Be Careful What You Wish For Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

The Maias isn't shy about being a story made of words, or a satire of Lisbon literary layabouts. The characters – at least the male characters – are bright but not deep, and the female characters are less bright and less deep. It may also be the least gothic incest story of the nineteenth century. We have four hundred-odd pages of bubbly club talk and overeducated emotion while the incest scenario gets set up (Maria and Carlos were raised separately; Carlos thinks his sister is dead and Maria never knew that she had a brother; they meet and are amazed by how well they understand each other! They even have the same middle name, what a cute coincidence! It must be destiny!) When Ega learns the horrible truth about his friend Carlos' mistress (entirely by accident; a friend of the family who knows Maria but hasn't seen Carlos in many years notices them walking together an remarks on it in all innocence) he agonizes over whether to tell his friend, tries to burden the family steward with the information, and finally breaks the news. Carlos is horrified for about fifty pages before he breaks it off with Maria and they go their separate ways. He weeps with bitterness, and the curse of the Maias is acknowledged.

Then, in the final fifty pages of the novel, the world slides back into alignment. A decade passes, and Ega and Carlos are back at the Grémio, gossiping and self-deprecating as if nothing had happened. The horror has lasted a few months at most; the long business of wasting one’s life extends beyond it into the future. Maria has made a perfectly respectable and boring marriage; Carlos has gone back to his relatively harmless wastrel existence, Ega still hasn’t finished that atom book and isn’t going to, but he’s definitely going to buy some clothes and complain that he spends too much on clothes. So the world keeps turning under the cursed and the charmed alike. I’m not completely sure what to make of this, but I think I like it.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't love The Ladies of Missalonghi at all. I disliked it so much that I felt bad about it and went back to try to find some things that I liked. I did find some - the history of the town of Byron (named after the first poet its founder could make heads or tails of), the description of Missy's medical examination, the line drawings) - but eventually I gave up and gave in to my dislike.

I knew it was a ripoff of (or “homage to”) The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery’s joyful comedy of, by, and about shameless wish fulfillment – but I wasn’t expecting that knowledge to be as much of a handicap as it turned out to be. In theory, I’m all for ripping off The Blue Castle! In practice, I wasn’t able to give it a fair chance. I found I was unable to read without mentally cataloging the differences: Missy swoons to trashy romances instead of to pompous nature writing; her friend is a perky self-hating librarian rather than a lonely consumptive with A Past; her guardians are more sympathetic and the rest of her family worse; the golden-child cousin is meaner and the narrative cattiness she elicits less subtle, and all the emotional beats are less heightened than in The Blue Castle. Not all of the differences are disappointing, but a lot of them are. In the end, Missy gets her man by deliberately lying about having a terminal illness, and the man she gets can’t shut up about what a bitch his first wife was. It’s not completely clear that the ending is meant to be happy, but it also isn't successfully ominous or satirical as far as I can tell. We never really get to know The Mysterious John Smith, except for some choice monologues about how women are the worst, and I didn't really feel like I knew the nasty relatives well enough to rejoice in their comeuppance.

I was accidentally spoiled for the Big Twist about Una, the librarian who pushes Missy to trick John Smith into marrying her. On the whole I'm glad I was, because if I hadn't seen it coming I would have been extremely mad. Do you want to know what it was? Here is some white text to hide the spoiler.

[Highlight the hidden text for the TERRIBLE TRUTH about UNA! Una is the ghost of John Smith's dead wife! She is so sorry about what a frigid harpy she was in life that she has decided to make up for her crimes of the heart by setting Missy up with John Smith (and encouraging her to NEVER TELL HIM THE TRUTH about her health, because MEN CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH and it's better that way! Honesty is for suckers! Una was honest about not wanting children and LOOK WHERE IT GOT HER). Thanks, ghost? It does make sense that a ghost would project a lot and have priorities not necessarily aligned with those of the living, so maybe this makes the story more interesting? I'm not sure. If I hadn't known it was coming, it would have come way the hell out of nowhere. I knew it was coming, and it still felt totally unearned and nonsensical.]

Maybe The Mysterious John Smith's misogyny is supposed to make him a more "realistic" character than The Blue Castle's Barney Snaith, whose only major flaws are an embarrassing writing style and a tragic inability to speak in complete sentences. But given that T.M.J.S. is also a rich mastermind who rolls into town and buys a valley just in time to be tricked into a wish-fulfillment marriage by Missy and [SPOILER! the self-hating ghost of his dead wife!!] this superficial nod toward realism seems neither necessary nor sufficient. Besides which, he's no fun. I don't at all mind reading about fictional misogynists if they are in a book about asshole artists or how much being in the army sucks, but I don't like them in my rom-coms. No snappy pillow talk about how your first wife killed herself just to ruin your life, please! And because I already had it in my mind that this book was going to be similar to The Blue Castle, I wasn't able to relax and enjoy my dislike of T. M. John Smith as I might in any number of other books. I kept waiting for the story either to abandon the template or do a better job of following it. Which is, again, totally unfair to poor Colleen McCullough, who was presumably just trying to write a book like anyone else.

I don't know. This book got me thinking about romantic comedies: how pretty much all my life I've been convinced that I love them, because I love them in theory and there are a few that are my favorites, but if you pick a rom-com at random and show it to me, I'm overwhelmingly more likely to hate it than not. Why I should have such an easily outraged Rom-Com Ideal when I have no problem enjoying mediocre sci-fi and bad murder mysteries is not clear to me.


I was disappointed in myself for not being able to enjoy this book on its own merits (or if not "enjoy," at least separate it from The Blue Castle enough so that I feel like I'm being fair), but I'm also not convinced that it's worth the effort to try again. Oh, well! Better luck next time, Australia.

What I'm Reading Now

I've started The Complete Works of Hadewijch, a present from several years ago, but I don't expect to get through it very quickly. Hadewijch is a thirteenth-century mystic whose works are letters exhorting friends to live in Christ, and poems about personal revelations - all well out of my comfort zone.

Also started: Chicks in Chainmail, a very 90s, very tongue-in-cheek comedy-fantasy anthology with a "warrior women" theme. There is a silly story about a man who dresses as a woman in order to be allowed to fight, and a silly story about the unforeseen consequences of a tax on metal bras. There is an extremely silly story about Hillary Clinton in Valhalla that made me so sad I couldn't follow what was happening, through no fault of 1994.

What I Plan to Read Next

Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary, probably some other things.

Comments

[oracne]

ZOMG, I remember the "Chicks in Chainmail" series! I don't remember any of the stories, though.

[evelyn_b]

I'm finding them mostly likable but not necessarily memorable so far. It's a fun book, deliberately very "contemporary" and dated, and I expect there will be about 1 or 2 stand-out stories (I don't think I've gotten to any yet) and the rest will be ephemeral silly fun.

[oracne]

"Ephemeral silly" is what I vaguely remember.

[thisbluespirit]

Is it wrong that I feel almost tempted to read the book just because of the ghost wife with strange priorities?

if you pick a rom-com at random and show it to me, I'm overwhelmingly more likely to hate it than not.

Yes, that's true - you have a huge tolerance for the faults of mid-20th C writers, but you aren't keen on letting Heyer have even one slip (or far worse, admittedly in Grand Sophy!), in a way that seems unlike your usual kind reading practices. Maybe you have a perfect rom com you need to write to get it out of your system? Although it may not help with liking everyone else's wrong ones. On the other hand, there are a lot of supposed RomComs that have very strange priorities and are neither romantic nor funny, and you should at least be one or the other if you can't manage both.*


* pot and kettles, yes. I am also very pernickity about rom coms! It has to be exactly right and, dammit, it ought to at least make me smile at regular intervals and not turn soppy the moment someone says I love you! (We shall both have to write it out of our system at some point, except you won't like mine, because they will inevitably owe a large debt to Heyer, and I won't like yours, because pernickity-ness. probably. Actually, it's hard to imagine disliking a romcom written by you.)

Anyway, it's possible I'm also projecting, so i will just go lay myself to rest for a bit and come back later.

[evelyn_b]

Aw, that's not how I remembered reacting to Heyer at all! I thought I liked Heyer. It was bad luck that I read The Grand Sophy first, but I still think of Freddy from Cotillion as one of the most delightful characters in all of literature, and even The Grand Sophy had the matter of the ducklings and many other things to like.

(I do have a problem of walking by the Heyer shelf at the library and completely forgetting which book it was I wanted to read next, and so not getting any one of them, but that is a different issue).

Anyway, plenty of the rom-coms I do like are full of strange priorities and ethical issues and sometimes terrible people; it's just that I like them. The heart has its reasons, etc.. None of my opinions here are very rational, and most of them are barely even opinions - just off-the-cuff reactions, highly personal and usually subject to change. I'm sorry if they come off too harsh at times.

Is it wrong that I feel almost tempted to read the book just because of the ghost wife with strange priorities?

Absolutely not! I encourage you to fly directly into that flame and let me know what you think. osprey_archer enjoyed the book a lot, so there's a good chance it's just me and my Blue Castle hangup anyway.

[thisbluespirit]

I thought I liked Heyer. It was bad luck that I read The Grand Sophy first, but I still think of Freddy from Cotillion as one of the most delightful characters in all of literature, and even The Grand Sophy had the matter of the ducklings

Oh, yes! I just am probably more sensitive to criticism of them just because they've been my comfort reads for twenty years now & have cheered me up on trains, through sickness, boredom, and just when I needed something to read that made me smile and didn't need a review. And, of course, they are mid-20th C thing, Heyer certainly had her faults & fandom these days does seem prone to not being willing to cope with anything like that, no matter the era, so I probably was just worrying more about those than even Alleyn.

(And you should get The Talisman Ring next. It has a side-order of murder and smuggling to go with it.)

plenty of the rom-coms I do like are full of strange priorities and ethical issues and sometimes terrible people; it's just that I like them. The heart has its reasons, etc..

Indeed.

I don't have much brain, so I had probably better just get on with reading the books I'm trying to read now anyway! I am not sure how entertaining the ghost wife would be in practice, but the idea pleases me a lot. :-)

[evelyn_b]

I just am probably more sensitive to criticism of them just because they've been my comfort reads for twenty years now & have cheered me up on trains, through sickness, boredom, and just when I needed something to read that made me smile and didn't need a review.

That makes sense! I think everyone has a few things like that.

I like a lot of things with a lot of flaws, and I'm afraid one thing I get tempted to do a lot is to enumerate all the flaws I can think of right off the bat, to assure the reader that my love isn't completely uncritical. This is almost certainly more annoying than I think it is, so I try to keep it in check, but the temptation is always there.

I don't think the ghost wife element lives up to its potential. But it is a very short book, so there's no harm done either way. I hope you enjoy your new free books! <3

[thisbluespirit]

I get tempted to do a lot is to enumerate all the flaws I can think of right off the bat, to assure the reader that my love isn't completely uncritical.

I get that. I think I do it too! Or at least, I watch so much old TV and I mean there is a lot of sexism and racism and things here and about, and so I just say it is TERRIBLE but I like it and then no one can come along and tell me I shouldn't like it because it's terrible and I must be evil. In fact, no one ever does even if I sometimes see it happen on tumblr, and so I'm just probably being meanly unfair to things that were often actually progressive at the time (/o\) or sadly typical (also /o\). It is an understandable way to feel safe while reviewing out loud on the internet in front of theoretically the world, I suppose!

This is also why I often can't read anyone's reviews of Doctor Who, because it is the highlight of my week and I don't want to read about all its faults. Unless I do. Sometimes I do!

[osprey_archer]

Awww, no! Now I feel bad for leading you astray in the annals of Missalonghi. At least it's short?

...Although now that you've put the idea in my head, I cannot but think that it would be far better if John Smith turned out to be the writer of the trashy romances Missy likes so much. (And also if he was less misogynistic.) It would be a much better twist than random!ghost!wife! He's financing the purchase of the valley through his romance-writing gains and is so appalled when Missy finds his work. What will this do to his he-man image???

[evelyn_b]

No harm done! It was so short and I would have thoroughly enjoyed hating it if I didn't feel bad about stepping on the toes of an honest rec/how unfair I was being for comparing it to The Blue Castle at every turn. Though it is very similar. I wonder if it was one of those things where the author read a book twenty years prior and completely forgot it wasn't her own idea.

John Smith being the author of trashy romances would have made him much more interesting! It would have made his history of sexual frustration more interesting and his predicament vis-a-vis Missy more interesting, especially if he wrote the book that inspired Missy to propose to him. Honestly, it would even temper his misogyny a tiny bit if we knew he wasn't just bearing a boring grudge against all women on account of his wife, but also had mixed feelings about his audience and publisher expectations and whatever else. Instant character complexity! And it wouldn't have been any more out of nowhere than RANDOM GHOST WIFE: THE GHOSTENING in the last two pages.

MAN that ghost wife was random though. What was that? How did she carry books around, and get people to sign legal documents, and buy a dress if she was a ghost the whole time?? How did she get to be a ghost when no one else was a ghost? WHO ELSE IN THIS TOWN IS A GHOST??

[osprey_archer]

He mightn't even need to have a difficult past wife if he were a secret romance novelist; perhaps instead of having issues with All Women he could just have issues with His Readers, who read his trashy romance novels instead of his Serious Literature which he writes under another pseudonym and no one buys. It fills him with bitterness! And then this girl, who was carrying one of his very novels the first time he met her, has had the audacity to propose to him! He is sure she must be awful because he is convinced that all his readers are.

And then Una could just be a regular friendly library helper rather than a Random Ghost Wife, which did come totally out of left field, even though I liked the book I felt that. Shouldn't there at least have been a bit of "BTW we are in a world where ghosts exist" foreshadowing?

[evelyn_b]

Fixed! I like this version much better. Poor TMJS gets the worst letters from his readers, you wouldn't believe what some of these women will put in a letter to a complete stranger. Married, single, it doesn't matter, they're shameless AND they have bad taste. One time his publisher made him dress up in a grey suit and do a book reading in Sydney or something, and he had to meet a whole room full of his awful readers, if you can even call it "meeting" when all they did was look past him and coo about his "adorable" and "scrumptious" cardboard heroes and bicker about minute plot points and who deserved what in books he's already forgotten. And the trashier and more fake his books get the more they seem to like them! What's wrong with these people? >:| And of course no one who reads his phony love scenes would ever like him for himself, in real life. They just think they would because they can't separate fact from fiction. No wonder he's surly.

Shouldn't there at least have been a bit of "BTW we are in a world where ghosts exist" foreshadowing?

Foreshadowing is for the weak! Readers like to be surprised!

(Speaking of ghosts, though, have you seen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? Rex Harrison plays a ghost with a colorful past who helps a widow write a best-selling book about himself. Unlike the RGW, he is frank and open about being a ghost the whole time. I feel you might like it).

[osprey_archer]

John Smith should be grateful they cooed about his heroes rather than flinging themselves at him and rumpling his grey suit. It could have been far worse!

I have seen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir! And it is delightful, although I felt bad for poor Mrs. Muir when the salty sea captain went away. No, salty sea captain! Don't you see that she's not interested in falling for some silly living human being and won't be even if you leave?

[evelyn_b]

I know! Dude, I know you're trying to respect her choices but maybe you should talk it over for a few minutes before vanishing forever. When I was a kid I loved the tragical disembodied romance aspect, but now I'm a little sadder that Mrs. Muir had to lose her cool ghost friend over a silly fling with George Sanders. They had such a good time laughing at other people together! :( At the least he should have checked back in after a few months to see if George Sanders broke her heart or not.

OH WELL, relationships are hard to negotiate when you're literally a ghost.

(I love that movie a lot, though in retrospect it's stacking the deck a little unfairly against the flesh).

[osprey_archer]

It does stack the deck a bit against the flesh, although it'd be hard not to when the ghost is a salty sea captain played by Rex Harrison. How can mere flesh compete with that??

Maybe ghost rules don't allow him to go back and check. Once he's gone, he's gone forever! Or at least until Mrs. Muir dies and the ghost is allowed to meet her on the way to the afterlife.

[evelyn_b]

Maybe ghost rules don't allow him to go back and check

Man, that is ALL THE MORE REASON why you need to swallow your ghost pride and TALK IT OVER. Oh, well.

[brigdh]

Chicks in Chainmail! I remember reading that back in the 90s. Or... those? I think there were several volumes in the series actually. They were fun, if shallow, and I have completely forgotten what any of the stories were about. But such a fun concept!

[evelyn_b]

I think you're right that there were several volumes! It's just what you say, a fun concept with completely forgettable stories. When I finished it, I thought there were about three that I would remember out of the collection, but in the past 48 hours that number has come down to one. I'll have to review the Table of Contents before I write my Wednesday post if I want to say anything besides, "this book is about chicks in chainmail, as the title can attest."

But I had a good time while I was reading (most of) them, and I got to indulge in some not-quite-nostalgia about 90s pop-culture talking points, so Chicks in Chainmail fulfilled its purpose.

[ladyherenya]

I haven't read The Ladies of Missalonghi yet, but I found an essay about it which indicated that the parallels with The Blue Castle were accidental rather than conscious. Apparently someone raised the question of plagiarism and the defence was that both stories were drawing upon the same old sources of Cinderella etc. (No one pointed out that The Blue Castle is in the public domain in Aus, but maybe it wasn't back then.)


How you feel about rom-coms is how I feel about romance novels - I like them in theory, but in practice find them very hit-and-miss.

[evelyn_b]

Hm. . . If the parallels are accidental (and independently arrived at), I guess stranger things have happened! I can believe it, but only just. Some things, like the positioning of the prettier cousin and the asshole shopkeep uncle within the story, are very similar. If it's not a deliberate homage, then "McCullough read The Blue Castle in middle school and then forgot about it" feels a little more likely than "totally independent takes on the Cinderella story," but I'm not a text detective; I don't actually know how you determine this kind of thing. I'd be curious to read the essay, though, if you know where to find it!

I also like romance novels in theory! But whether I've ever managed to read one without immediately filling up with petty complaints depends on how narrowly you define "romance novel." I really liked Persuasion, does that count? Is The Blue Castle a romance novel?

[ladyherenya]

Yeah, I think it must have been a case of McCullough thought she was drawing upon the Cinderella story but was actually drawing upon a novel didn't remember reading. The Blue Castle made an unforgettable impression on me when I was 14, but I guess there are other books I read at that age that I have no memory of, so it's plausible...

Found the essay in my browser history! "Double Trouble: One or Two Women?" by Gillian Whitlock: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49516607_Double_Trouble_One_or_Two_Women

My feeling is that Austen and Montgomery can be classified as romance but they're not really genre-romance romance, if that makes sense. There's not the switching equally between the heroine and hero's POV, and perhaps also the romantic relationship takes longer to come to the fore of the story, too. I don't know if genre-romance is more rule-bound than other genres or if there is just a strong community of readers, writers and publishers who define the genre narrowly.

[evelyn_b]

That is a very interesting essay, thank you! I could potentially get behind the Book is a Spoof theory and the related Subversion of Expected Protagonist Morality. I can appreciate that in theory even if it's not my thing.

I don't know if genre-romance is more rule-bound than other genres or if there is just a strong community of readers, writers and publishers who define the genre narrowly.

I don't know, either! I think I'm part of the problem when it comes to policing the borders of romance, despite not even being a self-identified "romance reader." If I had a different set of expectations for TLoM I might have enjoyed its cynicism, but since I'd already automatically mapped it onto TBC and was expecting an ending I could read as unambiguously "happy," I came away from it feeling almost as indignant as Eileen Robinson in my reactionary heart of hearts. But why was I so attached to that expectation, and why did the author's indifference to it it annoy me so much? I'm not sure.

That POV-switching convention was one of the things I found the hardest to like about the genre romances I tried. Not that the POV switched at all, but the specific convention of seesawing back and forth between two POVs with the ruthless regularity of a metronome. I'm sure it's possible to do it well, but I don't think I've ever been happy with it in practice.