A Moon in the Sky

I seldom find myself but in complete concurrence with the lyrics of the great Lorenz Hart, but just now, I'm afraid my romance does indeed require a moon in the sky, a castle rising in Spain, etc. I've been reading submissions for the prize committee on which I still serve and I desperately need a change of scene. I'm not finished reading for the committee, you understand, far from it, but for tonight and the immediate future, I'm done. Taken in gulps of twenty five or thirty pages each, I've had a steady diet of mostly middle class Americana and BFA prose for two days now, and I can't take another bite. Nothing wrong, really, with any of it, you understand, I just can't face another serving. I'm sorry, but I can't be made to care today about the contemporary state -- straight subset --of the American marriage, walking tours of Alaskan wilderness, or how one's kitchen garden teaches patience. I need to read something that isn't about you, whoever you are, nice as you are. I need something with savour, something with wit, history, adventure, and yes -- romance.

I try a noirish looking thriller. Why not?

Plop. Onto the pile it goes. Raymond Chandler may well have been a genius. Maybe it required a fastidious, expatriate, old English soak to really make art out of the American argot of gats, gumshoes, and dangerous dames. Maybe this kind of thing, besides a bottle of rye and a facility for alliterative names, really does require an old-school-tie. All I know for sure is, Raymond has a lot to answer for as an influence in American popular fiction, and it ain't all harps and roses, bub.

Twelve books in two days, that's what I've been through. I've taken to tossing each new book after the last to a heap on the floor by my bed, and then kicking them out of the way when I get up to make my lunch. Obviously, I'm hungry. A sandwich with good Parma ham and a nice, ripe cheese, makes me feel better. This, followed by the glory that is the Twice Baked Almond Croissant from Bakery Nouveau is nearly enough to restore to me my more usual delight in life, but then, I pick up the last book in the stack of submissions, the one I've been saving in hopes of something satisfying, and not even the last bite of croissant can keep the smile on my face.

It's a novel. It has a thoughtful premise. It is well written. I am bored beyond endurance. Over the side it goes.

It's a commonplace nowadays to bemoan the influence of the writing programs and seminars that teach to a standard that does not encourage innovation, experimentation, etc. This is nonsense. I've read far too many books by graduates of and or instructors in American writing programs that disproved this. If I have any complaint about the contemporary workshop prose I've been reading, it would be that too much of it seems satisfied with writing well about people every bit as dull as myself -- even, it seems, when they are traveling through time, solving mysteries, hiking a glacier, teaching, or having an affair with the neighbor. Ho hum. Yes, the author has captured exactly the way we talk nowadays, the way we think and dress and eat and write novels -- what of it? What I need is a book where the protagonist is better than me. I need a book where nearly everyone in it is smarter than I am, braver, wittier, more interesting. I need a romance.

So, I kick the last of my required reading under the bed, climb the back of the couch in the living room, and retrieve from the high shelf the last of Dumas' great Valois novels, The Forty-Five. Chicot Lives!

If you haven't read Alexandre Dumas père, or haven't read him since you read The Three Musketeers in a "Classic Comics" edition, well... you must. Dumas is the master of the romance. Scott was his master, but the student far surpasses elder writer in humor, invention, sophistication and sex. I am an evangelist for the Musketeers cycle, in toto, which is I think far and away the greatest romance ever written. The Valois novels, set in the successive reigns of the last Valois kings -- capons all three -- tell a thrilling story, with one of Dumas' greatest, and now least known heroes, Chicot. A loyal servant to bad masters, a swordsman, a wit, and a philosopher, Chicot deserves to ranked with D'Artagnan and Edmond Dantès as among the very best of Dumas.

I've held off reading The Forty-Five simply because I was reading so many other things and because I did not want to run through my Dumas. But today, I deserve a proper romance, castles and all. And so, off to the Louvre and the brave men of Les Quarante-cinq.

Bores be damned.