Fictional Matrimony
Father’s Day is one holiday that definitely embraces the married man. I was thinking about that switch from prowling single guy to paterfamilias the other day, after I found the sequel to a novel I’d enjoyed.
In this sequel, hero and heroine are married, and starting a family. I looked forward to seeing how Hero and Heroine went about that, now that they’d found one another.
Within a couple of chapters I was stumbling over the constant repetition of the word ‘touched’-not just in the bedroom (where long love scenes were constrained to the word ‘touched’ following which would be stratospheric level pleasure) but it seemed that every
Their love was so incredibly and fantastically superlative that everything danced whenever they interacted. Eyes danced. Eyebrows danced. Smiles danced. Voices danced; every bratty thing she said (and marriage seemed to change her emotionally from twenties to early teens) was guffawed at, as he found it excruciatingly funny, and every ponderous thing he said was received by her as amazingly profound.
It can be said that this is what that honeymooner stage of love can be like, when every twitch of the other’s eye could be discussed for hours. But as those effervescing pages went on without alteration in tone, I began to suspect that the author didn’t seem to know what to do with a married couple, and so ramped up the little interactions to maximum emo-overdrive with an orgasmatromic blunderbuss.
This is not a fault limited to this particular author. How many books have interesting married couples? After all, the reader doesn’t want them really fighting, because the author wants us to love them both. So the conflict pretty much has to be a Stupid Misunderstanding. Or, as in this book, the heroine’s feistiness dwindled into brattiness and self-pity, as everyone rallying around to pat her on the head, until she dashed off despite everyone’s warnings to do her Heroic Deed. At which time Daddy, er, Noble and Wise Hubby, comes to the rescue, sword a-swing.
Finally I didn’t find them interesting, but maybe other readers did. I guess we all have to define what kind of relationship is “interesting.” Authors of realistic fiction assume reader interest in microscopic and unflinching depictions of the petty defeats of anxious modern life. Relationships are built on lies, they don’t last, or one finds someone, just to love them to disease, random violence, a change of attitude. I happen not to find those interesting, though there is an admiring audience for this genre.
For my reading pleasure, I consciously look for characters in the heroic mold, in which our main characters are larger than life, ones we might wish we could be if we were smarter, younger, better looking, stronger, more talented and successful.
There are remarkable people like that-and there are remarkable relationships like that, both in life and in fiction. So . . . who are they in fiction? How do they make it work?
Where I think many authors go astray is in assuming that the couple has to stay in courtship mode forever. The thing about married couples is, they change. The subtle alterations, negotiations, tensions and releases involved in two distinct individuals in certain ways becoming of one mind, and even aging together, can be interesting in how they deal with events. We don’t need to have her be ever coy and alluring, and him ever chasing and catching, or the other way around.
There are so many facets to love. The couple has to negotiate, compromise, demand or retreat, and again and again, fumbling for understanding, through all the great events in which they are involved.
In this sequel, hero and heroine are married, and starting a family. I looked forward to seeing how Hero and Heroine went about that, now that they’d found one another.
Within a couple of chapters I was stumbling over the constant repetition of the word ‘touched’-not just in the bedroom (where long love scenes were constrained to the word ‘touched’ following which would be stratospheric level pleasure) but it seemed that every
Their love was so incredibly and fantastically superlative that everything danced whenever they interacted. Eyes danced. Eyebrows danced. Smiles danced. Voices danced; every bratty thing she said (and marriage seemed to change her emotionally from twenties to early teens) was guffawed at, as he found it excruciatingly funny, and every ponderous thing he said was received by her as amazingly profound.
It can be said that this is what that honeymooner stage of love can be like, when every twitch of the other’s eye could be discussed for hours. But as those effervescing pages went on without alteration in tone, I began to suspect that the author didn’t seem to know what to do with a married couple, and so ramped up the little interactions to maximum emo-overdrive with an orgasmatromic blunderbuss.
This is not a fault limited to this particular author. How many books have interesting married couples? After all, the reader doesn’t want them really fighting, because the author wants us to love them both. So the conflict pretty much has to be a Stupid Misunderstanding. Or, as in this book, the heroine’s feistiness dwindled into brattiness and self-pity, as everyone rallying around to pat her on the head, until she dashed off despite everyone’s warnings to do her Heroic Deed. At which time Daddy, er, Noble and Wise Hubby, comes to the rescue, sword a-swing.
Finally I didn’t find them interesting, but maybe other readers did. I guess we all have to define what kind of relationship is “interesting.” Authors of realistic fiction assume reader interest in microscopic and unflinching depictions of the petty defeats of anxious modern life. Relationships are built on lies, they don’t last, or one finds someone, just to love them to disease, random violence, a change of attitude. I happen not to find those interesting, though there is an admiring audience for this genre.
For my reading pleasure, I consciously look for characters in the heroic mold, in which our main characters are larger than life, ones we might wish we could be if we were smarter, younger, better looking, stronger, more talented and successful.
There are remarkable people like that-and there are remarkable relationships like that, both in life and in fiction. So . . . who are they in fiction? How do they make it work?
Where I think many authors go astray is in assuming that the couple has to stay in courtship mode forever. The thing about married couples is, they change. The subtle alterations, negotiations, tensions and releases involved in two distinct individuals in certain ways becoming of one mind, and even aging together, can be interesting in how they deal with events. We don’t need to have her be ever coy and alluring, and him ever chasing and catching, or the other way around.
There are so many facets to love. The couple has to negotiate, compromise, demand or retreat, and again and again, fumbling for understanding, through all the great events in which they are involved.