holdouttrout

I was bored, so I wrote a treatise on romance novels. I know.

Let me start off by saying that I was pretty sure, at about age 15-18, that I would never read a romance novel again. I was CONVINCED that I was utterly righteously right about my loathing for the genre, to the point of berating my mother for her choice of reading material. (Poor Mom. She now harbors a complex about this, doesn't read them herself, and berates me instead. Ah, the mistakes of youth. I am starting to see what they were. Most of them involve my mother ending up right after all.)

Thus, it was nigh inexplicable to me when I went through my second phase of romance novel reading, which is where I am now. Contrived plots! Utterly impossible heroes and heroines! Flat characters who only exist as plot devices! And yet I was actually reading these things. (Sex and all!)

And then I read Georgette Heyer and it occurred to me that perhaps I was denouncing a whole genre based on only some of its offerings. Of course! I'd seen this kind of thing before, in people who dismissed all of science fiction based on one viewing of Farscape, which, as much as I love it, has MUPPETS and is completely incomprehensible to someone who isn't already steeped in sci-fi tradition.

Ahem. I was talking about romance novels. Right.

Anyway, I stopped feeling guilty about the genre. Why is the term "romance novel" so despised? After all, Jane Austen wrote romance novels. The entire plot hinges on two characters falling in love and ending up married. Ta da! Romance in a novel form.

I've read some good ones. I've read some awful ones. But I've read awful classics, and brilliant science fiction novels, and--you know, it doesn't matter what the label of the book is.

Here are some of the things I love about romance novels:

1) Predictability (in the midst of uncertainty)
Okay. I might know that Angelina and Harold will end up together by the last chapter, but they don't. A skilled author knows how to make the reader buy into the uncertainty, and knows how to stretch her characters to get them to react in just the right way to maintain the illusion that Angelina might run off with her fourth cousin, and Harold might die a terribly heroic death in France. HOWEVER, I don't ACTUALLY want Harold to die in France, and I know that Angelina marrying her fourth cousin would be a terribly bad decision because he's more interested in his plants than in her. I love the predictability of a happy ending.

2) The settings
Personally, I can't get enough of Regency. The costumes, the titles, the back-stabbing jealousy thinly veiled with politeness. I don't know a duke from an earl, most times, but I don't really care, either. There are certain cliches in that genre that ping me, although I get rather tired of innocent maidens and rakes, to be sure.

3) The cliches
They're comforting, and they're even more fun when subverted. I just read an excellent novel where the heroine was as conniving as the hero, and the conflict was between what she thought she wanted and what the hero wanted. She thought she wanted someone else, and set up an elaborate scheme to win him--while the hero did his best to muck up her plans. It was excellent not because I haven't seen it before, but because it was done well, and because the characters were allowed to keep their intelligence, even if they were acting silly. It's very hard to do that in novels, although quite easy to do it in real life. ;-)

So...am I insane for thinking about these books so much? Probably. Do I think everyone should love them? Well...I suppose they don't have to.

If you read romance novels, what are your favorite cliches, settings, types? Do you mostly read (romance novels) for escapism or for something else?