Reckless Morality
I’m listening to the audiobook Reckless Pleasures, a Harlequin Blaze “Pleasure Seekers” book by Tori Carrington (narrated by Lauren Fortgang). I’m fascinated by Tori Carrington for (at least) two reasons.
The first is that Tori Carrington is a husband-wife writing team. I’d like to write a novel with my husband. We could combine his incredible powers of observation and keen mind for historical detail with my various plotting and character-development talents, and voila! Fame and fortune!
I suggested we write a World War II romance. He was all for it. He jumped right in with, “As the elliptical wing of his Mark II Supermarine Spitfire sliced through the 88mm flak over Germany, he thought about…” then turned to me and said, “OK. Your turn.”
(Later, he said, “I might have gotten the year wrong on the Spitfire. And it might not have had the range to fly over Germany.” I rest my case about the pairing of our talents.)
The second reason I’m fascinated by Tori Carrington is that–
I’m having a small amount of pronoun anxiety here.
–that they? that she–
that she frequently includes instances of infidelity in her plots. In Reckless Pleasures, the heroine, Megan, gets horny while her boyfriend is fighting in Waziristan and sleeps with his best friend. I have a few things to say about this. One is that I am never going to forgive Megan and I am never going to trust her again, and I think Darius (the hero) is a dumbass if he does–which means that for all intents and purposes, it’s going to be really hard to convince me that Megan and Darius can have a Happily Ever After. But I also have an enormous amount of respect for Tori & Tori, because I think infidelity is the realest and worst thing you can throw at a relationship, and the way that a couple deals with it is the truest crucible for what loves means to them. I’m not sure how many more T.C. books I’ll seek out, because I’m just way too much of a HEA-seeking sap, but I’m going to be thinking about this one for weeks if not months, and that’s a lot of weight-pulling for a skinny category book.
To get all academic here for a moment, Reckless Pleasures made me start thinking at a theoretical level about infidelity, justice, and HEAs. We think that all we want from our HEAs is for the hero and heroine to end up together. But we actually want something else, too. We want anyone who breaks the rules to be punished (that’s why we expect the villain who stands in the path of true love to get what s/he deserves). And the rules of romance are that true, monogamous, married love is sacred. So the problem is, you can’t have both. You can’t serve the unfaithful hero or heroine with true justice–the loss of love–while also delivering them a happy ending–the winning of love. That’s why books where a hero or heroine commits infidelity are so unsettling for romance readers. Even if we don’t recognize it, we want two things that can’t co-exist. And not just any two things. Love and justice, which are the two strongest driving forces in narrative, the stakes that matter most. I guess what I’m saying is that Tori Carrington is a little bit revolutionary, and in appreciation we should invent a new pronoun for them.
July 14, 2011 @ 3:24 pm
I had so, so, so much trouble with that book. For about a bajillion reasons. Jane reviewed it over at Dear Author, and she more or less hit all the high (low?) spots for me. I’ll be interested to hear how you feel about it when you’ve finished.
July 14, 2011 @ 3:48 pm
I ended up disliking it intensely, for almost exactly the reasons given by Jane in her Dear Author review. I thought she particularly nailed it when she said:
I *do* still think that dealing intelligently with infidelity is an interesting challenge for a romance writer to take on, but I don’t think T.C. successfully addressed all the interesting themes that could grow out of that challenge.
July 14, 2011 @ 3:56 pm
I agree about infidelity as a theme. I was surprised how strong the reactions against it were on the Dear Author blog (and also over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which also did a review), but I forget sometimes that there are romance readers who are more dedicated to escapism than I am. I am all for large dashes of reality in romance. But here, for so many reasons, the book just didn’t succeed. And honestly, I can’t help feeling that it was a lazy novel, rather than one that tried hard to hit the mark but missed it.
July 14, 2011 @ 4:08 pm
I would have loved to see Carrington explore the weakness theme. That’s where I thought s/he/they were going–people are weak, people make mistakes, but Megan *can* learn what’s important to her, etc. …
The other mysterious thing about that book is what the heck Darius’s father’s story is supposed to tell us about theme. I liked the idea of “love is about who you can’t live without,” but also felt that that idea was insufficiently mined.
I’m sort of right up the middle when it comes to romance as escape v. romance as vehicle for exploring a whole range of human possibilities. I don’t mind going someplace dark mid-way through a book if I know I’m going to get a (true) HEA.
July 14, 2011 @ 4:20 pm
Yes, I think that’s one direction the story could’ve gone and been more satisfying. But ultimately, those early chapters in Jason’s POV confused me so much, I doubt the story was redeemable. I felt TC depicted the depth of Megan’s love for Dari in two ways: (1) their sexual compatibility, and (2) her anxiousness to see him again. But then she was equally sexually compatible w/Jason, and she got so anxious to see Dari that she… slept w/his best friend. So in the end, I didn’t think the book was set up in a way that made it possible to believe in the love story that was supposed to be at its center. I didn’t believe Megan had the capacity for real love or adult behavior.
July 14, 2011 @ 5:54 pm
Jason’s chapters were hotter and more believable from a falling-in-love perspective than Dari’s were, which is a big problem …
To tell you the truth, I spent a good portion of the book convinced that we were headed for threesome territory–and I wouldn’t have had trouble believing it.