Title: Red, White and Royal Blue Author: Casey McQuiston Published: May 2019, St Martin’s Press
One of my motivations in doing my PhD was to answer the question: is a feminist chick lit novel necessarily an oxymoron? (In my 20s, I would have wanted to write a novel myself that positively answered that question. By my 30s, I had realised this was unlikely to happen, and I contented myself with critique.)
The novels I ended up studying didn’t answer the question with an unequivocal yes, but by then my question had shifted.
Red, White and Royal Blue’s answer to the question is a resounding yes. Not only is it possible to write enjoyable feminist chick lit, it is possible to write enjoyable feminist queer chick lit.
Alex Claremont-Diaz is the First Son. He and Prince Henry, the spare in the British royal hierarchy, are antagonists, until they’re forced to make nice, and then it turns out that the old trope “he’s mean to you because he likes you” is true.
The novel is very Gen Z in that it ticks all the diversity boxes. The president, a divorced single mom, and her chief of staff are women.
Alex is half Hispanic. His father is also a senator, and is supportive of his former wife’s campaign.
His best friends are his sister June, who wants to be a journalist if being the president’s daughter wasn’t a liability, and the vice-president’s daughter Nora, a math genius. He has been linked to Nora romantically, and the two are content to feed the rumours.
Henry is the rebellious second son, who doesn’t quite fit in, but yet is very British. He’s not ginger, but the family dynamics are very Windsor. His grandmother, the queen, is hell bent on preserving the family’s legacy, and his elder brother has bought into it. His mother is fragile and has retreated into her shell after their father’s death. He is close to his younger sister, but she has her problems.
Alex and Henry’s relationship seems to have been scripted in fan-fiction, and of course the novel references this. They are star-crossed lovers. While their countries are allies, this transatlantic relationship has geopolitical implications. Alex’s mother is up for re-election, and obviously, an openly gay prince is no-no for the royal family.
Once Alex and Henry admit their feelings for each other you wonder how this can all end.
It turns out that the larger romance was not individual but national. In my study of Anuja Chauhan’s novels, I argued that the larger fantasy in the novels is of a certain idea of the nation, one that embraces diversity. The romantic coupling and the journey – in space and time – towards it is symbolic of this.
Something similar happens in Red, White and Royal Blue. Throughout the novel, there is mention of Alex’s binder, a study of the state of Texas’ voting patterns. Texas is the Claremont-Diaz home state; it is also a state that has been staunchly Republican.
The United States has come a long way. But the turning of Texas from red to blue – the colours of the title take on many shades of meaning here – would signal a true turning of the tide. Would Texas elect a divorced, single mother as president if her son was gay? That, my dears, is really the question at the heart of the novel’s culmination.
Title: Don’t You Want Me? Author: India Knight Published: Penguin, November 2011
Years ago, I read Knight’s Life on a Plate and enjoyed it thoroughly as a married woman’s chick lit. More recently, I read Darling, Knight’s take on Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and enjoyed that too. So I had high hopes of Don’t You Want Me? despite the cringey title.
Stella is a divorced, single mother living in London. She shares a flat with a randy ginger named Frank, who Stella has firmly friendzoned.
It had shades of Mad About the Boy, the third book in the Bridget Jones’s Diary series.
SMH was my reaction to that book and to this one. Can women who have been married and given birth to a child be this silly? After 35, would you, for example, be so desperate for sex that you would sleep with a man you found pathetic?
Also, this idea that not socialising much when one has a young child is somehow abnormal. Stella didn’t seem displeased with her life until Frank points out that she never goes anywhere, and then there’s this whole project to date. Why isn’t it enough to be a single mum with a job?
Then, the novel took the chick lit turn of chronicling a series of bad dates before ending up with The One, who it was obvious right from the get go that she was going to end up with. There is a whole extended conversation in a bar in which she insists Frank explain what makes a woman a “dirty ride”, which I found extremely disingenuous and childish. Like the Bechdel test, there should be one about men and women who cannot have a conversation which is not about sex.
At one point, Frank tells Stella, “You’re like a pretty bloke” and I’m like, ah it’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with a French twist. Reading this novel soon after Darling, it struck me how for Knight French= good foreign (it turns out Knight is a French speaker who lived in Brussels for a chunk of her life, so this makes sense). Stella is a half-French and this gives her an outsider-insider perspective, but also makes her by definition “not like other girls”.
Part of Stella’s venturing into the wider world is going to a playgroup, where she quickly discovers she can’t stand most of the women and babies there. Why would you go back then? Because Honey, her daughter (and she actually ridicules other children’s names) likes it, she offers lamely at some point, though there were never signs of Honey being very into it. Admittedly, the women and children sound dreadful, but there’s also a fair bit of fat-shaming.
What comes out of the playgroup is a serious friendship, so I was quite shocked with the immaturity with which Stella treated Louisa. Again, it’s like women don’t evolve at all with age.
The idea of the leading man, though, has evolved. He now has to completely hot with an enviable career, but also handy in the kitchen and with (your) children.
Regardless of all this, the chemistry between the two main characters is delicious, and they are overall likeable, so I kept going.
This is not chick lit. I repeat: this is not chick lit.
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan dislikes the term, one that after a fair bit of thought I decided to use in my PhD thesis, one that covers her early work.
But by my own definition of chick lit – (often lighthearted) novels about young women on quest for love and career success – this is not chick lit.
It is on this blog because it’s chick lit adjacent, because this blog has become chick lit adjacent, because I have read almost no actual chick lit since my PhD but I read a lot that is adjacent.
This novel, if anything, is chick lit’s unhappily ever after.
Helen Fielding wrote a three-quel to Bridget Jones’ Diary in which (spoiler alert) Mark Darcy is no more (gasp!), and Bridget is a single mum. I enjoyed but did not love that novel like I loved Bridget Jones Diary and its sequel. I remember thinking though how insecure Bridget still seemed. I thought 30–somethings were supposed to be scatty but one then grows up?
I certainly have. I wish I could have the whimsy of Bridget.
But I keep encountering female characters in their 40s who are as insecure as everyone else about stuff like how they look – even smart characters like Sally in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy – and I’m like huh.
Anyway this is all to say that Mallika in Soft Animal is grown up. Her life and her marriage has evolved, in a relatable way (not in the addition of two children without any of the heaviness BJD way, even if your partner, the love of your life, has died ffs).
There could be a chick lit version of Mallika’s life before she got married -Madhavan Reddy could write an excellent prequel, I’d imagine, but maybe she couldn’t because she too has grown up. I find myself unable to conjure up the levity of my early blogs, I am so far removed from that person as to be a different species.
And so, thankfully, is Mallika.
The novel has a memorable opening line: “I realized yesterday that I don’t like my husband anymore.” The ensuing narrative could be anything. A detective story, for example, that I thought Madhavan was supposed to be writing – but it turns out to be quintessential MMR, a stream on consciousness lens into a deteriorating if not dead marriage.
I once made the case that MMR’s work is in the ecriture feminine tradition and here I think she has perfected the style that began in You Are Here. The chapters are short, and not about anything in particular. Things happen but very gently.
If one got away from the chick lit comparison, this could be described as the great Indian (upper middle class, or – OK fine – elite) pandemic novel. I have to say that my heart sank when I realised it was set in the pandemic.
The extent to which I dislike novels set in the pandemic tells me how much it affected me even when my official position is that it wasn’t that bad for me all things considered. Mallika never really complains about the pandemic, and yet, surely it took a mental toll. (And her description of the middle-class colony’s response to the pandemic is spot on).
In several ways, the novel cut very close to the bone. I had a lot in common with Mallika, apart from her not having children but only an existential dilemma about them, that becomes a turning point.
There is nothing wrong with Mallika’ husband Mukund on paper. She is married to the kind of man a millennial urban Indian woman would want to be married to – goodlooking, rich, not overtly violent. His main flaw seems to be that he doesn’t help around the house, and, well, Mallika isn’t working so…
And yet. And yet. The pandemic provides a sympathetic backdrop for Mallika’s own feeling of being trapped. We meet her at the point at which she is ready to break free.
Mallika has always been fairly nice – she accepted her mother-in-law swooping in and decorating her house, and her husband casting this as a colossal favour – but the voice in her head isn’t, and now that voice is matching her actions. She acquires a sidekick – her mother’s dog – and a friend, an elderly neighbour who she visits even though their conversations are awkward, and the visits take a strange turn, and he never lives up to the promise of wise, elderly counsellor.
And yet, she has become completely detached – a situation probably exacerbated, but not entirely blameable on, the pandemic.
There is something Betty Friedanesque about Mallika’s predicament – and while Friedan’s work is out of fashion (too Western, too elite) – it described a moment and a feeling that could very much apply to India’s highly educated young urban married women today.
The end, when it comes, comes with a whimper, not a bang. Mallika decides to do what she wants, for no reason other than she wants to.
Why? … Because I don’t like honey in my tea, because I like the colour blue, because I am left-handed, because I prefer to sleep on my stomach.
Look, I’ve not read a Sittenfeld novel I haven’t loved. She’s had two fictionalised accounts of the lives of first ladies (Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton), a contemporary Pride and Prejudice retelling, and a boarding school novel. All were excellent. I read and loved Sisterland randomly, and it was only later, when she had established herself in my mind as a go-to novelist, that it was by her. The weakest of the lot, in my opinion, was The Man of My Dreams – I barely remember what it was about.
Now this one. For some reason, although I eagerly await every new Sittenfeld, I was somehow reluctant to get started on. I think it was because I didn’t know how to place it. The blurb sounded like, well, a romantic comedy, but I couldn’t imagine how Sittenfeld could write something so, well, straight.
Well, I needn’t have worried. Sittenfeld carries it off with her attention to detail and her ability to channel voice. Sally is a whip-smart writer for a show that sounds like Saturday Night Live. We get a very detailed ringside view of what goes into making such a show.
But the premise of the novel is that Sally has a theory: mediocre looking men can get much better looking women, but the reverse isn’t true. This plays out quite close to home, as Sally’s office-mate Danny, he of the pungent burps, is dating a famous actress.
Noah Brewster is pop star, guest hosting the show, and Sally proposes a sketch based on her theory. Noah questions the idea, but also, ends up being attracted to Sally, thereby proving it untrue in practice.
So far so good, as the chemistry builds between Sally and Noah. Sally has been unlucky in love at least twice, and has now barricading herself against romance, especially romance as unlikely as between her and Noah. This is fine too.
Then, the novel takes a pandemic turn. The dread I feel when I read a pandemic novel is my cue to belatedly acknowledge how much the pandemic got to me even as my position has been that it wasn’t that bad, because we were safe.
So, yeah, I would love it if writers just skipped over the bizarreness of the past three years, but, nope, of course they won’t. Instead we get, in Sittenfeld’s case, an entire long distance section conducted over email. This too was actually fine.
It’s the latter section of the novel that didn’t do it for me. By then, Sally had reacted with uncharacteristic insecurity one to many times – and it’s never entirely clear to me why she’s so insecure, for such a smart person (though aren’t we all) – while Noah remains unbelievably zen, even though he calls her out, and she alludes to the fact that he’s clearly had therapy.
In romantic comedy (the genre), there’s tension or an obstacle that the protagonist, or both characters, have to overcome ideally by growing as people before they can get together. What Romantic Comedy lacked for me was a big enough obstacle. There seemed to be nothing keeping Sally and Noah apart, except for Sally, and somehow Sally’s constant sabotaging didn’t seem convincing for someone so smart and self aware, someone who writes comedy for a living for heaven’s sake. Admittedly, we all have our blind spots, and Sally’s inability to believe she could be genuinely attractive to a hottie is hers, but after the first “does he really love me”, it felt overdone.
The New York Times’ review said something about how the lesson here is that sometimes what’s getting in the way of us finding love is ourselves, and yeah maybe that was the point the novel was trying to make, but I wasn’t buying it of this character at least.
The Guardian has a more esoteric take on the novel being a remix of 1930s Hollywood, and if that is so, then it went way over my head. Sittenfeld herself says that it might be seen as a reverse of something like Notting Hill (the film, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant), and yeah, I do see the fun of that. Also, Sittenfeld is a straight-up SNL fangirl, and thus the setting, and the excellence of the first section set in the making of the show.
In some sense, I think the novel suffers from trying to be both a fly-on-the-wall of the making of television comedy, and a take on romantic comedy as a genre. It succeeds somewhat in merging these two propositions at the start, but then loses steam as it ventures deeper into romantic comedy per se.
Also, there is a really charming interaction between Sally and her beagle-obsessed stepfather, so charming that I was incensed when Sally failed to reply to one of his missives because she was so caught up in her own (frankly dubious) drama. There could have been more of this.
Look, the novel is fine as a romantic comedy. It’s well written. It falters in not having enough dramatic tension at the end. But the writing saves it somewhat.
But if it was trying to say something new about romantic comedy, the genre, to offer a retake, a critique, to write “to write non-condescending, ragingly feminist screenplays for romantic comedies”, as Sally says she wants to do, then I feel that it doesn’t quite get there.
This comedy of manners by Barbara Pym was published in 1952. Its protagonist, Mildred Lathbury, is a single woman in her 30s, living alone, which is why she has landed on this blog. Pym has a great eye for personal foibles, and the novel is extremely funny. It also surprised me how contemporary it was.
The novel opens with movers bringing furniture in the downstairs flat. It turns out to be a couple, the Napiers, who embroil her, despite herself, in their rather disordered lives.
I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her.
Throughout, we encounter the term “excellent women”. Who exactly are these excellent women? From Mildred and her circle of acquaintance in a London parish, they are unmarried, they “expected very little – nothing really”, who “could so very easily be replaced”, who “would never do anything wrong or foolish”, who are “balanced and sensible”.
“You could consider marrying an excellent woman?” I asked in amazement. “But they are not for marrying.
“You’re not suggesting that they are for other things?” he said.
That had certainly not occurred to me and I was annoyed to find myself embarassed.
“They are for being unmarried,” I said, “and by that I mean a positive rather than a negative state.”
“Poor things, aren’t they allowed to have normal feelings, then?”
“Oh yes, but nothing can be done about them.
While Mildred is rather young, and inclined to try and put a positive spin on things, another more experienced type of excellent woman who I enjoyed thoroughly was the no-nonsense Sister Blatt. Here’s her assessment of the curate Father Greatorex who Mildred describes politely as “saintly”:
Saintly!… I don’t know what’s given you that idea. Just because a man takes Orders in middle age and goes about looking like an old tramp! He was no good in business so he went into the church – that’s not what we want.
Sister Blatt, Excellent Women
Interestingly, there is a subset among these women – widows.
I had an inexplicable distrust of widows, who seem to be of two distinct kinds, one of which may be dangerous. I felt that Mrs Gray sounded very definitely of the safer kind.
Mildred
This Mrs Gray is beautiful, and the opposite of an excellent woman because she is adept at getting people to do things for her.
I did not then know to the extent I do now that practically anything may be the business of an unattached woman with no troubles of her own, who takes a kindly interest in those of her friends.
Mildred
Also, not excellent is Helena Napier, the married downstairs neighbour who keeps a slovenly house and is angling for an affair.
It was not the excellent women who got married but people like Allegra Gray, who was no good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up.
When in crisis, of course both Helena and Allegra turn to a single woman friend, and Mildred at one point wonders if these “sensible” women ever get tired of being called on “at any hour of day or night to listen “to sit up half the night, listening and condoling”.
Like the single women of today’s chick lit Mildred even has a gay friend, her best friend Dora’s brother William, who she realised “was not the kind of man to marry” and who she enjoyed having lunch with once a year. William is delightfully fussy, a feeder of pigeons and possessive:
But my dear Mildred, you mustn’t marry … Life is disturbing enough as it is without these alarming suggestions. I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible, such an excellent woman. I do hope you’re not thinking of getting married?
He describes them as “the observers of life’. But it is Mildred who keenly observes the absurdity of the office life, with its “grey men” who rushing off with their mugs to catch the tea trolley.
And then, there’s romance, of course, with a rather stand-offish Mr Darcyish man, whose charmless attempts at courtship Mildred misreads entirely. There is a delightful scene in which he invites her over to help him cook a piece of meat for him, and although Mildred all along comes across as one of those passive characters who is swept along by the demands of her friends, at this stage, she has had enough and she refuses. And while she is cast briefly in the role of spurned lover-from-afar, she refuses to do the expected thing and marry the rejector as a woman in her position might be expected to.
I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.
By the end of the novel, Mildred’s patience with the excellent way of life has been exhausted. She is tired of being the support of men and particularly of various married people – this aspect of the novel is particularly sharp – and being seen as the kind of woman who is always making cups of tea.
… it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink… though I had to admit that nobody had compelled me to wash these dishes or to tidy this kitchen. It was the fussy spinster in me, the Martha, who could not comfortably sit and make conversation when she knew that yesterday’s unwashed dishes were still in the sink.
She even dares to suggest at a jumble sale – where yet again women are doing all the work – that tea might not be needed and is met with frank astonishment.
“Do we need tea?” she echoed. “But Miss Lathbury …” She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.
The end of the novel is ambiguous. There is a gesture again to the kind of tedious unacknowledged work “excellent women” are often roped into – in this case wives typing up and indexing the scholarly work of their husbands, for which they get little credit – and Mildred is fully aware that this tedium will only be exchanged by another, and yet it seems she might chose the fate of these women, although she leaves the door open to another possibility involving another man. Perhaps in the 1950s, Pym could not go so far as to have her protagonist reject men altogether.
Have you read the novel? What do you think? What other Pym novels would you recommend?
Title: Ghosts Author: Dolly Alderton Published: October 2020, Fig Tree
I’ve been meaning to read this novel for ages, but it sounded like chick lit. What? Isn’t this a blog allegedly dedicated to chick lit, you say?
Indeed it is. But after three years of intensively reading and analysing chick lit for my PhD, I found I couldn’t take any more of it. Although I focused on Indian chick lit, it was the Western version that I went completely off.
And Alderton’s novel is almost in the classic Western chick lit mode, a form that traces its origins to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Nina, the protagonist, is single and, if I may use a dreadful cliche, ready to mingle. She has a loving, if adled, father, and a mother who seems hell bent on reinventing herself. She is surrounded by smug marrieds, but bravely ventures into the world of dating guided by a more experienced single friend. Sound familiar?
What makes Ghosts more than bearable, though, is that it is an update. Possibly the update we all (didn’t know we) have been waiting for. In the age of Tinder and swiping left, when meeting Mr Right seems to be at every woman’s fingertips even though the said Mr has been mysteriously more elusive, Bridget Jones’s Diary seems more like a fairy tale than ever. Moreover, while Bridget’s bumbling might still strike a chord with women plagued by imposter syndrome, increasingly young women prefer to think of themselves as competent.
Nina George Dean wakes up on her thirty-second birthday well pleased with her life and confident in her own competence:
I can confidently declare at thirty-two that there are three things I can do flawlessly: arrive anywhere I need to be on time with five minutes to spare; ask people specific questions in social situations when I can’t be bothered to engage in conversation and I know they’ll do all the talking … and poach an egg to perfection.
She has a successful career as the writer of foodie memoirs, has bought her own flat and is “indifferent” to her body:
I know it’s much more compelling to have a story of transformation. But I think having twenty years to get used to how you look is no bad thing. I think about the way I look much less than my friends who are still striving to be beautiful, waiting for the final stage of their transition… I have never and will never be a great beauty. And it’s freed up a lot of energy to be other things.
She celebrates her birthday in a pub, surrounded by married friends, their well-meaning husbands, her ex-boyfriend Joe and his new girlfriend Lucy, and her Only Single Friend Lola.
On that fateful August evening, when “it felt like every random component of my life had been designed long ago to fit together at that very moment”, she downloads a dating app, and thus begins “the strangest year”of her life.
Despite being warned of the perils of 21st century dating by Lola, Nina’s initial thought is that it’s all terribly convenient:
Looking for love didn’t have to be factored in to my schedule in the way I’d dreaded – I could do it while watching TV.
Nina’s foray into this world and her observations on it are aphoristic. She is unwilling to accept the “apathetic, adolescent, can’t-be-arsed, useless-intern-says-he-doesn’t-know-how-to-use-the-printer attitude” displayed by men who are incapable of suggesting a place for a date. She is dismissive of the insubstantial, fleeting and stilted conversations, the “Pretend Boyfriend Man” who “used his profile to push an agenda of a dreamy, committed reliability”, those that “feigned indifference to being on Linx … as if downloading a dating app, filling in a profile with copious personal information and uploading photos of yourself was as easy to do by accident as taking a wrong turn on a motorway”, and the surprising number of graphic designers. She has more respect for “the men who were unabashedly forthcoming about the fact that they wanted a night of sex and nothing more”. She marvels at the rules of dating that insist that people tolerate behaviour they would never put up with in a friend.
I hadn’t realised quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstrably ‘low key’ about everything.
Fortunately, she strikes dating gold quite early on in the form of Max, a leonine accountant, with “a face that looked like a Viking warrior”, who distinguished himself by picking a place to meet, even though he was ten minutes late (“Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument”).
Nina grew up in suburbia, and makes regular visits to the parental home there. Her father, an aging academic, has fallen into what seems to be dementia; her much-younger mother, immersed in a cycle of yoga and feminist book club literary salon, has decided she wants to be called Mandy.
One of the critiques of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and chick lit in general, is its invoking of and subsequent repudiation of feminism (a phenomenon sometimes referred to as postfeminism). In Ghosts too feminism is mentioned now and then. It is first invoked in Nina’s mother’s reinvention of herself – when we are first introduced to her she’s listening to an audiobook by Andrea Dworkin (“quite a big girl, but not much of a sense of humour”) and she waltzes off to yoga with friends leaving her ailing husband and daughter to figure out lunch themselves, though in the end, it seems that she was grieving the loss of her husband (present in body, but not spirit).
Then there’s Nina’s single friend Lola, who coaches her through the dating minefield, denying that there is anything particularly gendered about the experience:
For God’s sake, Nina. This isn’t about being a woman. Most people are self-obsessed, gender regardless. Most people pretend they care about single-use plastics more than they care about their own split ends, but they don’t. I’m just not scared to be honest about it. And THAT’S feminism.
Is it though? Elspeth Probyn has critiqued what she calls “choice feminism” wherein the very act of making a choice is deemed feminist, regardless of the repercussions of that choice on women and the world more broadly.
Nina, for her part, is keenly aware of the patriarchal underpinnings of the dance of dating:
He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it. I wondered how much of his behaviour had been dictated by a pressure to perform his gender in such a demonstrative way. But then again, what was I doing? Why was I wearing a pair of four-inch heels that gave me blisters? Why was I laughing knowingly twice as much as I normally do and making half the amount of jokes?
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, too, we get these references to feminism, most notably in the rants of Bridget’s friend Sharon, but they are largely waved away as drunken performativity. The negation of feminism does not happen in this way here. Even though Nina does not put up much of a struggle against these trappings of the dating game, she is aware of her complicity in some of them:
I was reminded of how annoyingly delicious these patronising traditions of heteronormativity could be. Of course, the rational part of my brain wanted to tell him that he was no more capable of receiving the oncoming blow of a crashing car than I was, and his act of supposed chivalry made no sense. But I liked him standing on the outside of the pavement. I liked feeling like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating?
Nina describes the early experience of being with Max as “a time of promise and pleasure. I was a teenager again, but with self-esteem and a salary and no curfew”. Yet, there are already intimations of, if not doom, something awry:
Only now do I realise that the first night I spent with Max, I was looking for evidence of past lovers. I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context of who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him.
These, then, it seems are the “ghosts” of the title. But quickly it becomes clear that the titular ghosts are not these shadowy female presences, but the men themselves who are connoisseurs in the art of ghosting “when a person just stops speaking to you instead of having a break-up conversation.”
Lola, who has a “PhD in dating” ties the ubiquity of ghosting to video game culture:
Men of our generation often disappear once they’ve got a woman to say ‘I love you’ back to them, because it’s almost like they’ve completed a game. Because they’re the first boys who grew up glued to their PlayStations and Game Boys, they weren’t conditioned to develop any sense of honour and duty in adolescence the way our fathers were. PlayStations replaced parenting. They were taught to look for fun, complete the fun, then get to the next level, switch players or try a new game. They need maximum stimulation all the time.
I’m not sure this is universally true. I read Ghosts around the time a friend of mine had a very similar experience in India. I don’t think Indian men of our age grew up with PlayStations. But this kind of callousness seems to be endemic to dating today, perhaps exacerbated by the depersonalised nature of dating apps.
Max could be read as a kind of Daniel Cleaver (of Bridget Jones’s Diary) figure, who engages in what Bridget’s friend Sharon dubs “emotional fuckwittage”. However, while Daniel’s treatment of Bridget was always leavened with self-deprecation on her part, Alderton does not spare us the cruelty of “ghosting”.
But the “ghosts” of the title are also the ghosts of our parents that haunt romantic desire. As Nina grapples with the decline of her own father – and in that sense the loss of home, a loss that her father is also struggling with – she realises the truth of the theory that romantic love is merely the search for a replacement for unconditional parental love. Citing Freud’s theory that “when two people have sex, there are at least six people in the room. The couple and both of their parents”, Max asks: Come on then, what ghosts are you bringing to the orgy?”
There is also a realisation, though, that this loss may never be compensated for romantically, that things may not go according to plan. At different points in the novel, both Lola and Nina acknowledge that they had grown up with the idea that they could have what they wanted if they put in a fair bit of effort.
More interesting than Nina’s romantic predicament, however, is her relationship with her married-with-child best friend Katherine. From the outset, it’s clear the relationship is flagging, signposted by the desire to meet for a movie, “the platonic version of no longer wanting to have sex with your long-term boyfriend. it is the lingering, looming sense that something is no longer working, pervaded by a reluctance to fix it.”
Nina has already noted how people in their thirties “saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgment on their lives”, an affliction more pronounced with parents, and epitomised in Katherine for whom “neutral ground seemed to have become an intimidating place … she used every environment as a way of justifying and defending her life to me”.
She is fond of the new parents among her friends, and their children, even as she recognises their “feral look in their eyes” on their first night out away from the kids or the “photos that charted every step of their relationship” in their homes, a “breadcrumb trail of a couple’s history” that perhaps functioned as “a way of tracing back who they were before they became co-wipers of face and arse”.
Although she trudges to Katherine’s home yet again, she is tiring of her friend’s penchant to see the life of a single person as a blank canvas of endless time and to act as The Gatekeeper of All Things Matrimonial, her “tireless performance of perfect motherhood”, and her competitiveness. Increasingly, her meetings with Katherine have taken on the quality of a chore: “I felt the same sense of relieved satisfaction that I get when I clean my fridge or finish my tax returns.”
I felt that in the second half of the book, the treatment of smug marrieds, and those on the cusp of joining their ilk, was a bit heavy handed. Do married people have such aggressive conversations with singletons as was had at the hen weekend and Lucy and Joe’s wedding?
But Katherine and Nina’s falling out rang true. As a married woman with children, I could sympathise with Katherine’s frustration (“I don’t have the headspace for it! I can’t be that for you any more, that’s what Lola is good for. You’ll understand when you have kids”), but I can also see how parenthood cannot be a pass to get out of any and all responsibility to one’s friends.
Also, interesting is Nina’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend Joe, with whom she remains close friends, despite the slight resentment on the part of his new girlfriend. Her attending his wedding as an usher (and the contrasting views of the hen night versus the bachelor’s) is an insight into how such a relationship might play out.
The continuation of this friendship, which endures while making space for Joe’s wife, and the eventually reconciliation with Katherine, are the high points of the second half rather than romantic closure.
I love you, Nina’ she slurred, in between retches. ‘I know you do.’ ‘I really love you.’
This one doesn’t even try to pretend that it is not a Beauty and the Beast rewrite. You see the title, you get what you paid for (or laid down your library card for).
Charles d’Harcourt has one bad eye, a limp, and is much older than Louise Vandermeer. He is wealthy, and her parents have decided he is the right man to settle her down (Louise has a penchant for bolting, seeking adventure). He decides to marry her on the basis of a painting (and the promise of some perfume ingredient); she agrees on the basis of nothing actually, except a vague sense that she has to get married sometime.
Yet, there is something interesting about the two of them.
Charles is vain, despite his outward flaws. He has overcome them by adopting a rakish air and fine – if overwrought – tailoring.
Louise has begun to question who she is beyond her good looks.
Charles is travelling across the Atlantic incognito on the same ship as Louise and her family, and overhears her diminishing him to a much younger man. He decides to teach her a lesson by seducing her.
All, okay, except that he dons the garb of a middle eastern prince. The ships lights go out and he is able to dispense with the robes and make love to her in the dark. Louise is intrigued, and calls him “her pasha”.
He charms her, not only because she is trying to keep the reality of her impending marriage to someone she has been told is an old, ugly man at bay, but because he really listens to her. He tells her to bracket out looks (her own and her fiance’s) and think about who she is and who she wants to be.
Then, the lights come back on, the ship docks, and Louise meets the real Charles. Only she is in love with his exotic avatar, and can’t seem to let go. Charles can’t seem to tell her that it was him all along.
There is an interesting feminist turn when Louise categorically refuses to sleep with Charles. He is furious, but she is nonrepentent. He continues to be kind and indulgent with her – when he is not overturning tables in fury and insisting on the odd kiss – and of course, she eventually falls in love with him, but it’s not absolutely clear why.
Also, if the point was that Louise needs to know herself, it’s not clear that at the end of the novel she does. She is good at languages and studies math for fun, but when Charles suggests she take up accounting, he declines and she doesn’t seem fully committed to the chemistry lessons she does take up.
Then she gets pregnant and the question of what she wants to do with her life is resolved. It turns out the central question of the novel was not who Louise but what she would do when she discovers Charles and her on board seducer are one and the same person.
This discovery coming towards the end of the novel and this being a romantic tale, it’s pretty clear that all will be well, and it is, though the final scene is rather charming.
Sarah Maclean’s The Rules of Scoundrels series centres on four men of aristocratic birth who are associated with one of London’s most notorious gaming hells.
In the first book in the series, A Rogue by Any Other Name, the Marquess of Bourne claims as his wife his childhood friend, the serious, proper, Lady Penelope Marbury. After a broken engagement, Penelope is resigned to the fate of being an old maid, when her father dangles a sizeable dowry, including Bourne’s former inheritance, at London’s bachelors. Bourne’s abiding goal is to regain his estates, lost during a gambling streak, and marrying Penelope is just a step in this direction.
Bourne is definitely a worthy smouldering hero (in the usual Beast mode; are all historical romances Beauty and the Beast retellings), and there is genuine chemistry between him and Penelope, but the book suffered from “she doth protest too much”. From the start, when Penelope is explanining why she refuses to settle for just any man, to Bourne’s refusal to allow himself any affection for her, even though she is now his wife, there was too much repetition.
Penelope’s loud and grasping mother had something of Mrs Bennett of Pride and Prejudice about her, with her desire to make good marriages of her five daughters.
But Bourne is no controlled and detached Mr Darcy. His passion for Penelope is clear, but like her mythical namesake, she is left alone at home (though what she does there is unclear. Penelope had said she didn’t want the life of a typical matron, doing needlepoint, but apart from chasing Bourne down at his gaming hell, it’s not spelled out how her life is any different).
Rather, the underlying myth of this tale seems to be Persephone and Hades. Bourne does not want to drag Penelope into his darkness, but she is fascinated by it. Even as he is pulled into the light by her.
In One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, the second book in the series, Penelope’s sister Philippa, a scholarly young woman, decides she must understand sex before she weds the rather vacuous Lord Castleton, and she enlists Bourne’s partner Cross to teach her. Apparently, her sisters, even Penelope, are of no use.
This premise, and the two characters involved, have all the makings of a good read, but somehow this one did not work for me. Like the previous book, there was too much restatement of the same points:
How much Pippa wants to be ruined, and how this scares Cross How stupid her intended Lord Castleton is (I felt sorry him honestly) How Pippa does not believe in love How proud Lady Needham is to have all her five daughters married How smitted Bourne is with Penelope How everyone thinks Pippa is odd How Cross wants her but not have her
Ugh. We get it, honestly.
I speed read this book, and did not finish the series.
If you’ve read this series, did you enjoy it? Are the next two in the series worth reading?
So, my recent reading list has been people with Scottish dudes of a bygone era. First there was Jennifer Ashley’s Mackenzie series. And then I gave Julie Garwood’s Highland series a try.
Big bad Scot blokes take unwilling English brides until they can’t fight the feeling any longer, and then they live happily ever after.
What’s not to like? I’m not complaining.
But it did strike me, this fascination with Scottish dudes as The Other. You see, all these books are basically Beauty and the Beast retellings. In other words, as Tania Modelski points out, they are the fantasy that the price of being taken care of is not eternal vigilance.
Since we’re not in the realm of fairytale or fable, though, the “beast” has to be human – and still strange. How to defamiliarise the man, while keeping him (nominally) human? Apparently, for English historical romance writers (and their North American counterparts), make him Scot. Again, fine with me, but I do wonder what Scottish people think about their menfolk being cast in the role of – let’s face it – barbarians.
In The Bride, mighty Scottish Laird Alec Kincaid and his friend Daniel are ordered by the monarchs of both England and Scotland to take an English bride from among the daughters of Baron Jamison. Their attitude is philosophical:
It mattered not if their brides had other inclinations. The women were simply property, after all, and neither Daniel nor Alec considered the wants of a bride significant in the least. They would do as they were told, and that was that.
On a hint from Jamison’s stable master, who happens to be Scot, Alec picks Jamie, the baron’s youngest and most beautiful daughter, the girl he wanted to keep at home because she took care of him. Jamie, like the fairytale Beauty is the devoted daughter, but it’s time to leave her father and come into her sexuality. (Daniel picks Mary, Jamie’s older sister.)
Jamie is outraged by Alec, but perversely attracted to him:
She felt her cheeks grow warm and knew she’d started blushing. There was such possessiveness in her stare, a look of ownership she couldn’t understand. It suddenly dawned on her that Lord Alec wasn’t looking at her the way a true lord would look at a gentle lady of breeding. No, it was an earthy lustful look he was giving her.
Alec is attracted to Jamie’s rebelliousness as well as her beauty, and is convinced he can tame her. He keeps telling her obey orders and other cave-man-style utterances while being confused by how attracted he is to her. She, of course, refuses to obey, while being somewhat afraid of him (although he promises never to lost his temper with her, or at least to beat her) and simultaneously convinced that she can take him in hand.
In addition to being Scot, and in possession of all sorts of patriarchal ideas, Alec has also been accused of murdering his first wife, which adds to his bestial aura. Who actually killed Helena Kincaid is a mystery that must be solved.
It is made very clear that while Jamie is afraid of Alec – he is so big, and she has watched him demolish a group of bandits singehandedly – she knows right away that he could not murder his wife. Paradoxically, she begins to feel safe with him, even when she is skittish around him. This is the wife’s lesson – to see past the bluster.
The husband’s is to rid himself of the ridiculous notion that he can resist loving his wife. Even as he keep muttering that she must obey, must not have her own opinions, must not try to order his life, and that he must not let her distract him from the important business of being a man, he has fallen in love with her.
This is the crux of the fantasy, of bringing the man to his knees, to his acknowledgement of his dependence.
This textbook on marital relations and how to solve them is more clearly spelled out The Wedding, the sequel to The Bride. Lady Brenna Haynesworth has been sent by her father to marry the Scottish Laird MacNare. En route, she is waylaid by Connor MacAlister, who has a grudge against MacNare, and forced to marry him. To make this seem less like a simple abduction, there is a prologue in which we are told that as a child Brenna had once met Connor and asked him to marry her three times.
As a grown up, Brenna sees MacAlister as “primitive and frightening, yet still just a man.” She also refers to him as “barbarian” and “outcast” even as she admits he is handsome. In many ways, Connor resembles Dane in Lord of Scoundrels. In both, it is childhood trauma that made the man put up barriers that only the right woman can break down.
Connor does have primitive ideas about wives, but from the start he yields to her:
His reaction to Brenna was bewildering. She made him feel like smiling, even when she was frowning at him. In truth, she was such a refreshing change from all the others, he couldn’t even begin to imagine her cowering before him, and though her bizarre behaviour pleased him, he knew it would be a mistake to let her think she could always get away with such defiance.
Connor believes he can get by on ordering Brenna to obey him and not to have opinions, but realises he is quite at sea as to how to deal with an actual woman:
“I have decided to comfort you.” “You have?” She looked thrilled. “Yes, I have. However, you’re going to have to explain this duty to me first so I’ll know how to proceed. You may begin.” “This isn’t the time for jests.” “I’m not jesting.”
Their wedding night is a (ultimately) pleasurable shock to Brenna, but it Connor who comes away dazed. He realises that his desire for his wife means he is in danger of losing control, and struggles to regain it. His turning away from her is part of this desire to regain control, but she misunderstands that his coldness means she has disappointed him.
He was ignorant of women’s feelings, she reminded herself, so she wouldn’t get angry.
I cannot guess what you want. You have to tell me, Brenna.
Lesson one: When the husband acts hurtful, realise it’s because to him women are as unknowable as the sea. It is the wife’s duty to communicate her needs.
He was just about to take a much firmer stand when she waylaid him by touching the side of his face. He felt as though he were being stroked by the wings of an angel.
Lesson two: Don’t underestimate the power of feminine wiles.
He had to admit he continued to be impressed by her boldness in standing up to him.
Lesson three: Whatever you do, don’t roll over and be a wimp, because that just boring. Fiestiness for the win.
She finally understood that what she was doing was both holy and right, made so by the church and God himself the minute Father Sinclair had united them as husband and wife, and although she’d been telling herself she would make the best of her circumstances, she admitted now that she hadn’t really accepted the marriage. It was time for her to stop fearing her future and let go of her desperate hold on her past, and as soon as she made the decision to do just that, the most wondrous thing happened to her. She willingly gave herself to him.
Lesson four: Let go of the past.
Finally, when Connor pushes her away one time to many, Brenna confronts him directly:
You’re deliberately trying to provoke me, aren’t you? Oh, I know the truth now. You’ve figured out that I’m falling in love with you and you’re trying to make me stop by hurting me this way. Well, it won’t work. One way or another, I’m going to make you care about me.
Connor relents, and if he can’t apologise, he makes amends by kissing her thoroughly.
After this, Brenna confronts that second big obstacle in the marriage – the mother-in-law. This one is actually a step-mother-in-law and although Brenna is determined to please her, it turns out she will not be pleased. She also comes with a lascivious son.
Brenna’s final mistake is to assume that Connor will choose this woman over her.
Lesson five: He won’t.
The big lesson Connor must learn is put to him by Alec Kincaid, and fittingly for two warriors, it is couched in terms of battle.
You’ve fought a good battle, but the time has come for you to stop struggling. It’s becoming painful to watch.” “Alec? What the hell are you talking about? His brother laughed. “You know good and well what I’m talking about. You’re trying not to love your wife aren’t you? I understand why, of course. You’re afraid.
Connor resists this, but Alec knows better: “Ah the foolishness of men who embraced the notion that loving would weaken them. But finally, he must not only admit his love to himself, but to his wife before they can, well, live happily ever after.
All this apart – or more accurately because of all this – I thoroughly enjoyed both books.
Have you read them, or anything else by this author? Which would be recommend?
This series by Jennifer Ashley is basically four variations on the Beauty and the Beast theme, or I’m seeing B&B everywhere.
The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie
The novel grabs you from the first line: “I find that a Ming bowl is like a woman’s breast.”
Ian Mackenzie, the “mad” Mackenzie, of the title, a lover of said Ming bowls, doesn’t agree. He is determined to rescue the bowl in question from Stuart Mather, and when he sees Mather’s fiance, he is determined to have her too.
Ian is singleminded in his pursuit of Beth Ackerley, a widow recently affianced to Mather. Ian has what would today be diagnosed as Asperger’s syndrome, but in his day was simply dubbed madness. For this alleged madness, he was consigned to an asylum by his father, until his brother reached the age of maturity and got him out. Beth sees past this, and is instead attracted to Ian.
But apart from his madness, Ian is being investigated for murder by an obsessed Scotland Yard detective. Not only is Beth convinced that Ian is innocent, she is also convinced that Ian’s brother, the now formidable duke, Hart Mackenzie, and she sets out to prove this (and obviously does).
Beth’s faith is touching if unrealistic, but the mystery does keep one interested, in addition to the chemistry between Ian and Beth, and of course the fabulous sex.
Lady Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage
The idea of an estranged couple – passion restrained – works but it dragged on a bit too far after they were doing everything but having proper sex. Sort of like teenagers who took an abstinence vow. Like in the previous novel, there’s the mystery of who is impersonating Mac, which keeps the interest alive.
Both Isabella and Mac are attractive characters. Roland ‘Mac’ Mackenzie was the hard-drinking, debauched artist Mackenzie brother, Isabella, the woman who eloped with him after she met him at her debutante ball. Their tumultuous marriage culminated in Mac crossing a line with Isabella, and her leaving him, though Mac continued to support her as his wife.
Now, Mac is determined to win Isabella back, and of course sparks fly.
The only thing that annoyed me a bit is the privilege (okay fine, a bit rich to be offended by privilege while stuffing one’s face with a series on aristos, even Scots ones). But still, Mac not caring about the value of his paintings is presented as a virtue or self confidence but it’s really that he can afford not to care.
Otherwise, carry one.
The Many Sins of Lord Cameron
I loved this book, but don’t have a lot to say about it. Cameron is the rough, horse-trainer brother, Ainsley is the poor widow, lady maid to the queen, and an intrepid solver of ladies problem. Cam had an encounter with her years ago and never forgot it, now her husband has died, and he finds her once again in his bedroom, up to something.
There’s no murder in this novel, but there are horses, which works.
The Duke’s Perfect Wife
It seems like every series has to end with a ducal romance – and the duke’s are always hard men, men who have had to forgo emotion in order to be the men their family needs. In two of the three cases – Evie Dunmore’s Bringing Down the Duke and Mary Balogh’s Slightly Dangerous– glacial is the word that comes to mind. I’m not complaining, those two books are my all-time favourites.
Hart Mackenzie, Jennifer Ashley’s duke, is Scottish and dark, and so cannot be glacial, but he is similarly masterful and contained, and being a Mackenzie has a traumatised past.
He also is slightly reminiscent of Christian Grey of Fifty Shadesfame, or vice versa. We are titillated with the information from the first novel that Hart has unusual sexual tastes. More about this is revealed through the series until it all comes to a head in this novel.
Like Bewcastle in Balogh’s Bedwyn series, Hart waits until his siblings are settled to give himself some rope (pun intended). Years ago, he was engaged to one Eleanor Ramsey, but she broke off the engagement. Now Hart has decided it is time to revisit that episode.
Eleanor reminds me a fair bit of Christine in Slightly Dangerous. The daughter of an impoverished, absent-minded scholar, Eleanor is vivacious and chatty, the total opposite of the very controlled Hart. Despite her lack of funds, her ton credentials are impeccable, though, and she would make a fine duchess if she will have Hart.
Just as he is determined to seek her out and somehow manipulate her into agreeing to marry him, she reappears in a bid to protect him from a scandal that might affect his political career.
It’s obvious they are going to land up together, but there’s the mystery of who is sending Eleanor the risque photos. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure that that mystery gets entirely solved.
Also, Hart’s Fifty Shadesness is somewhat anticlimatic. We get only one scene that could fit that bill.
I did enjoy this book, though I think I need to reread it sometime.
Chick Lit Hall of Fame 