Romance Reading Expectations

I had an interesting moment with a fellow grad student last week that made me start thinking about genre expectations (in general) and romance readers' expectations (in particular). We had both read E.M. Forster's novel Maurice for a class.


CAVEAT:
This book has been around so long that I don't think I'm spoiling anything, but if you desperately want to read Maurice and not know the ending, you should probably find something else to read. I don't mind spoilers myself, but I realize that other people do...
Example:
Kitty: Man, I love the ending of Crime and Punishment, when [redacted] happens in the prison. I cry every time I read that scene!
Boyfriend: Ahh! You just spoiled me! I hadn't gotten that far yet! I didn't know he got caught...
::Kitty and Best Friend exchange a long look::
Best Friend: Well, Boyfriend, it's called Crime and Punishment... not Crime.




Anyway, on to Forster.


For those who don't know, Forster was a semi-closeted homosexual and Maurice was the novel in which he attempted to envision a happy ending to a male homosexual relationship in Edwardian England. Needless to say, the book wasn't printed until well after the Edwardian age ended. The book does have a happy ending, and the main character and his boyfriend get their HEA.


In conversation with my friend, I mentioned that I didn't think it was as good as Forster's other books (say, Howards End or A Passage to India) and that I didn't think it reached the emotional depth or prose brilliance of those works.


She countered with, "That may be true, but I just loved it. It was sooo romantic."


This exchange left me scratching my head and wondering if we had read the same book. Part of my dissatisfaction was because I felt that Maurice was decidedly un-romantic. (Unlike, say, A Room with a View.) The main character spends the entire book pining over someone who is, well, a big jerk, and he only meets his real love interest about fifty pages from the end of the novel. They have a total of three or four awkward scenes together in which there is ample evidence of class differences and general animosity, and then in the last half page or so, they decide to run off and live HEA. If this had been a romance novel, I would have thrown it at the wall.


I wonder if part of my reaction (setting aside questions of bad plotting and narrative awkwardness) isn't because of reading romance. When I pick up a romance novel, I expect to see the growth of a romantic relationship between two people. I expect the ending to be satisfying and grow organically out of the interactions between the two characters. If there are big issues, such as class differences, I expect them to be dealt with or at least addressed by the end of the novel. If books don't meet these standards, I don't consider them romance novels. Read React Review's Jessica has a great post on why she doesn't consider Kristan Higgins' books to be romance novels. Her reasons also have to do with genre expectations.


Coming to Maurice as a reader of genre fiction, I was disappointed. However, my friend does not read romantic fiction of any kind, and she felt that the novel was a romance. Why? Because it ended with two people running off together. She didn't have any expectations about growth of the relationship or a believable HEA. To her, any book that ends with a couple pairing off is a romance because she is unfamiliar with the genre and does not have the same expectations as a romance reader. Ultimately, she found the book to be much more emotionally satisfying than I did.


So, what other genre expectations do we have as romance readers? Do those expectations spoil or enhance our enjoyment of other genres, like mysteries or science fiction? Something worth pondering...

Lydia Davis and the art of translation

The Paris Review blog has a great piece up by Lydia Davis on her new translation of Madame Bovary. 


On the subject of multiple translations, Davis has this to say, "But even though I believe a superlative translation can achieve timelessness, that doesn’t mean I think other translators shouldn’t attempt other versions. The more the better, in the end." 


I'm really looking forward to reading Davis' new translation. She's immensely talented.