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

The Smart Bitches were e-mailing each other about women of leisure as they’re depicted in historical romances, and somehow we got sidetracked into talking about romance novel villains instead. Go figure.

Candy: I read The Lady’s Tutor a few years ago, and I didn’t like it too much. The thing that bothered me the most was the villain. Oh, so not only is he bisexual and emotionally abusive, but he’s a CHILD-MOLESTER as well? Feh. Just once I’d like to encounter a hetero child-molester in a book, ANY book, since in the real world the vast majority of pedophiles are straight. Using homos and bisexuals as villains--and EVIL EVIL EVIL ROASTING BABIES ALIVE AFTER MOLESTING THEM villains at that--is one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction of any sort.

Sarah: Speaking of cliché villains, you know what else I hate? I hate when an author can’t come up with a good bit of characterization to define how bad the villain is using multi-dimensional scenes or actions. No, the author just says, Hey! I know! This man is BAD. He is E.VIL. So I will make him… cruel to animals! What a cop out. Not only do I find it horribly upsetting but it’s such a weak ass wussy way to make someone evil. I mean, dang. What happens if someone is gay, an incestuous pedophile, AND cruel to the horses? Why, he’s satan! ARGH! God that makes me nuts.

The villain for Duke of Sin is also half Jewish. His ancestors are Bohemian Jews who emigrated two generations before. I am still not sure why it is relevant. Perhaps he is also gay, an incestuous pedophile, and mean to the horses, on top of being Jewish. Then he’d be more than Satan. He’d be über-Satan. Satanalicious! The Duke of Satan! GAH!

Candy: No, if a villain was all of the above he wouldn’t be the Duke of Satan, he’d be part of the secret cabal in charge of the World Bank, the stock markets and the mass media! Those goddamn faggot Jews are ruining our shit yet again! The only way he could be worse was if he somehow managed to be both Jewish AND atheist.

Sarah: Don’t forget Hollywood. We control that, too. Last I heard, anyway. Tom Cruise still won’t return my calls so I don’t know for sure.

Candy: Hahaha. And man, don’t get me started on Tom. You know, he’d make an excellent villain. Too good looking, member of a weird cult, generally beloved, yet something about him gives me the jibblies.... Bleck. Anyway, romance novels tend to have really sloppy villains. Popular fiction in general isn’t all that great when it comes to creating convincing villains with realistic motivations, but most romance novel villains are just downright ridiculous. They’re often psychotic, when most of the bad people in the world aren’t psycho per se, they’re simply greedy, callous and/or selfish in certain ways, and to a certain extent they’re blind to how much harm is caused by their actions. I believe in the banality of evil, which is a term Hannah Arendt came up with to explain how so many people accepted--even embraced--the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. People who commit evil acts often sincerely believe they’re acting on the best interests of their families and their community. But romance novel villains? More often than not they’re just batshit insane, boy. Think of all the pointless romance novel tragedy that could’ve been averted if only the villains had access to Haldol or Thorazine!

It’s true. Not because of my Heathen Godlessness (or at least not only because), but because I dare to review books.

The piece starts off calmly and reasonably enough. The writer, PaperbackWriter (PBW for short) explains why she doesn’t read reviews of her work, and why she doesn’t think book reviews necessarily help her.

And then right around paragraph 8, she starts losing it:

Now, some ditz with internet access and a hair up an orifice for whatever reason wants to come and tell the world how he or she would write my book? Oh, be my guest. Only when you write that review, imagine how you’d feel if I came into your place of business, knowing little to nothing about how to do your job, and commenced to decide how well you did it. Then imagine me going to your boss and saying, I think Jane Reviewer sucks at the job that pays her mortgage, feeds her children and keeps her from living under a bridge. Dock her pay, will you? Now I’m off to smear her on every bookkeeping site on the internet. Oh, and if you ever need a new bookkeeper, here’s my card…

So, okay, despite this, I accept that I am a public figure, subject to public opinion. Goes with the job. Certainly you reviewers are entitled to your opinions, and free speech—something I dearly love—protects your right to air them. Air them. But expect me to read it? Think I’m going to learn something from you? Based on what? Have you written sixty-two novels? I have. How many of yours are published? My #27 and #28 will be out next month. Let’s put some credentials on the table here.

Right, forgot. You don’t have any. You just have your opinion.

REEEERRRRR! HISSSSS! Somebody put some SoftPaws on this dame. Hey, you know what? I write for a living. Not fiction, true, but I’ve produced, edited and revised well over 100 technical manuals in the five years I’ve worked as a writer/illustrator/webmaster for my company. And if a mechanic complained to my boss and said “That latest service manual is complete shit, the instructions and photos are confusing,” then based on what this writer is saying, I’d be justified in telling the customer: “GET THAT HAIR OUT OF YOUR ASS. You don’t know the torments I went through to crop, adjust and clean up those photos! You don’t know how many meetings I had with engineers and how many prints I consulted to find out the tolerances required for the clutch! How many service manuals have you created? Oh that’s right, NONE.”

This example is not strictly analogous, of course. Writing fiction is very different from writing a tech manual, just as the reasons why people read a tech manual are generally very different from the reasons why people read a novel. But the claim that those of us who don’t write or edit fiction professionally are not qualified to critique or have an opinion on a book is quite possibly the most fragrant pile of bullshit I’ve encountered in quite a while, and is a classic defense posture affected by thin-skinned whiners everywhere when their work is reviewed negatively. Last time I checked, reviews involved a person’s opinion based on several complex factors, chief of all being personal aesthetics, and I don’t see how publishing 28 books would somehow enhance my aesthetic sense. Now critiquing somebody’s bookkeeping, or engineering, or a PhD dissertation on the flurorescence of nitrous oxide when bombarded with high-energy electromagnetic waves would take a LOT more technical knowledge than reviewing a book--but even a layperson can catch errors and point out incompetence if the mistakes are particularly flagrant. So PBW’s analogy is even shittier than mine is.

I respect PBW’s freedom to read or not read, or to take to heart or disregard any and all reviews about her work. But she completely misses the point about why people like me write reviews. I don’t write reviews in the hopes of instructing the author on how to do her job, just as Joe Mechanic isn’t trying to tell me how to use PhotoShop and InDesign when he’s telling me that something about a manual is confusing him. I write reviews for a myriad of reasons:

• I’m a loudmouthed, opinionated bitch, and I figured what the hell, I might as well share my opinionated bitchiness on the Interweb since everyone else is. I’m nothing if not a joiner!
• I really, really love reading books in general, and romance novels in particular. Writing about it provides just another outlet for my fascination with the genre.
• I want to share the good books I’ve read, and warn people who might have similar tastes to mine about the stinkers.
• I enjoy writing, but unlike some authors--fuck that, MANY authors--I realized long ago that I can’t write fiction worth a good goddamn, so this is a fun project for me to keep the old gray matter working and my writing skillz sharp. (Note my substitution of the letter “z” for “s” in that last sentence. This indicates I’m young, hip and urban!)

If an author decides to take a review to heart and gets rid of annoying verbal tics or drops stupid plot devices, then hooray, awesome, champagne all around. But really, it’s an incidental by-product of reviewing, and not its primary purpose. My take on the whole thing is: if authors see the same criticism pop up over and over again, perhaps instead of saying “EVERYBODY IS FULL OF SHIT!” it might behoove her to see if these myriad viewers coming from different backgrounds and presumably with a variety of tastes might have a point? And hey, sometimes everybody IS full of shit--what else can explain the popularity of Avril Lavigne? But sometimes they’re not.

Her claims that reviewers are somehow out to get her, that we somehow run around posting every negative review to every website and clamor at her publisher to cut her contract, also strike me as distinctly paranoid, with a good dash of delusions of grandeur. So far I’ve written one bad review for this site. I haven’t publicized it. I haven’t gone on Amazon to throw in my 1-star review, which would certainly be higher-visibility than a website that ranks 99 for “romance novel reviews” on Google but number 2 for “trashy bitches”. I haven’t even asked anyone other than my sister and my best friend to look at this website. When I snarl and snark while writing a review for a bad book, I consider it cathartic, but I certainly don’t have a vendetta against the author. I’m snarky, not Annie Wilkes. The only authors I give a shit about are the good ones, and these are the ones I’m much more likely to talk about. The bad authors can be rolling in dough (God knows many of them are) or trolling the streets for their next hit of crack for all I care. And I honestly don’t think many (if any) reviewers behave in the way PBW writes about when they encounter a book they don’t like, simply because psychosis is a pretty rare ailment.

And towards the end of this blog entry, PBW really starts losing it. Witness:

I listen to my readers; if I hadn’t at least five of my books wouldn’t exist. They write to me, and talk about what they like and don’t like. They are always in the back of my mind when I write. Occasionally I write things or change things to please them, too. I can’t make them all happy, that would be like trying to count all the stars in the galaxy. (...) But I listen, because it’s part of the unwritten contract between me and someone who paid seven or nineteen or twenty-five bucks of their hard-earned money for that book.

I don’t maintain that kind of contract with reviewers, 99% of whom get the books for nothing from my publisher. Some of you write great reviews that sell a lot of books for me, but that doesn’t offset the hatchet jobs that cost me sales. I’m not going to kiss your ass. I’m not afraid of you. Mostly I feel nothing but contempt for you, as a soldier feels for an informant (stole that from my man Flaubert.) I’m working on turning that into pity. Because as much hell as I’ve gone through, it can’t be anything compared to where most of you burn.

So at first I thought maybe she was bitching about Amazon one-paragraph hackjob reviews, but this last paragraph indicates that she isn’t. Hey, here’s a thought: if there are more negative reviews than positive from across the spectrum--both “professional” reviews and reader reactions on sites like Amazon.com--perhaps, just maybe, what you’re writing is shit? Just a thought. Not that I’m trying to say all great books are critically acclaimed; Moby Dick tanked when it came out, but even now you can still make an excellent, convincing argument that it’s an overrated piece of crap. (Not me, personally, I love that huge, unwieldy piece of insanity. Now on the other hand, ask me about Wuthering Heights, go on, I dare you...)

And I’m just wondering: who does she think reviewers are? Some sort of weird sub-human, non-reader category? Because she makes a very distinct and bizarre demarcation between “readers” (who are good, and praiseworthy, and worth listening to) vs. “reviewers” (who deserve to burn in Hell if they dare have a negative opinion about her work). Y’know, last time I checked, every book reviewer is a book reader. If you paid any attention to high-school math when they covered Venn diagrams, that’d make us reviewers a sub-set of readers. Unless you volunteer for a big website like All About Romance or work for a publication, most of the people writing reviews on the Internet paid for the books out of their own pocket. She needs to make up her mind: either reviewers are worth listening to, or we’re shitful freaks. Or are we somehow magically less shitful if we paid for the book? Will our opinion somehow be more valid? Then let me state up front here: Sarah and I pay for ALL the books we review, one way or another. Sarah gets many of her books through Booksfree or buys them outright, while I either buy them or get them through the library (which I pay for with my taxes).

Are there good reviews and bad reviews? Of course there are. The bad ones go something like “I LOVED THIS BOOK! FIVE STARS ALL THE WAY! THIS AUTHOR DESERVES ORAL SEX WHILE BEING FED CHOCOLATE-DIPPED STRAWBERRIES BY HOT SHIRTLESS TENNIS PLAYERS INTO PERPETUITY FOR WRITING THIS GEM! A+++!” The good ones not only tell you the book was good, or bad, or mediocre, but WHY the reviewer thought so in an honest, coherent, entertaining manner. Reviews are not literary analysis--or at least they shouldn’t be unless you’re either a pretentious whore or have a fairly perverse sense of humor. Reviews are primarily gut reactions tempered by self-reflection.

So in short: if I’m burning in hell, I kind of like it here. I prefer warmer climates, anyway, and besides, it’s a dry kind of heat.

p.s. Did you like the way I casually tossed out references to science and literature? I wish I could’ve done it with the same panache she said “my man Flaubert,” but alas, I’m afraid I’m not a published author.

p.p.s. Hey, I guess I need SoftPaws too.

p.p.p.s. For a response that’s a lot more measured and a whole lot less catty than mine, check out what Laurie Likes Books wrote on her blog.

Sarah: I just realized I don’t really have anyone I can talk romance with who remembers characters and stuff until now! Hooray! Can I just tell you how happy I am to have the opportunity to think critically and bitchily about romance novels?

Candy: I think it’s really fun to dish about romance novels with you, too. I think I’ve said this to you before, but all my friends treat my romance novel habit like a sore-ridden crack whore on a street corner: they try to pretend they don’t know it’s there.

Sarah: I am so with you on the friends don’t let friends read romance thing. I never talk about what I’m reading because I am friends with more than a few people who are very into reading Good Books and my choice of brain candy is so beneath them. I just don’t want to hear it. Even Hubby used to give me a hard time (and justifiably so when Fabio was featured on the cover) until I explained that I like romances because I like the guarantee of a happy ending, and I know with a happily ever after I will be satisfied in the end. Plus, I loooove attraction and the initial stages of a romance - and that’s the best part of any story for me. You know, the, Dang he’s HOT stage.

Candy: Yeah, the Very Tall Husband made fun of my romance books too until I pointed out that he reads and loves Terry Goodkind, who’s trashy fantasy. We actually have a pact: he’ll read a romance book if I’ll give Terry Goodkind a shot. So far neither of us has picked up the gauntlet, haha. Peple who meet me are usually surprised to find out I read romance novels because I can be such a book snob and will fucking tear books like The Stone Diaries apart for being uninteresting, overrated pieces of crap, and because I read a lot of “literary” fiction as well other forms of fiction that aren’t quite literary but are still acceptable, like science fiction, children’s books and non-fiction (mostly dealing with the sciences, I love me a good science book). Their stance is “But you have all these GOOD books, these REAL books to read, why do you read romances?” My answer is: Because I like stories with love and sex and happy endings, bitch. Leave me alone!

More conversations on what drives us batty about romance novels:

Sarah: I am in the middle of glomming all the Balogh and Putney backlist I can get from Booksfree.

Candy: Good luck with the glom. I personally can’t read too many Putneys in a row, though when spaced apart she’s usually quite reliably good. Her Fallen Angels series is especially entertaining, but when they stage group get-togethers in the later novels and you see the massive conglomeration of gorgeous, wonderful people who have found other gorgeous, wonderful people to spend forever with, it gets a bit much.

When bitches are bored at work, what else do we do but talk about what we love and hate about romance novels?

Candy: Hey, have you read Uncommon Vows? That’s one of my favoritest books by Mary Jo Putney, ever. I’m not usually into heroes who are religious (me being a Godless heathen and all), but Putney pulls it off real well. And it makes me cry and cry. If you don’t like books that make you sob like a little bitch, though, you might want to skip it.

Sarah: I’m OK with religious heroes but not with books that derive their plots from Christian values. I mean, I am aware a majority of the folks who make up the protagonist pool for these novels are from the Christian majority belonging to the Church of England. But I am also aware that outward discussion of faith was not entirely appropriate social conversation, and certainly wasn’t the driving force behind a couple’s romance. Further, I’m not Christian, so I don’t identify with that value set and the language employed within it as part of my leisure reading. I started one romance that was some fantasy set in 1993 with arranged marriages between two kingdoms and the opening chapter was some diary entry about Your Will and Your Plan and I was like, You are going Back where You Came From because I will not Read You. Yuck.