Every shelf of the bookcases in Elizabeth White’s apartment in downtown Brooklyn measures just over seven inches high and four and a half inches deep. That’s because the mass-market paperback romances she has spent her lifetime reading (roughly one a day) are a whisker short of the same dimensions: a perfect fit. She had the bookshelves custom-made when she moved from her previous apartment, in Brooklyn Heights, fourteen years ago. Even so, she had to sacrifice ten boxes of Jayne Ann Krentz and Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle (all the same person, as it happens) and other titans of the genre. She had the boxes delivered to local prison libraries, where, apparently, romance fiction is quite popular with the inmates. That’s no surprise to her. People read this stuff, she tells me, because they like it. Who am I to disagree?
The thirteen hundred or so paperbacks in Elizabeth’s current apartment are the merest tip of the iceberg. She keeps ready to hand only her favorites and returns to them during occasional bouts of sleeplessness. At three in the morning, a musty paperback recounting the amorous adventures of Miss Harriet Pomeroy and Gideon Westbrook, Viscount St. Justin, is a safe and efficient means of inducing slumber. Elizabeth knows perfectly well that it’s all trash. That’s why she likes it.
And not just romances. Although romance fiction will always be her leading preference, she has also consumed vast quantities of science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and mysteries. If it’s genre fiction, she has probably read it. Black, Christian, gay, kinky, chaste: She’s open to all of it, with the partial exceptions of horror, hyper-violent thrillers, and what’s euphemistically known as “enforced seduction” (that is, women falling in love with their rapists).
It’s not news that writers of genius (Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Octavia E. Butler, and many others) have long worked within the relatively narrow confines of genre fiction. This is not a distinction that particularly concerns Elizabeth. J.R.R. Tolkien is perfectly fine, in Elizabeth’s view, because he did not make the mistake, as she puts it, of “going around describing every little tree or plant that for some reason was symbolic of something.” Actually, he did. But he certainly told a good story. The rest is dross.
Elizabeth’s predilection for devouring oceans of print dates from early adolescence and paid off in the college-admissions sweepstakes. It helped (along with very good grades) to get her into Mount Holyoke (Emily Dickinson’s college), where she was, in her words, “the worst English major they ever had.” Dutifully, she analyzed Shakespeare and Restoration dramatists, but by then she had become the reader she remains to this day: one who reads for the “story,” who has no patience for what she calls “symbolism,” who finds all that “great literature” stuff frankly and irredeemably boring.
Early on, Elizabeth discovered what she liked to read (trash) and how she liked to read it (fast). For more than sixty years, that discovery has guided the near entirety of her reading life. As a former colleague of hers at the Brooklyn Public Library (and occasional birdwatching buddy), I’ve known Elizabeth for a good many of those sixty years. What amazes me—indeed, inspires me—about her case is not so much her choice of louche reading material but her open and cheerful refusal to disavow it. Given her milieu—educated, professional-class, brownstone Brooklyn—that avowal is rather like offering to say grace before a gathering of atheists. Like it or not, certain expectations are assumed of people occupying a niche in cultural institutions in places like New York City—which is merely to say that in her long career at the Brooklyn Public Library, Elizabeth was surrounded by scores of screamingly pretentious colleagues, myself foremost among them.
This was, after all, a woman with a bachelor’s degree from an elite college, a master’s degree in librarianship from Rutgers University, and, as the head of the library’s Brooklyn Collection, the responsibility for running a local history repository of far more than local significance. Such a person might be expected, on her lunch hour, to discuss the work of Milan Kundera or that year’s offerings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Elizabeth wasn’t having any of it. She liked what she liked. Take it or leave it.
Any notion that an exclusive diet of genre fiction might entail some slight impairment of the intellect or coarsening of the sensibility won’t survive an encounter with Elizabeth White. Now in her eighth decade, and twentieth year of retirement, she’s sharp, funny, and unillusioned—a classic New York liberal and passionate environmentalist. In fact, she’s like many of the people I know in this city, except that her reading tends to books with titles such as The Viscount Who Loved Me and The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown. She’s quite right to say that neither her choice of reading nor anyone else’s is worth arguing about.
It is, on the other hand, worth thinking about. In considering Elizabeth’s reading life, I can hardly avoid thinking about my own. Inevitably, if unintentionally, she unsettles virtually every one of my assumptions about reading. It’s a chastening experience. Must I always read with care and deliberation? Must I seek out books that disturb as much as or more than they delight? Must I habitually consult the secondary literature? Must I be “challenged”—intellectually, ethically, aesthetically—by every book I read? I’m not such a pedant that I’m incapable of losing myself in any given book. The baseline for me is and always has been pleasure. Maybe I delude myself in thinking that the pleasure I derive from reading ambitious works of literature is multilayered, complex, problematic. Maybe I’m really just consuming the stuff. And if I am, is that something I should worry about? Am I as highbrow as I think I am? Should I be?
In Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez, reading is the “insatiable vice” of the lovelorn protagonist Florentino Ariza. “From Homer to the least meritorious of the local poets,” he reads indiscriminately and voraciously. Furthermore, “he made no distinctions: He read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate, and despite his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not in all that he had read.”
In outline, Love in the Time of Cholera sounds like a Harlequin Romance, and is so described on the back cover of my English translation: “In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. …[H]e reserves his heart for Fermina.” Well, who isn’t a sucker for a good love story? García Márquez certainly didn’t disdain the tropes, from the thunderbolt of first passion to the opposition of a hardheaded parent. But this love story is, not coincidentally, a highly wrought literary performance, a book very much concerned with other books and with literary traditions both high and low; hence the reflections on Florentino Ariza’s reading habits.
It would be difficult but not impossible to read Love in the Time of Cholera without pausing to reflect on the welter of sociopolitical factors, as well as gender and class distinctions, that condition the rise and fall (and rise) of the romance. Indeed, that’s how Florentino Ariza would have read his own story. It would have broken his heart, as it breaks mine. And yet Florentino Ariza wouldn’t have been able to say whether Love in the Time of Cholera was a good book or not. I can: It is emphatically a good book because the love story it tells is made more affecting, not less, by the unromantic circumstances in which it is embedded, and by the literary self-consciousness that governs our apprehension of that story. It gives me, the kind of reader who looks for disturbance and strangeness and density, all those things, plus a knock-out love story. “Literary” fiction, my friend Elizabeth complains, “goes on and on.” Yes, it does. That’s sort of what makes literature literature.
Elizabeth knows what she likes, but she’s not very good at explaining her preferences. Why should she be? The letter killeth, as far as she’s concerned. All that she cares about is what’s so obviously there: story and character. She does say that she appreciates the unrealism of genre fiction. Escaping for a few hours each day with Judith McNaught or Sarah MacLean allows her to shut out our calamitous world and restore her mental equilibrium. “[H]uman kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote. He knew what he was talking about. The author of The Waste Land and Four Quartets spent a good deal of time reading detective and mystery novels.
In short, reading romance novels makes Elizabeth White happy. She also thinks it might make me happy. So before I leave her apartment, and after I’ve marveled at the ingenious arrangement of her personal library, she places in my hands one of her very favorites: Ravished, by Amanda Quick. Unlike Elizabeth, I need more than one day to read it, if only to spread out the pain. It does not make me happy.
To criticize such a work would be overkill. Indeed, it takes skill to write that badly—to subordinate all literary values to the imperative of swiftly moving, page-turning narrative. How could I not dislike it? Everything my demographic has taught me to value in a work of literature—those values Elizabeth airily dismisses as “symbolism” and “imagery”—is systematically violated. Perhaps I’m a prisoner of my demographic. And yet Elizabeth, my colleague and cohort, cherishes not only that book but the two hundred or so others written by the author variously known as Amanda Quick or Jayne Castle or Jayne Taylor or Jayne Bentley or Stephanie James or Amanda Glass or Jayne Ann Krentz. Two possibilities suggest themselves: 1) that literary taste is not entirely comprehended by the New York Review of Books; and 2) (this rather unsettling) that my friend Elizabeth loves reading more than I do.
Aside from its unthinking endorsement of British class hierarchies, Ravished struck me as too silly to deplore. But really, it got the job done. Miss Harriet Pomeroy and Viscount St. Justin settle into a happy marriage after much intrigue and many bouts of hot sex. I was gratified, if not for their sake, at least for the legions of readers who had eagerly followed their story. Amanda Quick keeps her promises.
Picasso reportedly said that he never saw a painting he didn’t like. The mere fact that anybody would ever paint anything, no matter how well or badly, was, in his view, a permanent astonishment. The world doesn’t need Ravished, by Amanda Quick, but it’s there, offering glad tidings for those so inclined. I don’t share that inclination, but the fact that someone bothered to write it, and that many thousands of people, who could have been doing something more practical or remunerative or “sensible,” bothered to read it, to imagine lives other than their own—that, too, is an astonishment. I feel, in some obscure sense, that the dedicated readers of Amanda Quick and Tessa Dare and Teresa Medeiros are my sisters and brothers. Nora Roberts is my role model! All of us read imaginative literature despite not having to. That is what’s glorious about it. Even when it’s bad.