple. To back Candy up, oh yes, nothing turns a book to grape flavoring like overworked words: “huskily” is my personal trigger, along with “redolent.” For some reason, I see “redolent” and my brain reads “corpulent.” Not at all what the author was intending, I imagine.

For example, I have now in front of me said saga of Nyssa and her love juices. Here are some purply examples for your titillating pleasure:

“Your love juices begin to flow, sweetheart,” he said softly, kissing her ear as he spoke. “That is how I know you are ready for me.” The tip of his finger found her tiny love button and he rubbed it....

She cried his name even as the feeling of pressure building within her exploded in a starbust of incredible pleasure… He could feel his love juices gushing forth in a great discharge of sweetness that overflowed her womb. He fell forward atop her body, exhausted, yet filled with a contentment he had never known.

Ah, the golden standards of purpleism: love juices, love button, and, further into the sexcapades of Nyssa in “Love, Remember Me,” we find his raging member.

What bothers me most is that purple prose does little to advance the story or even distinguish it from others of its ilk. I picture the author trying to come up with a masterful adverb or a devastating adjective, and unwittingly using the standby seen in hundreds of other works, even as the author tries to deviate from the pack. It’s sad - it’s like talking to someone who doesn’t express a thought originally, but couches everything in cliche so you feel like you’re not really talking to anyone. Not anyone intelligent, anyway.

It didn’t start out this way. When I first started reading romance novels—and I mean actively seeking them out, instead of turning to my sister’s collection of old-skool romances out of desperation when my book-buying budget ran out—everything was fresh and new. Extremely naïve debs from days gone by I didn’t have a problem with. Girls were a lot more sheltered back then. Eventually, however, I noticed an odd, rather disturbing pattern emerging in almost all the romance novels I encountered, regardless of the period setting: all the women were virgins. If they weren’t virgins, their previous love lives had been unequivocally horrible. You name it: childhood sexual torture, rape, abusive ex-husbands, impotent ex-husbands, lousy boyfriends who couldn’t find a clitoris with a flashlight, a magnifying glass and a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs—the heroines weren’t allowed to come or even so much as cream their panties watching the hot stableboy muck out the stalls before the heroes showed up with their magical Fleshy Sword of Pleasure +10. If the heroines weren’t virgins and had experienced orgasms in the past, it was only because the heroes had generously bestowed them, but once the heroes leave, the poor heroines are left in a holding pattern. Do not pass go, do not find another orgasm, do not collect $200.

(On a related note: I am also bloody sick of traumatic de-flowerings. I am tired of how the heroines go from “bring the morphine drip STAT” agony to eye-rolling ecstasy in 60 seconds. I’m not asking for strict realism in my romance novels, but please, some variety would be nice. Not everyone’s first time involves pain, not all girls have intact hymens, and reading about a virgin heroine whose first time is beyond stellar is much more believable if penetration was merely uncomfortable instead of a sea of stabbing, searing, tearing pain.)

Many romance novel authors seem to turn themselves inside out and stretch all credulity to create physically untouched heroines whose counterparts are, more often than not, immensely slutty men who slide their dicks into anything remotely moist and warm. Not only that, but if there are female villains, they are usually sexually voracious creatures. What does that say about the state of the sexual double-standard, eh? The authors probably don’t mean to reinforce the old Madonna/Whore dichotomy or imply that women who enjoy sex for its own sake are all morally corrupt, but that’s the collective message one could easily come away with after reading a few hundred romance novels. This message is hammered home hardest in the contemporaries featuring the heroine who doesn’t take another lover (or only one or two phenomenally lousy ones) after breaking up with the hero. One Pamela Burford Harlequin Temptation I read some years ago literally got flung against the wall when the divorced heroine admitted she hadn’t slept with anyone else after divorcing the hero, while the hero had had no trouble getting laid.

In short, many romance novels do not allow women to be independent sexual entities, while the men definitely are, and the unfairness is provoking, to say the least. I understand the appeal of an “untouched” heroine, one whose world is only really and truly rocked when the hero comes along. I dig that fantasy. But isn’t part of the fantasy also how the hero’s world is only really and truly rocked when the heroine comes along? So how do romance novel authors achieve this without glutting the market with virgin heroes and legions of heroes whose ex-wives all suffered from vaginismus?

By utilizing the emotional component, of course, and by making the sex that much more explosive because of the heightened emotions. Oftentimes the physical chemistry is portrayed as being out-of-control hot, so hot that the sexually experienced hero is often at a loss. So why don’t more romance authors utilize this method on heroines too, especially in contemporary novels or historical romances with sexually-experienced heroines? I don’t know. Possible reasons probably include laziness, adherence to tradition (whether conscious or unconscious) and the belief that it’s OK for a guy to be the hugest whore in the world but that it’s icky for a girl to have had multiple sexual partners and, God forbid, actually ENJOYED the experience.

However, in the hands of a skilled author, it’s possible to make annoying archetypes like the Orgasmless Widow into believable, sympathetic characters; Loretta Chase, for one, did it twice in Mr. Impossible and Captives of the Night. What makes her Orgasmless Widows interesting, however, is how both of them enjoyed the sex but were left unfulfilled, only to have their husbands make what enjoyment they had seem wrong and shameful. This is a much more nuanced take than the army of sexually sadistic and/or impotent hubbies usually inflicted on the average Orgasmless Widow.

I’m not saying I dislike these romance novel conventions enough that I’m going to make a buying decision based on the state of the heroine’s purity. I do reserve the right to relentlessly make fun of these archetypes when I encounter them, and if they’re done poorly, they’re definitely grounds for docking the final grade a point or three. In fact, now that I think about it, I want to propose a standardized scale for rating how good a job authors do when portraying the heroine’s sexual (in)experience. I’m going to call it the “Bitch, Please!” scale, with the unit of measurement being a BP (yes, it’s metric—an extremely exasperating justification for a heroine’s virginity may rate a kiloBP, for example). It’s based on how often the book makes me say out loud or think emphatically “Bitch, please!” when the author explains why Priscindella Prissypants has been married for six years yet doesn’t even know where her vagina is located, much less what to do with her clitoris. For instance, Amanda of The Real Deal gets at least 50 BPs for her unduly stankeriffic bisexual husband and her beyond-rotten childhood, while Holly of Where Dreams Begin rates only 8 or so BPs.

So, think the BIPM will be adding BPs to the International System of Units any time soon?

So when I say I know geeks, I KNOW GEEKS. I know and appreciate the many different flavors and varieties of them: the hardcore science geeks, the geeks who like to dabble in the shallow end of freaky physics and cosmology but can’t be bothered with the freaky math (*raises hand*), the rainbow varieties of computer geeks, literature geeks, music geeks, movie geeks. These are, of course, hardly mutually exclusive categories: it’s extremely uncommon to find a geek who’s solely into, say, research on irrational numbers and nothing else. Geeks, because they’re smarter than the average bear, tend to have varied interests about which they are usually extremely knowledgeable. Geeks tend not to have hobbies so much as obsessions. But despite this wonderful variety of geekery to draw from, not a single damn romance novel has gotten a geek hero right. This is how most romance novels handle the characterization:

1. Make them sound like Spock after a lobotomy. The more painful and stilted their conversation, the more intelligent they must be, right?

2. They are always, always, always science geeks. Give them an especially esoteric area of interest the average romance novel reader probably won’t know too much about so if the hero’s area of research becomes a plot point, you can fudge outrageously. Quantum mechanics and bioengineering are two extremely rigorous fields that have unfortunately been bombarded by more than their fair share of mass media oversimplification and pseudoscientific kookishness, leading to widespread misconceptions about what’s possible and not possible, so go ahead and misrepresent quantum non-locality or gene therapy and have a friggin’ field day.

3. Despite their geekiness, social awkwardness and general isolation (romance novel geeks resemble people with Asperger’s syndrome more than anything else), these heroes have super-duper lovemaking powers. Is the ability to cause an orgasm merely by waggling their fingers in the general direction of the heroine’s clitty a geek hero trait? Oh yes. In fact: Yes! Yes! YESSSSSS!

Peeve Number 1 is probably what bugs me the most. The reason why I’m so overwhelmingly attracted (romantically and otherwise) to people of Very Big Brain is because they’re such excellent conversationalists. The talk can switch from riffing over the A-Team to the situation in Sudan (which will of course bring up inevitable comparisons with Rwanda) to how photons have momentum even though they don’t have mass to why you think anchovy ice-cream is so very, very wrong, even if it was made by Iron Chef Chinese, to whom you would give your first-born child if you actually had any kids, and isn’t that Rosanjin scholar just the whiniest little bitch of a judge, ever? Geeks are articulate, geeks are quick-witted, and best of all, geeks are FUNNY--or at least the sexy ones are. So why oh why do so many authors take the lazy route and make their geek heroes sound about as lively as those computerized messages you get from the library? Seriously, I often expect the geek hero to start saying things like “Please pick up your books at the CENTRAL… LIBRARY… before APRIL… FOURTEENTH… TWO THOUSAND AND… FIVE.” Except that would be an IMPROVEMENT on the average geek hero’s dialogue.

So if you’re a romance novel author contemplating creating a geek hero, please, please, PLEASE have your geek heroes talk normally. In fact, make their conversation zippy. If you HAVE to show how extra-super-duper-king-sized-smart they are, then sure, throw in some stupid puns involving gluons or whatever, but in my experience, real-life geeks are more likely to make dirty jokes than jokes involving exotic sub-atomic particles. Just keep this in mind: your geek should be capable of creating HAL, but he shouldn’t at any point sound like HAL--unless he’s re-enacting 2001: A Space Odyssey for some reason.

The first bit of Peeve Number 2 isn’t really too much of a peeve, because it IS romantic fiction, and theoretical physics research is a sexier occupation than civil engineering or IT, though all these are honorable geek professions. But for the love of God, GET THE SCIENCE RIGHT. I’m not asking for equations or details, I’m talking getting the most basic of basics correct. Don’t have your geek hero assuming that the magnitude of uncertainty as put forward by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle remains the same for large bodies as well as sub-atomic particles. If you have a smart science-oriented high school kid handy, have her proof-read the rivetty bits. If she spots errors, it’s a pretty good sign you should do a lot more research. You don’t expect a romance novel set in fourteenth-century England to refer to Thomas Jefferson, right? I mean, that kind of an egregious error merits a thorough beating about the head and shoulders with a history textbook, doesn’t it? So why be sloppy with the science research?

And as for Peeve Number 3: Geeks are often geeks because at some point they were unattractive and/or unpopular, and the mindset has spilled over into their adult lives. This unpopularity oftentimes is due to the person not being able to look right or care about the same things other kids care about, and not necessarily due to a lack of social skills. Yes, there are geeks who live up to every awful stereotype: they’re physically unattractive in every way you can think of (too fat/too skinny/too pimply/bad teeth/bad hair/partially-resorpted fetal twin dangling from their forehead), they snort when they laugh, they’re completely clueless on how to behave themselves in any given social situation, they’re genuinely uncomfortable people to be around--but are we really trying to portray these kinds of geeks as the geek hero? I mean, WHY?

So given that many of the stereotypes of the completely socially inept geek are not necessarily true, one thing does tend to be true: geeks as a group tend to have less sexual experience, or at least start their sexual experiences later, compared to the general population. Sexually inexperienced heroes may turn off some people, but personally, I think they’re adorable. Actually, it’s almost a fetish for me. Part of the reason why I like Wild at Heart and The Shadow and The Star so much is because the heroes have never been with a woman, and witnessing the fumbling is both sexy and very, very emotionally-charged. Why so many romance authors include all the inaccurate and unattractive personality stereotypes while overcompensating them in the bedroom is beyond me. One can learn to give good head; learning to be an engaging conversationalist is also possible, but a LOT harder. Guess which skill I’d much rather teach a guy and which skill I’d much rather have a guy know already. Hell, guess which skill attracts me to a guy in the first place, and the one that will keep the relationship going years and years later when all the fun bits are no longer firm and pert and cellulite has made inroads in areas you never though possible.

You want good geek hero models? Science fiction shall be thy savior. Read some Neal Stephenson. Pick up some William Gibson. Or hey, try Connie Willis--she writes SF novels with a distinct romantic bent featuring brainier-than-average people. See how these authors make being a geek pretty damn sexy even if the books aren’t necessarily focused on sex or romance.

Another example:

By and large, I enjoy Judith Ivory novels, and she’s an autobuy author. When I picked up Untie My Heart, though, I immediately noticed that the recipes provided by the Victorian sheep-farmer heroine were all in grams and kilograms—which immediately awakened the Nitpicking Monster who slumbers within my breast, because the Imperial system was still the standard among laypeople (read: non-scientist types) until well into the twentieth century. If you look at old home-written recipes, many of them don’t use standard measurements, much less the metric system—they’re all about “a pinch of this” and “handful of that.” Even today, metrication isn’t complete in all parts of the United Kingdom. Just ask the people at the UK Metric Association, and they’ll give you an earful.

So again: brutally yanked out of an author’s carefully set up world, and I had to set the book down and go back to it later. I don’t know if my initial peeve stayed with me or if it’s just a coincidence, but this was also the first Judith Ivory book to receive less than a B grade from me, and it hit the “donate to the library pile” quicky-quick like.

As Jorie pointed out, it’s hard to get the tone right in a historical romance. And really, I’m not looking for complete accuracy. If I wanted to read a book that’s 100% authentic, I’d pick up some Austen, or Trollope, or Hardy. And there are several romance novel authors who manage to keep me within their world even as they utilize huge honkin’ anachronisms, such as using the word “sex" to refer to sexual intercourse or genitalia. How do they do it? By getting the rhythm of the language right. By using words that just sound old-fashioned (ref. my really silly nitpick regarding “grippe” vs. “influenza” in my review for To Love a Scottish Lord). By refraining from having their nineteeth-century British aristocrats say something like “You’re kidding me,” or “ The investigator has a couple of leads that might prove who tried to make you look guilty.”

Above and beyond technicalities like language and details of the era, a lot of historical romances also have extremely modern characters. They think like modern people, they act like modern people, and—perhaps worst of all—they indulge in a lot of very modern navel-gazing and psychoanalysis.

Take, for instance, two different tortured heroes from two different time periods: Allegreto of Shadowheart and Lucien of Dancing on the Wind. Both these books have immovable spots on my keeper shelf, and the two men qualify as two of my favorite romance novel heroes. But Allegreto strikes me as a character who is much more true to his time period than Lucien. He never analyzes why he finds so much pleasure in sexual pain; in fact, he’s convinced he’s going to burn in hell for enjoying what Elena does to him. At the end of the book, I KNOW Elena will keep on hurting him in the bedroom, Allegreto will keep on lovin’ it, and both of them will still be convinced that what they’re doing is unnatural and sinful—but like just about everyone else, they’ll ignore the proscription because it feels too damn good and go to confession as necessary to make peace with their consciences. There’s no feel-good, “Oh, it’s not bad if it’s two consenting adults expressing their love in different ways” kind of a resolution—which is great, because it prevents the book from being squishy, and it prevents the book from feeling too modern. I also like how Allegreto doesn’t really ponder on the role his father had in forming him. Instead, the author provides glimpses into his past, which in turn allow us, the readers, to draw our own conclusions about him and what makes him tick.

Lucien, on the other hand, goes into protracted discussions with the heroine about the effect the death of his twin sister had on him, and the effect the heroine’s twin sister’s disappearance might have on her. They talk about the bond between twins in somewhat modern terms, and analyze themselves quite thoroughly. These are the scenes I never re-read when I pick the book up. And every Putney book I can think of has these spiritual healing sequences in which the protagonists look into their pasts, pinpoint what’s making them nuts, address the issue head-on and then allow themselves to let go of the pain, which strikes me as a very modern process. Without reading The Bartered Bride, I can tell you right now there will be a scene in which Alexandra, who’s been raped, is going to go through something like that with the help of the hero.

I’m just not convinced that people knew and accepted the impact their pasts had in shaping their psychological present and future before Freud came along and demanded we tell him about our mothers. Shit, I doubt people before the late twentieth century acknowledged psychological reality and its importance in quite the concrete way we do nowadays. People also placed a lot of importance in heredity—"blood will tell” and all that. Fuck nurture, nature’s where it’s at, baby, hence all the delightful theories about inherently inferior races and classes.

So how does Allegreto, a character whom I think is a pretty convincing product of his time, deal with his past and find his peace? He tries to seek absolution with the Church, and through the Church, with God Himself. Now that strikes me as being more appropriate for the time he inhabits.

But as with everything else, I want my historical accuracy to go only so far, and no further. I don’t want to read about historically accurate heroes who believe, say, that too much reading and thinking will cause a woman’s womb to shrink. Similarly, I can’t deal with heroes who engage in slavery, either as traders or property owners. I just can’t buy into the idea that a hero can own or trade slaves yet still be capable of being truly heroic according to my effete modern sensibilities. And while we’re talking about suspension of realism, I want my heroes to smell nice, still have all their teeth and not be bloated, gouty and syphilitic by the time they’re 45.

So to summarize: I want my characters to be historically accurate, but not too accurate, and the setting to be convincing, but without dwelling on the fact that there was no running water or toilet paper which meant performing oral sex on somebody before they took their annual bath involved either a lot of courage or a completely non-existent sense of smell, oh and I want everyone in the book to sound real, which means avoiding words that sound modern even if they were coined way back in the day. That’s not too tall an order, is it?

See, I’m not hard to please at all.