I am generally not a reader of romance-related stories, period. I like books about people doing atypical things in unusual place and circumstances, and for some reason, I can’t explain why, practically none of my favorite books have to do with romance or love in any way whatsoever. Not erotic love, anyhow. I adored The Road and that’s all about the love of a father and a son; I thought Kim was brilliant, but that’s all about love of a very different sort, not romantic in the least; The Siege of Krishnapur has love IN it, but the real urgency of the story is in a different place altogether; and Riddley Walker is about a hunter-gatherer society so patriarchal that women barely factor into it at all. My favorite book of all time, Watership Down, treats love– as the rabbits treat it– as a procedural thing, something that must happen for a species to survive. My favorite series of all time, the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin books, have a great deal of romantic angst in them, but that’s never the whole point of a book, and I did always get frustrated at Stephen Maturin’s interminable yearning and warbling about that one true love who would never have him. I do enjoy Pride and Prejudice a great deal, but that seems to be the exception that proves the rule. I’ve been working on Wuthering Heights now for over three months, and I am still having trouble getting myself to finish it. I simply find it boring.
So what is it with me and romances? Why do I avoid them? Why does romance in a story bother me so? Usually, I think, it’s because it’s poorly done. All of the romance in Wuthering Heights, for example, has always struck me as particularly unrealistic and extremely boring. I know it’s a classic, but I find it unspeakably dull. With love stories, there’s one of two endings: either they end up together or they don’t. Along the way there will be a whole lot of waffling back and forth, and some things will be very sad or very happy, and I won’t be able to predict all the vagaries, but they’ll either end up together or they won’t. Boom. That’s it. To me, love stories, out of all varieties of tale, are the only ones that feel as if they have a goal: they are the only ones which the characters can really ‘win.’ And because I see them as having a specific goal, all the nonsense in the middle seems rather irrelevant. Who cares how much the characters change in the course of the tale? Either they end up together or they don’t. In the same way, the score at the end of a soccer game almost invalidates all the struggle that took place during the game. Once you know the score, it barely matters anymore what was happening at any given moment during the struggle. Either your team won or it didn’t, and that’s that.
And why would I read about people being in love, I’ve always wondered, if they’re not doing something more interesting at the same time? This is why Wodehouse stories please me. Though Jill the Reckless is just a love story, it’s simultaneously an expose on the lost world of early twentieth century musical theater! Isn’t that exciting? I don’t mind all the shameless Wodehous self-insertion or the charming-heroine nonsense because there’s something else there– something very good. Hilarious characters to keep me occupied; weird procedural stories about what it’s like to live in that kind of world during that particular time period. Because the rest is so clever, I actually enjoy the love tale at the heart of it. But if there hadn’t been so much packed in around it– if, like Wuthering Heights, it had concentrated on the love alone– I would have just rolled over and died out of boredom.
So: why did I just enjoy reading A Room With A View? Because, I think, it was short, and because it was realistic. It is in no way boring. It is also in no way clear what will happen to our dear Lucy, and she and her friends all behave in such a human, realistic way that I stopped wondering what the end of the story was going to be (but I could obviously guess, it being so tender and kind a tale) and started worrying for her moment by moment.
Now, the characters behave realistically emotionally, but the Emersons– the love interest, George, and his father– are not particularly realistic themselves. They behave like a bunch of wandering philosophers. No people in the world actually have the kind of conversations about life and the universe that they do. George and his father do not have one single typical human conversation in the entire book. But thier actions– the things they’re doing, the things they’re trying to do to other people through thier unrealistic words– those are realistic. The whole way the story was plotted reminded me very strongly of my Screenwriting I class from several terms ago: everyone had secret and non-secret motives at play at all times, and nobody was a caricature or a stereotype. The actions were real, so the story was compelling.
I think A Room With A View is the first book I have read since Pride and Prejudice that has managed to interest me despite its being only about love. Clearly, this is a very difficult thing for a story to pull off. Romeo and Juliet is only interesting because everyone is so committed to killing everyone else; the story would have no tension otherwise. It’s very hard to get tension into a love story if you expect the story to stand on love alone. Forster and Austen figured out how to get this to work, and they get it to work beautifully. Clearly, it takes a master.
This is why I will not be writing love stories anytime soon.
