Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

[lightreads]

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So. As some have noticed, I have ventured with uncertain heart and girded loin into the realm of the romance novel over the past few years. Mostly historical by virtue of the fact I started with Heyer and she wrote, like, seven hundred books. And with the historicals, it’s like reading about the customs of an alien culture, and thinking about it that way is good. The creepy virginity fetishizing, all the arranged marriages, how a girl can be “ruined” by talking to the wrong person – it’s all . . . anthropological to me, and in that detached way, sometimes quite enjoyable.



And then I get to this, a contemporary romance, and . . . oops. Still aliens. It wasn’t just that the characters were in historical romances; apparently just being in a romance novel is enough. I read this book (which was quite funny, as advertised, with a lot of great banter and secondary character color) and I basically think isn’t that a charming custom. Okay, that one’s a bit odd, but I’m trying not to judge . . . Cultural relativism! Cultural relativism!



Because women who don’t just talk about men but who talk only about men, women who try fad diets requiring impossible lengths of self-denial and then don’t understand what’s happening when they inevitably fail and get trapped in a cycle of guilt and self-loathing, people who assume that serial monogamy is the only acceptable way to live, women who say things like, “I’m not going home with you, I bought my own drink,” to their boyfriend . . . I don’t know these people. I am occasionally reminded they exist, but I find them confusing and sometimes quite distressing.



But then I’m reading, and I get to certain scenes. Like where the heroine breaks down in tears because she’s in love, sure, but that’s not a good thing because she’s going to get hurt. And she puts her finger so keenly, so precisely on that -- if you leave me, it will wreck me. The big risk. Or another scene where one woman browbeats another into actually saying what she wants and not not not apologizing for wanting things, to own what she wants and not dismiss it as a fairy tale or stupid or silly. And how hard that is for some women who have been taught for so long not to want, to always be second, to please someone else first.



And in those flashes I would think oh. Maybe we aren’t aliens to each other. Because I understand that completely.



Anyway. It’s a completely absurd, over-the-top bit of silliness that is quite funny in places. And it’s mostly full of aliens. But once in a while it’s really not. And in those times it is keen and true and really very good.



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Comments

[yunitsa]

I was wondering if you've read Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw, because while the model for that was the Victorian novel rather than historical romances, it definitely gets at the Alienness of "how a girl can be “ruined” by talking to the wrong person" and so on. It all makes sense if you imagine all the characters as dragons in hats who eat each other!

[lightreads]

Huh, yeah, that's in the stack. Good to know.

[jadelennox]

I wonder if part of your more lackluster reaction to this book is because you don't read romance as a general rule. I'm just thinking because I do read them, and they're all total aliens to me, so when I got to Bet Me it was just revelatory. The characters were closer to being real people than anyone I had ever met in a romance before. Just the fact that they had silly, ridiculous, awesomely petty loves: food, shoes. The beautiful mundanities of the everyday.

(Also, I generally don't mind aliens, as is evidenced by my love for How I Met Your Mother, which is entirely about aliens.)

[lightreads]

I suspect you are right about this. And that yeah, this book really is so much better than a lot of what you get out there. Which I don't understand! Why can't there be several thousand books like this one that I can pick through to find the ones that jump all over my buttons!

[readerjane]

Speaking as an alien from the far land of Monogamy, I also found this book lacking. *g*

I’m usually dissatisfied with romance novels, because the genre conventions require the outcome of the romance to be foreordained. So there’s no peril: the ship’s gonna happen; we’re just along for the ride. The writing has to be incredibly witty, rich or insightful to make it worth the trip. In mysteries or horror stories or spy stories with romance, the author can sustain some doubt. The strongest thing Julia Spencer-Fleming did to hook me on her series was to convince me, early on, that here was an author who actually might resolve the sexual tension by having one of her principals decide they needed to leave town.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me was witty, but not enough. And it hit one of my major book-throwing triggers in Calvin Morrisey’s relationship with his son. The college-age son wants to get married. Monogamy is a terrifying undertaking: who but the invulnerable young would dare to promise something they don’t know they can deliver? I’m amazed that anyone my age gets married at all. It’s a risk of heroic proportions, but this young man’s father – his father – who ought to be leading the way and demonstrating by his own life and actions that the risk can be achieved, counsels his son, "No." You’re not ready; you’ll ruin your life, don’t take the chance, keep your options open. Feh. Of course the boy’s not ready. No one ever is. You become ready by doing it. I couldn’t root for Calvin, so the main thing the story had going for it, the ship, wasn’t enough to sustain the tale.

Okay, I’m done spitting monogamy juice. We now return you to your previously scheduled station. :-D

[Oh, and I’m with you on the alienness of fad diets and a-Bechdel characters. Dunno what planet those folks are from.]

[lightreads]

It's funny what you said about romance novels, because I feel like what I'm objecting to here is about romance novels instead of just about monogamy. I mean, it's not my cuppa, but some of my best friends are monogamists, heh. It's how everyone in this book believes there's a way you've got to do things. You go out on Friday and you meet a guy at the bar and you date him, and the entire point of dating him is getting to marriage, and then you get married and that's the goal. And there are people in the book who diverge from that, but it's in small ways, and they are all tertiary characters. Because the point of the romance is that you do these things in this order, and that's the way it's done, and the people doing this are the people we're supposed to care about by default. And that's what I find so weird about it, and probably about the whole romance novel enterprise, I'm beginning to suspect.

[readerjane]

I guess that's true about all lit forms, isn't it? That the characters who share our assumptions about what life is supposed to be like are the ones we're meant to care about, and the ones who have differing assumptions are only there in the story as accents to the overall decor?

It's a shortcut, I guess. The more formulaic the story, the more heavily it will lean on shortcuts. Romance, as a genre, is strongly formulaic, so maybe that's why we see this shortcut more consistently in this genre than in others?

Which raises the question: how do romance authors know their readers will share those particular assumptions? Probably a chicken-and-egg thing: the romance audience is self-selected for those who want the particular conventions which the romance genre supplies.