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.

Would you have them locked in a dungeon? Kidnapped and held for ransom? Would you make them neighbors and then have one of the pipes in an apartment burst, forcing the other to take refuge in the dry apartment while repairs are made? Cause a rock to fall on the heroine’s head leaving her with partial amnesia where the hero is concerned, allowing him to date her under false pretenses? Have one of them become superglued to the other and then to a chair so they can’t call for help, nor can they get to the bathroom to pour nail polish remover all over themselves? Or have a zany uncle leave them his entire estate, to the exclusion of a host of other relatives,provided the hero and heroine move into said estate for six months’ time, not leaving the presence of the other for more than 48 hours?

If you picked the last one, well, you must have read this book. “A Will and A Way” places Pandora and Michael, the not-blood-related niece and nephew of a goofy and now deceased Uncle Jolley, owner and multi-billionaire inhabitant of a catskills estate called...wait for it… come on… you can see it coming...Jolley’s Folly.

Yeah. So down the road of predictability we go: Michael and Pandora stand to inherit a bajillion dollar estate if they live in the house for six months; the rest of the relatives are left with inconsequential things like books of matches to light fires under one’s ass, or the exact sum needed to buy wheat germ for life. If they can’t agree to move in to the giant, hulking mansion for six months, then the estate will revert to the other relatives in equal shares, along with some institute for the study of carnivorous insects.

I’m not kidding.

So Michael and Pandora are pissed because they don’t want to live with each other, and while Pandora is wealthy in her own right, neither is comfy with inheriting billions of dollars (whyever not I can’t even figure). The relatives who got the shaft are pissed and now in the position of hoping Michael and Pandora kill or run out on each other. But ultimately they agree to try living in the vast multi-winged expanse of the house together, much to the displeasure of the rest of the kooky family, and away the story goes.

It doesn’t get much more believable than that. I got the feeling Roberts sat down with a trading card deck full of common romance plot devices and frequently used conventions and shuffled them together to create this book. Usually, even operating with the most common of plotlines, Roberts can create a character, usually the hero as I love her men, who is so fascinating I’d put up with kidnapping, amnesia, witness protection, or God forbid even a secret freaking baby, so long as Roberts wrote at least one good character.

Neither of the characters are even remotely interesting to me, and nor are they too smart. First, it’s a huge house. Go live in separate wings. Don’t talk to each other. Don’t see each other. You already know that she designs award-winning jewelry by day, while he writes Emmy-award-winning television scripts by night. You don’t even have to same schedule. Just don’t talk to each other!

Look, I have to go to Passover Seder with an entire wing of my husband’s family that I find less than lovely to be around. If I can put up with them, and their merry ingestion of the four cups of wine that are part of the Seder service, then you can live six months in a mansion with someone you don’t actually have to see.

Second, what is all this animosity based on anyway? I mean, she designes jewelry. He writes scripts. Both creative professions. You’d think there’s some common ground there, but no, they actually snipe at each other by criticizing one another’s creative efforts! She designs “ugly baubles for rich women;” he writes “mindless entertainment for idiots.” Gosh, I know there’s professional jealousy in the artistic community but that’s a little extreme.

It’s not as if they are jealous of each other’s relationship with their dead uncle. They call a truce of momentary duration while talking to each other about how sad they are, will and inheritance nonsense aside. So where the animosity comes from is peculiarly unexplained. I know plenty of people who get under my skin, and I know why they do. And either I put up with it or I avoid them. I don’t go after them for more insults and fighting. Usually there’s a root source, a larger reason why they would be so pissed at each other. In this case, there’s none. It’s one more invented plot contrivance to draw the story along towards the final page. The characters don’t lead the story; the plot doesn’t either. Roberts drags them along and pushes them forward with the tip of her pen, forcing them together, forcing them into Grave Danger That Forces Admissions of Emotional Attachment, and wrapping their ending up neatly at the final page. I am amazed one of them didn’t say to the other, “Oh, now it’s time for me to get ‘accidentally’ locked in the basement so you can worry that someone is up to no good!”

The worst is that the source of all this ire is supposed to be because they are secretly in love with one another. If you love someone, even secretly, why would you put yourself in a position repeatedly such that the object of your adoration puts down your very personal creations that, coincidentally, pay your bills, thus allowing you to live on doing exactly what you enjoy doing. Wouldn’t the criticism do lasting, painful damage, coming from someone you purportedly love?

Aside from the woefully contrived conflict between the hero and the heroine, the external forces working against the protagonists are sketched with one of those inch-wide Crayola cubby-hands crayons. The relatives, who, DUH, of course are going to try to interfere with the terms of Michael and Pandora’s cohabitation to force them to be apart for periods of more than 48 hours, are all caricatures of various types, from the earthy-crunchy health duo, recipients of the lifetime supply of wheat germ, to the harshly inconsiderate brother, recipient of not a thing, and his ineffectual sister, who received a house in Palm Beach. You know they’re bad news, even the attorney thinks they’re kind of creepy, and yet the protagonists think the rest of the clan is going to go merrily into the evening without a worry or concern that, should the two of them be apart for two days, they suddenly receive an enormous inheritance, each.

So of course weird shit starts happening - ransacking, tampering, accidents that are two convenient for accidental cause, and false information being acted upon without proper verification on the part of the hero or heroine. Jeez. These two are dumb as hell. And even as the weird shit starts to become more menacing, not that it didn’t start with a rather frightening event in the first place, they agree NOT to call the police. I’m guessing there was a sentence edited out where the heroine says, “No, we should not call the police, even though millions of dollars of my personal property was tossed on the floor and left there. To call the police would mean a much too quick resolution to the drama, and we have two hundred pages to go!”

Further, the two servants, loyal and true of heart, are perfect in every way, serving as plot devices to push the two together, faking fainting spells and colds and general old agedness, causing the hero and heroine to clean, cook their own meals, and be around each other frequently.

The kicker moment is the climax of all the drama. The hero and heroine gather the family into the house and...oh it’s too stupid. Dare I tell you? Dare I spoil this marvelously predictable mess?

The hero and the heroine gather the family in the mansion, tell them that the gig is up, they know who has been causing all the problems and trying to kill them both, and then - the lights go out! People scream! And when the lights come on, there’s the heroine in a pool of blood, a bloody letter opener next to her, while the hero calmly stands over her and says that one of the family is a murderer. I shit you not. It was like one of those bad plays acted out where YOU are part of the DRAMA, and you have to go solve the MURDER in your own HOME.

And of course this whole melodrama wrings a confession out of the appropriate people and they all live happily ever after, as the hero and heroine have fallen marvelously in love with one another and will now cohabitate as Husband and Wife in their mutually admired artistic endeavors.

But wait! Before you rush right out and buy this thing, I never told you the very best part! The most wonderous, marvelous, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious next best thing?

This book is a two-novel set!! There are two books in one as Silhouette tries to milk the last dollars it can out of Nora Roberts, since she did not renew her contract with them. The next one? Oh, you’ll never guess. The hero and heroine are the younger members of two familes who are long time rivals and neighbors. You will never guess what the families’ competing interests are.

No really, give it a try.

Diamond mining? Software development? Hardware stores? Flower shops?

No.

I’m not even kidding.

Ranching, cattle, and oil.

Cue the “Dallas” theme.