Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #54

Shockingly Gauche Clerihew

GEORGETTE HEYER

Were you aware
That Georgette Heyer
Rhymed not with shire?
No, nor esquire!

Big Babies

Now that's a big baby, no? That would be me. The photo's undated, but I'd have to say it was taken, roughly, in the first Johnson administration. Add a beard and spectacles, replace the ball with a book, and I look pretty much the same today. Same chin anyway, I'd bet ya, somewhere under the chin-whiskers. Now keep in mind, different time, different standard of what constituted the "healthy" baby. Back then? I was the bomb. I'd like to think that I've made some progress; intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, -- if not as a physical specimen -- since such a grin could be had from me by handing me a rubber ball. (Probably the last time that worked, frankly.) Times change. Everybody says so. Evidently, I don't, much. Not so much as I would like to think, anyway, but they say the times do. Not The Times, though, not much, not really.

The New York Times has been publishing its best-seller lists since 1935. (The Times has doggedly kept the hyphen all these years, why I don't know, but I'll honor the tradition tonight.) Looking back at almost any of these lists previous to the present decade, what's most striking is how few titles or authors will now be either familiar to readers, or even in print. Take, just by way of example, this fiction list from the week of my birth, July 14, 1963:

1 THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN, by Morris L. West.
2 ELIZABETH APPLETON, by John O'Hara.
3 THE GLASS BLOWERS, by Daphne du Maurier
4 GRANDMOTHER AND THE PRIESTS, by Taylor Caldwell.
5 SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
6 RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS, by J.D. Salinger
7 CITY OF NIGHT, by John Rechy.
8 THE SAND PEBBLES, by Richard McKenna.
9 THE BEDFORD INCIDENT, by Mark Rascovich.
10 STACY TOWER, by Robert H.K. Walter.


There, of course, is J. D. Salinger. There also is John Rechy's City of Night; an early and important work of realistic homosexual fiction, and the foundation myth of the gay hustler as Existentialist in tight jeans. Still in print, is Rechy's book. (There are also, by my count, at least three popular movies made from this list: one good, one pretty good, and one epic if ridiculous potboiler, though that last is still enjoyable today, if only for Anthony Quinn's performance, in a part played less convincingly thirteen years later by one Karol Wojtyła.) This list, I can assure you, is pretty typical, even as to Salinger & Rechy bobbing up amidst the usual flotsam and jetsam of otherwise forgotten fiction. Trust me, when it comes to what makes a best-seller, nothing much has changed.

Here's the most recent top ten NYT List for hardcover fiction:

1 DEAD OR ALIVE, by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood.
2 THE CONFESSION, by John Grisham.
3 CROSS FIRE, by James Patterson.
4 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson.
5 FULL DARK, NO STARS, by Stephen King.
6 FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen.
7 PORT MORTUARY, by Patricia Cornwell.
8 THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett.
9 SQUIRREL SEEKS CHIPMUNK, by David Sedaris.
10 FALL OF GIANTS, by Ken Follett.

See what I mean? There's Franzen, of course. Nothing like Salinger, which is neither a good nor a bad thing to me, but Franzen may well last a good long time yet. In fact, by 2063, I'd bet he'll be something very like the late John Updike, as that would seem to be the model in mind, though I'd say the name John O'Hara, from the actual July 14th, 1963 list, may prove nearer the mark. (All three of those much reviewed novelists seem to me to be, and to be read and reviewed by, much the same white guy. There's kind of a gap in there, between Updike and Franzen, so maybe it skipped a generation, but that would seem to be something like the point of putting Franzen on the cover of Time magazine, among the man's other recent achievements. Remember Time magazine? We still carry it at the bookstore where I work, right next to the New Yorker.) Now, does anyone really think anyone, roughly fifty years from now will be reading anything on this list, other than, if I had to guess, maybe the minor Sedaris and the major Franzen? (Someone, I just know, will want me to say a kind word for that dear man, Stephen King, and he is quite a nice fellow, but, no.) Anyway, I'll be long dead by 2063 most likely, so it won't matter a snap to me who's reading what.

Spend most of my working life, you know, buying books to resale as used (in case anyone reading this has missed the name on top or wondered what it meant.) I can tell you categorically that I would not buy any of the books on that first list, hardcover or paperback, save numbers six and seven. Perhaps more surprisingly, once any of the titles on the second list cease to be listed, I won't be buying many of those either. And a year from now? Even the hardcovers of Franzen will be on a discount table.

Please note also, that the division by gender, both on the old list and the new, is heavily weighted to the boys. This tells me that men write, and read, at least as much or more shitty fiction as women do or have ever done. I mention this to avoid, in what comes after, being accused of pickin' on girls. For now, I'll save any speculations I might make as to the inexplicable popularity of Tom Clancy for another occasion.

I make this all too familiar point about the unchanging nature of the New York Times Best-Seller List again tonight because of a couple of recent and related items in the news that I happened to read, both reported in the New York Times, not so coincidentally, now I come to notice. The first, much ballyhooed item back in November, as I remember it, was the announcement that, starting this year, the NYT Best-Seller Lists would be including a list of the best-selling ebooks. Well, why not? Just the Times keeping up with the times. Gotta give them credit -- no frost on the pumpkins over at the NYT. The other story, from December 8, last year, was titled, "Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: Romance E-Books Thrive." That was the headline that really caught my eye-- so pantomime-dame-dirty and so utterly unsurprising.

Back in 1891, in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde claimed, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written." (This would come up again, for poor Oscar, about four years later, when he was tried and convicted on a charge of immorality, or "sodomy and gross indecency," to give the specifics.) I quote this famous maxim because in the "Lusty" NYT piece, an explanation of the burgeoning popularity of Romance on ebook devices, was given by one Sarah Wendell, Romance blogger and co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, who was quoted to the effect that because of “the mullets and the man chests,” on traditional Romance cover art, the consumers of this kind of fiction are not always "comfortable" being seen reading these books in public. As the article's author puts it, Romance readers, in ever increasing numbers, would seem to prefer "the discretion of digital books." Huh. That might be true of most of what appears on the NYT Best-Sellers List of Hardcover Fiction too, in a way, come to think of it, and explain why we don't sell much of that stuff nowadays either. Just a theory.

I may have heard this somewhere before, this blushing about the covers of Romance novels. In fact, I've been hearing exactly this as long as I've been selling books. I'm not really buying it anymore. The only source of the Romance readers' embarrassment is still poor old Fabio, -- or Son of Fabio, I should think, by now -- lookin' all sweaty tan and man-whorish on the cover? So it's just the vulgarity of those big bosomed, bare-chested book-covers, not the content, that still brings a blush of shame to the Romance fans? It's the sex? Honestly? As a bookseller, let me assure you, at least for the bestselling authors in this genre, those covers are no longer required, or even the norm nowadays. Oh, they're still in use, but by my observation, there is more garish flesh displayed on the average sword & wizard epic, or superhero graphic novel, hell, on many a wholesome YA novel of teen angst, than on the covers of three quarters of what we sell in Romance.

So why all this embarrassment about reading Romance in public, still?

For any who may never have actually read a Romance novel, or only read something in the more genteel Regency line, let me just say, I've actually read more than one. I did. I asked a wonderful woman I worked with years ago, the woman who ran the incredibly profitable Romance section at a Crown Bookstore where Romance was Queen, what I should read if I was only going to read the best contemporary Romance writers. I read all three she gave me. I did. This was the top o' the line. Every title was a best-seller and all three novelists were considered then to be at the top of their game. Here's what I remember:

The plots, while more than predictable in the main, did offer some interest. Only one of the three I read was billed as a "romantic thriller," but all of them had suspenseful elements, and these were competently handled; carefully paced, logically arranged and satisfactorily resolved. If anything, I would say that the best Romance writers could give a lesson or two in simple craftsmanship and planning to a number of better known writers in more regularly reviewed and critically better respected genres, from espionage thrillers to detective fiction, to say nothing of that nest of lazy fabulists hiding in the dark corner of fiction indulgently called Fantasy.

The heroines and heros, at least in the books I read, were likewise surprisingly realistic characters, with real jobs, believable circumstances, even convincingly complicated emotions. The real tell, of course, was how good looking they invariably were, but this is an acceptable, even time honored convention in fiction, dating back to Gilgamesh, so if the appearance of a devastatingly handsome rake seemed sadly inevitable once the reader had been introduced to the ravishingly beautiful female lead, that proved less a problem than one might anticipate. Everybody likes a pretty girl and a guy with a great smile. The supporting players, including the inevitable wrong guy, didn't offer much interest, but none were handled any less professionally than they might be in the average police procedural or historical novel of the past fifty years.

What about the sex? Well, nobody does that very well in fiction. To their credit, all three of the Romance writers I read treated the act of heterosexual coupling, and the language used to describe it, with a becoming restraint; bosoms didn't heave, nothing undulated or throbbed, and, while there was a lot of moistened lips, damp lashes, glistening flesh and wet regions, in fact, more moisture than would seem altogether usual in this sort of thing, I will be the first to admit the limitations of my own experience in the field, and just defer to the expertise of the authors. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much actual consummation was on offer in all three books, as I'd been led to expect more tease than tussle and more longing than laying in this kind of book. What's more, the heroines were uniformly sexually aware, and experienced, with not a trembling virgin in the batch. I don't mean to suggest so much as a hint of feminism in any of the three Romance novels I read, but the practical and cultural effects of the women's movement -- remember that? -- were evident throughout. When these women succumbed, as they all did, it was very much a matter of choice, not force, fate, or uninvited friction.

The morality in the books I read struck me as being sound, if far from thoughtful, and certainly in keeping with the contemporary moral and cultural climate. There were none of the expected anachronisms of feminine inferiority or inherent weakness, or dependence on men. If the men in all three books could still easily be slotted into the either upright or low down, at least the good guys weren't saints and the bad guys weren't complete cads. That's progress, isn't it?

So why this unconquerable, blushing embarrassment among the constant Romance readers, still, if the books they read the most aren't anymore quite the books they still describe to reporters and the rest of the us? Well, to refer once more to Wilde's rule, the one thing all the Romance novels I read had in common, beyond the points already mentioned, wasn't their immorality, it was that they were all badly written books. That, I think, is what their devoted readers would rather the rest of us not notice about their Romances.

The Romance novels I read, and the Romance novels I've looked into since, are without any of the qualities that elevate fiction to literature. Romance has little or nothing to say, and says it not only over and over and over again, but says it thoughtlessly, just passing the time, with no more originality, style or wit than one might overhear in a polite conversation between strangers about the weather. I would be hard pressed to find duller prose among the computer manuals, or less interesting or imaginative ideas bandied about at a card party in an Episcopal rectory. It isn't, I now think, the sex then that embarrasses these women, it is the knowledge of, and their continued, cowardly, childish pleasure in, childish things. A dull girl of thirteen could be forgiven for thinking Twilight a good book. What might she know? Her mother insisting that Teresa Medeiros, or Nora Roberts is suitable reading for a grown woman of even average intelligence? Might as well admit one has never opened a magazine more challenging that Us Weekly, liked a song without a catchy hook, watched anything on television after nine PM, seen a movie that didn't star Jennifer Aniston, or had a conversation, with anyone over the age of thirteen, not met at either a parent-teacher-conference or in the beauty shop. Get caught, in public, reading a book by Loretta Chase and you've nobody to blame if the rest is assumed. It isn't fair, and it's not right, but there it is. May not be true, probably isn't, but there's no one but yourself to blame if reading stupid books makes people think you're stupid. It is that, the evidence of their own arrested intellectual curiosity, at least in reading fiction, that, quite rightly, shames the Romance reader of whom we have every right to assume more when she is caught by her peers reading Romance novels.

Nobody who isn't likes it when people assume they're stupid.

I believe many, if not most of 'em, know better. (Maybe they don't, but as a bookseller, I'd have to say most of them had to walk past an awful lot of good books, in most independent bookstores, to find the bad ones.) What reading Romance novels suggests to me is neither a dirty mind nor a dumb person. What a regular or exclusive reader of Romance looks like to me is someone who has made a choice to avoid reading literature for the very things that make it superior to just fiction. I am not wholly unsympathetic. (Not that any reader of popular fiction has need of, will or should care to have my sympathy on this subject.) There can be a perfectly understandable exhaustion for the contemporary reader of literary fiction; it can all seem so mannered and maudlin and grimly pessimistic. And the classic novel, at least as remembered from high school or college? The language alone can defeat the best intentions of the most sincere reader. That said, it really does take a conscious effort to avoid good books. Unless one lives in a cave, the access of readers to good books has never been easier. Informed opinion is everywhere. Librarians, booksellers, reviewers, bloggers and book groups have never been so loudly, widely and readily available to offer suggestions, possibilities, and alternatives to whatever it is you might already have read. Despite all the media noise about the death of the book, the fact is that there has never, in all of human history, been an easier time for people in the developed world to read good things, find good books, try something new.

The most common defense of reading Romance novels is that everyone, even the gourmet, may still have a craving for junk food. This is inapt. What makes a Snickers bar superior to nearly anything I could think of to eat just at this moment is not just the knowledge that I can walk upstairs and fetch a Snickers from the pantry in less than a minute, (excuse me, be right back,) or that it will be sweet, it is also, and this is my firmly held conviction, that for what it is, a Snickers candy bar is about as good as such a thing can be made to be for less than a dollar, retail. A Romance novel is not then a Snickers bar, it is not even a plain Hershey's Kiss. As an inexpensive, accessible and easily consumable treat, the Romance novel does not rise above the level of the candy-necklace, Pixy Stix or candy cigarettes (ask your parents.) Romance novels are not empty calories, just empty, badly written books.

The friend of a friend recently chided my friend and me for just this kind of snooty talk on a social media site by suggesting that great and good literature is full of romances. This is true, but please notice the case. From Walter Scott to A. S. Byatt, great and good novelists have titled their books this way. But a romance in this sense is a tale, told well or badly, of virtue's triumph over adversity, as I understand it, and in the modern sense, is more a Bildungsroman, or novel of education, with a specifically female protagonist. Don't confuse cases. When the term "romance" is not now used either ironically, or in actually parody of those earlier forms, it just means a love story. A Romance novel is to an old style romance, or even a good love story, what a so-called debate on the floor of the newly installed U. S. House of Representatives is likely to be to the oratory of Demosthenes: something like, but not much, and embarrassing when compared.

Jane Austen and the Brontes are also frequently invoked in defense of the genre of Romance, but again, even in the sub-genre of the Historical or Regency Romance, there is less evidence of actual inspiration, or even imitation in this, than of either a jaundiced, grubbing mimicry or flat misunderstanding or ignorance of the work of Austen or even the least of the Bronte sisters, none of whom produced the kind of insipid, repetitious, recycled pap that is sold from the Romance shelf. Not every novelist can aspire to be Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, but I can't see where the contemporary writer of Romance fiction aspires to be much of anything at all, other than rich. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, at her most desperate and worst, would not have presumed to suggest that her late potboilers were written or ever meant to be read as worthy successors to Pride & Prejudice, and the very late Mrs Humphrey Ward, at her worst, wrote better fiction than the recently late Kathleen Woodiwiss at her best.

The nearest thing the Regency Romance can claim to a classic, would be the books of the Georgette Heyer, the founder of the category, and pleasant as some find these, they are but the best dresses most carefully made to old patterns.

So why the persistent popularity of some of the worst writing by women currently being produced, and consumed in unprecedented volume, both as books, and now on electronic devices? And why have I let myself get so exercised on the subject? After all, if anyone still wants to buy a Romance novel from me, or any other damned thing from an independent bookstore, I for one am only too happy to sell it. And if the readers of Romance now prefer to read their stuff on discreet, gray little calculators, really, that is the only ground on which I can honestly object. Nevertheless, I will offer at last only one, entirely anecdotal, otherwise unsupported theory, and then I will just shut up about the whole business for now. Most of us do certain things in private of which we would not be proud to have notice taken in public. For example, I blog -- a hideous verb I try never to use in reference to myself, even among friends. Well, if I'm going to do such a thing in public, and if anybody is still reading this, then, yes, that's what I've just been sitting here doing again, all evening, instead of reading Balzac, and like Romance readers, I should hope I have the sense to be at least a little ashamed of myself.

(Oh, stop be so damn cranky, you Big Baby, and just go to bed.)

A Defensive Clerihew

GEORGETTE HEYER

The readers of Georgette Heyer
Insist whenever they buy her,
Her books aren't nearly so vulgar & cheap
As the company they've been forced to keep.

Heyer and Higher

This will get me in trouble, should any of my devoted readers also happen to be devoted readers of Georette Heyer. If anyone does happen to be both, it might be best if this entry were skipped. Pick up a Heyer novel and let this be. I don't mean any trouble, honestly. It's just that I've tried her again, my fourth book by Heyer, and I simply can't. Try as I might.

If one works in a bookstore, it's likely the fans of Georgette Heyer are familiar. They are unlike most readers of genre fiction, at least insofar as Heyer's readers do not readily admit to being readers of either mysteries or romance. Georgette Heyer, according to every one of her readers I've ever met, is superior to genre. She really ought not even be shelved with such. She certainly doesn't deserve the undignified way in which, for example, her Regency novels are marketed, as if they were just, well, Regency romances.

Georgette Heyer is credited, rightly I trust, with having invented the 20th Century Regency romance novel. Taking the premise, period and setting of an Austen novel and making a working formula of it, and a fetish of her extensive research, Heyer produced one new romance every year for years, usually set in the Regency, but with some exceptions. Later, she expanded her production to include thrillers. For the thrillers, Heyer's lawyer husband provided the plots. It was a workable system. In fact, other than tax problems, Heyer seems to have been a remarkably clever business woman, and a remarkably successful popular novelist. That her books are still read, and largely in print, and her fans still so uniquely devoted, speaks well of her skill at what she did.

What she did though was hack. Many if not most great writers, at some point, have hacked, either as journalists, or copy writers, or middle school teachers, or editors of Christmas annuals. Writers must eat, after all, have a roof over their heads, earn some kind of living. Rare indeed have been the real aristocrats whose art was done entirely at leisure. Rarer still the writers who wrote to please themselves and ended pleasing readers. Not every budding Thoreau had a family pencil factory to finance pumpkin-sitting. Austen herself might have been too genteel to scrub floors, but I suspect she worked hard enough about the place, if not on her knees. And middle or working class writers were often grateful for the opportunity to write reviews between novels. Oliver Goldsmith, perhaps the most famous or infamous hack in our literature, accepted commissions to write just any damned thing on offer, often spending the commissions without producing the contracted work, or, if he did write the book he'd already been paid for, producing something like his natural history, so laughably inaccurate, even in his own time, as to be the subject of more jokes then praise. (Though even the least of Goldsmith's hack work was touched by something of his wonderful style, and often proved popular enough to go through multiple printings, at least in his brief lifetime.) There's no shame in hacking, except as a vocation. For Heyer, hacking was a business, and she was damned good at it. The problem I have, trying to read even a late thriller from her, is that her very real talent was never put to any better use. I think she might have done, but her last book was no better than her first, so far as I can tell, and not because she just wasn't a very good writer. I can't help but think she chose hacking, perfecting her formula to the detriment of her talent. That's what makes her maddeningly difficult to read for me, the awareness that she might always have written better than she does.

Josephine Tey was a very successful playwright when she took up writing mystery novels. That she seems barely to bother with the conventions of the genre, which I suspect bored her, is now what makes her very light entertainments still so surprising, and entertaining. I don't think there's any doubt that she wrote for money. I do think she became a mystery writer for that very reason when her plays ceased to be successful. But Tey, by the time she took the genre up, already thought and wrote quite unlike most of her peers. She wrote stories of murder and historical crime because it was a way for a woman to be successful, and because she discovered a facility for doing so. But every Tey novel is different. Her plots are irregular. In her first thriller she seemed to almost forget to kill anyone until the book was nearly over. Her detective is remarkably passive, for instance, when she has one, and she was as likely to stick him in a hospital and set him to solving the murder of the Princes in the Tower as to have him be on a train where a man dies in what may or may not have been an accident. Tey's novels make no claim beyond their genre, but they aren't made to serve the genre either.

Heyer clearly set out, from her first novel, to write commercial fiction. That she was brighter than the average, more meticulous in her research than most, and genuinely amusing, ought to have put her in at least the first rank of the strictly mercantile writers. Perhaps in her romances she deserves to be considered the best in her genre, though of what must be admitted is a truly sorry, sorry lot. I've read two of her historicals, one Regency and the other a novel of Charles II. Both are full of entertainment. I can quite appreciate how well she did what she did in her romances. The problem is that that is all either book ultimately was. Heyer never wrote a single memorable heroine or hero, so far as I can tell, or villain. In fact, I doubt she ever wrote a memorable character. Clever things are said in all her books, and in her historicals, everything said is said, as I understand it, just as it either was or might have been said at the period in which the book is set. She is not without real wit. Her plots, if predictable and completely unoriginal, are well made. Her writing is never clumsy or obviously bad. So why isn't she better than she is?

It was one of her thrillers I've just tried, Penhallow. Evidently she wrote a story of murder where there would be no mystery as to who did it, why, when or how, as much to break a publishing contract with which she was unhappy as to do something different. The idea that she was not writing a traditional mystery made me think that here at last I might, indeed, have found a Heyer novel superior to its genre. I was hopeful of that for a hundred pages or more, despite the many and obvious faults of the book, all of which are faults of genre; the cliche of the plot and setting; a bully too deserving of murder, a family tied to a manse, resentments and motives galore, the cliched characters; the dotty widowed aunt, the unhappy wife, the bitter and useless younger sons, the malevolent head of the family, and the cliched writing with which the bad guy "storms" and "rages," his victims "cower," etc. It is all pure melodrama, though better made perhaps than the average, but melodrama made to serve no purpose. Nothing is said of these privileged types that in any way challenges either their privilege or their place in a novel. There is no hint of a wider world, of interior lives beyond the uses of the plot or to generate emotion. Every chapter is a discreet scene, serving nothing but the advancement of the rather lame story. No one in the book changes, evolves or increases in interest, each being just as and what he or she was when met, except of course the guy who gets killed, who at least goes from living to dead, and not a moment too soon.

The problem with Heyer's novel then is not that it isn't good, though it ain't, but that it isn't better. Any writer who could do as well as this ought to have at least tried to do something worthwhile. Heyer never does. She is not so bad as to be sincerely so, not a hack, in other words, for want of talent, but rather only as good as she seems willing to be without extending herself, mentally or stylistically, beyond a lazy conventionality. Even her prejudices are predictable and dull; mocking the brutality of uneducated country gentry, and the pretensions of anyone inclined to art or even just urbanity, treating the working people about the place with something very like the disdain of their employers, when not ascribing to them an animal cunning. Heyer was such a complete and unrepentant bourgeois that nothing she seems ever to have said or written, about the rich or poor, the violent or the passive, the good or the bad, could ever have caused a moment's disquiet in her equally bourgeois readers. Nothing, it seems, ever moved the woman herself but cash, comfort and competence. That doesn't make her a bad person of course, but it does define the hack, no? That is, I suspect, the secret of her sustained popularity, the defensiveness of her fans, and her singular failure to write a single exceptional, or even really exceptionable book.

The comparison inevitably made is always with Austen. Fair enough, considering Heyer's obvious debt. But it does a disservice not to the romance novelist, but to the great one to see between them, or between their books, the slightest real resemblance. I may not always like what Austen has to say, but she has every right to say it, writing as she did of and in her own time and doing so better than any of her contemporaries, if not better than almost anyone since. Jane Austen may have been limited by her circumstances: provincial, a little pious, conservative, romantically silly, but her novels are never limited by either a failure of nerve or talent. Jane Austen wrote the best possible novels a woman so circumstanced ever could, and because she was a truly uncommon writer, a great writer, wrote some of the best novels ever written. If Heyer was not gifted with such an exceptional genius, it hardly seems right to judge her harshly because of that. It seems quite right though to judge her for her reliance on, or better, her exploitation of, the least, as it were, of Austen: the plots and props, the sets and costumes and slang. Heyer wrote her novels for no better purpose than to say nothing worth saying about a time not her own, people as dead on her pages as they already were by the time she came to write about them, and evidently with no other motive than to systematically, and profitably, produce commercial fiction using meticulous, unadulterated research, hackneyed construction, and a style of smug palatability seemingly suited perfectly to her devoted readers. The whole enterprise, to me, begins to reek a bit of sausage. Austen was a supremely talented and original artist. Heyer was, I must say again, a supremely successful hack.

The comparison I've found more telling than that made to Austen is with another, more modern and minor novelist, a truly original writer but one with whom Heyer seems to share a certain preoccupation not only with the past, but also with monsters. Trying to read Heyer's Penhallow, I was put in mind not of Jane Austen, but of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In Penhallow, the reader meets an aging monster, a brute and a sadist, who bullies his servants and family until, at last, the only option for his dependents seems to be murder. Compton-Burnett wrote just such monsters, male and female, in novel after novel. Here's Heyer describing her monster:

"... a mountainous ruin of a man, with a hawk-nose jutting between bloated cheeks; fierce, malicious eyes staring beneath brows that were still jet-black and bushy; and an arrogant, intemperate mouth."

This is Adam Penhallow, who, even before we meet him, is already "roaring" the house awake,and who "jeers" at his wife as soon as the scene is set with an inventory of his miser's room. We quickly learn that his knuckles are hairy, his mood bad, his temper short, his tongue sharp. We're told all this as well as shown it. He's a bad 'un. Not long after we meet him, propped up in his vast, ugly bed, chewing an apple and torturing his weepy wife for the fun of it, there is a furious exchange of exclamations, threats, ending in hysterical punctuation and the usual cruel laugh. One hears the swelling score in every gesture.

Now here's one of Compton-Burnett's monsters, from her novel Daughters & Sons:

"Sabine was a tall, lean, upright woman, with small, tired, acute eyes in a small, tired, acute face, and rather flat and formless features shaded by a fringe of dyed, dark hair, which had once taken from her years and now protected this period. Nothing about her, save perhaps the smallness of her steps, suggested her eighty four years, but her face told their tale, and her pale grey eyes were the eyes of a woman of a hundred."

Now there's a monster that will do damage.

Compton-Burnett understood that monsters must be human to be truly frightening to adults. And her monsters are not isolated cliches, her bullies are calm, clever, ruthlessly conventional, and motivated by more than the needs of the plot, to the extent Compton-Burnett's novels can really be said to have plots. Compton-Burnett, as evidenced by just that short quote, knew her monsters, and was not afraid of making them funny as well as hair-raising, nor was she either afraid of or embarrassed by her own curiosity. No need to show off what she'd "researched," to write what she knew. No need for just the right hat-pin or detail of saddlery. No need to reassure her readers that evil was hairy, girls good, and the best boys eager for marriage. Her style is everything Heyer's might have been had Heyer been an artist, or rather Heyer's novel is everything Compton-Burnett's might have been had she not. The comparison then is not between good and bad writers, or even good and bad books, but fiction and literature. I just can't quite read popular fiction as such anymore without comparing it to, and hoping it will be, literature, and that makes reading Georgette Heyer an unhappy experience. She never even tried to write anything higher than the most thorough and accomplished hack-work.