I’ve heard many arguments about why romance novels are often just plain good books, but one of the most frequent is that lots of people like it. While I agree that popularity is certainly an indication of appeal, I wouldn’t say it is always an indication of outstanding quality. Take McDonald’s, for instance. Billions and billions served, right? They’ve sold more hamburgers than any other restaurant chain in the history of the world. But if I said that McDonald’s serves the best hamburgers in the world, bar none, because lots of people like it…well, most people would look at me like I’m crazy. And they’d be right.
I’m not saying that there aren’t romances that are absolutely fabulous books, period. But I am saying that they are fabulous for other reasons than for simply being popular.
This comes down to the old argument of what constitutes art. Yes, storytellers are artists, no matter what kinds of stories we write and no matter what kind of labels on the covers of our stories. There are a lot of flavors of the philosophy of art, but here are just a few. I think a combination of them is best for defining what makes a book great rather than committing ourselves to a single piece of evidence that, in isolation, is simply not enough.
Great works are something many people appreciate. This is the populist or canonical view. What’s considered “good” is usually labeled by some level of consensus. People generally agree that Michelangelo, George Eliot, Hemmingway, and Bach are great, and therefore, they are, just because lots of people think so. While I’d agree there is a kind of agreement among many people about many great works, I’d submit that lots of people liking a thing is not enough alone. Even if lots of people (or experts) appreciate something, they would have to consider it to be more than just good for their appreciation to really count. Popularity, then is not simply a show of hands but requires judgement, too. And the reasons people call something great almost always go beyond “well, I just like it,” which indicates that consensus is an expression of greatness but not a requirement for it. (And some people will call things great because important call it great in a kind of artistic peer-pressure. I doubt that one in 10 people who read Jame Joyce’s Ulysses honestly think that it’s any good, yet most of them will say that it is a great book…because their college professor told them so. It totally destroys much of the value of populist opinion when the population doesn’t stop to form its own opinion!) Even if a person is identifying the greatest hamburger in the world, she might explain, “It’s great because it has a perfect texture, rough and not too processed, and it has a slightly smoky flavor that compliments the beef, and the outside is perfectly brown with a more tender inside cooked exactly to medium…” and so on. Sure, different people like different things, but in the end, virtually everyone can give more of a reason for calling something great other than simply liking it. In addition, this view supports the idea that if the Mona Lisa had been hidden away in a remote abbey for the past few centuries and no one had seen it, or if it had been so scorned by some influential figure at its time of creation that it had been forgotten, that it wouldn’t be great now. And, quite frankly, I think that’s bunk.
Great works have a positive and compelling moral quality. This is the moral view. It’s very popular in today’s relativistic culture to mock morality, but there is no society, no matter how small, that does not have a morality, and most art is a reflection and either an affirmation of or a rejection of (on an ethical basis) of those morals. This is particularly true for fiction. We create a world in the image of the inside of our minds when we write stories, whether it is the championing of a positivistic worldview in a cozy mystery or police procedural or the glorification of the power of human connection, redemption, love, and gender harmony in romances. Virtually every canonical great work can be given a very revealing moral reading, from Chaucer to Joyce Carol Oates. Mediocre stories play the some familiar notes in the same familiar ways, but great ones strike chords that use our common culture and/or humanity to vibrate our cores in harmony with them. Some writers lose that power as the culture changes over time–Dickens, for instance, will move few modern readers to tears. Others, like Sophocles, reverberate across the ages and still affect us profoundly. I do believe that every work that has a great effect upon many readers can only do so if it tells a story that is more universal than that of the lives of the characters upon the pages, if it reaches out through the medium of our humanity and, without falsity, contrivance, or preachiness, siezes hold of some root-deep cultural or human truth and shake it. This does not mean that any story ought to “have a moral” in the traditional sense but that it needs to reach into a kind off Jungian world of archetypes and to appeal to a sense of universal justice for the depth and breadth that truly affects people.
Great works are moving. This is an aesthetic or emotional view. Great art is experiential at the gut level, and I think the unquantifiable nature of such a work is one of the reasons that some people are uncomfortable with it. You can’t measure beauty with a scale or ruler, but you can take a poll of people and find out which books or paintings they consider the greatest ever, so it’s often easier to ignore this aspect. The problem with ignoring it, though, it that the people who respond out of personal experience and conviction–not out of what they feel like they ought to say because of the influence of the canonization and “classicalization” of works–almost always move to the emotional/transcendental/experiential level at some point, and this one of the fundamental means by which most people instinctively classify something as great.
Great works reflect truth. This is a view of verisimilitude. Great art is not a perfect recording of the “real world,” but it is a distillation of certain aspects of reality, a presentation of it in an emotionally honest way that is true at a level deeper than fact. This is the argument most often leveled against romance–that it isn’t realistic, and so it can’t be any good. That it’s built on lies. My rather blunt answer to that is that if you think there is no such thing as transforming and lasting love, I pity you your sad, bitter, empty life. A gentler answer is this: Great romances are as true as any great book. Their emotional honesty is precisely why people treasure them. Sure, there are plenty of books about spinster secretaries being swept of their feet by their Greek shipping magnate bosses…but that kind of froth is not enough to create the attraction that the genre as a whole has with its audience. Romance attracts because it resonates, and it resonates not with out-of-touch pathetic women who have never been kissed but with people who are largely in the middle of their own “ever afters.” It resonates because romance reflects the story of overcoming adversity through a mixture of love, self- AND mutual-reliance, and empowerment that isn’t some sort of oppressive fantasy locking women into doomed and delusional marriages but is an inspiration to women to find that truth in their own lives. Romance readers have more sex with their spouses (often considered a sign of the health of a marriage) than non-romance readers not because they are dreaming of Fabio but because what they get from their romances is an affirmation that positive, mutually happy relationships are both desirable and possible for ordinary people like themselves. Women’s shelters often stock their libraries with romances as a model of good male-female relationships, to help those women realize how horrible their own lives are with their abusers and to help them realize that they had been duped into believing that they are experiencing what love should be. It is the women in the shelters who are laboring under a lie, not the average romance reader.
So, why are some romance books great? I’d say it’s because many people of discriminating tastes agree that certain books are deeply emotional and beautiful experiences that express universally human truths in gripping ways as they address some of the basic cultural and biological struggles of the genders and champion the harmonious resolution of such a conflict into a balance of strengths rather than a compromise or a surrender.
Say that five times fast. *g*
What is a good book to you?
