This may be more rant than review. Go buy the book, it’s good.
I had this whole other review written and I expected to publish it Wednesday morning. It talked a little bit about how great Cannonballers are and some #BlameMalin jokes. I reviewed the book. I was debating a spoiler section at the bottom where I could talk about what I really loved. And then I read a tweet from The Ripped Bodice about Robert Gottlieb’s fabulously condescending “round up” of Romance books. I’ve definitely read Gottlieb’s roundup many more times than it deserves. I’m not sure why I’m allowing it so much space in my brain. I’m not embarrassed by the books I read. Some of them are the equivalent of a bag of cheap marshmallows and some of them are like a nutritionally balanced meal with a glass of wine. Whatever the quality of the book, I can and will defend my reading choices.
Paragraph after smug paragraph, Gottlieb got under my skin. Maybe it’s because the modern “working girl” romance I had just read deserved so much better. Here’s what Gottlieb has to say about Romance and the women who read the genre.
The hundreds of romance novels — perhaps thousands, if you include the self-published ones that constitute their own phenomenon — just published or due to appear in the next few months essentially fall into two categories. There are the Regency romances (descended from the superb Georgette Heyer, whose first one, “Regency Buck,” appeared in 1935). And there are the contemporary young-woman-finding-her-way stories that are the successors to the working-girl novels that for decades provided comfort and (mild) titillation to millions of young women who dreamed of marrying the boss. This formula reached its apogee in 1958 with Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything,” whose publishing-house heroines find either (a) business success at the price of stunted love, (b) true love and wifey bliss, (c) death. But almost 60 years have gone by since the virgins of “The Best of Everything” hit the Big Apple, and real life has had its impact not only on modern romance but — as we shall see — on modern Romance.
Every time I read that paragraph, I find something new wrong with it. I’m so glad there’s an 86 year old white man to tell me that stories about modern working women finding love peaked almost 70 years ago. I guess all those women can all stop writing now. In case you are wondering, the new (not entirely welcome) additions to modern Romance are orgasms, girl friends, and not having to choose love or career.
It’s too bad that he failed to notice the many ways in which the Romance genre is evolving. Fuck that guy. I’m going to get to the reviewing.
Dating You Hating You is a modern working woman Romance. Evelyn “Evie” Abbey would recognize Gottlieb’s smug, dismissive smarm intimately. Evie is not a bright eyed naïf, she is in her early thirties with an established career. She is the star of this story. Even though she and Carter trade off chapters, Evie is the star and she deserves to be the star. She doesn’t want to marry her boss, Brad. She wants to survive him. Using a consistent pattern of word choice, emotional blackmail, and just enough praise to be confusing, Brad undermines her and keeps her perpetually set up for a fall. Everyone knows her boss has problems working with women, and no one is surprised that he is the boss. Women are supposed to deal with it. Almost every woman who has ever held a job has been in a situation like this.
Evie meets Carter at a party. It’s a good meet cute. Completely believable. She has reservations because they are both talent agents and he is younger. After some text flirting, they do go on a date. Their mutual attraction sings off the page. And then the shit hits the fan. Her company buys his company and suddenly they are in a manufactured Highlander situation for a job – there can only be one! The competition is ridiculous and created solely to give Brad leverage to get rid of Evie. Despite their best intentions, paranoia about their jobs and miscommunications put them at odds.
Carter gets an education in the sexism Evie and other women face at work. He finds himself being used as a tool against Evie and is forced into “wokeness.” Carter has to evolve in order to be in a place where Evie can let down her guard.
“I tried nice, Carter,” she says, “and here I am, fighting to keep my job—a job I’m more qualified for, if we’re being honest. You might be the one everyone likes, but I’m the one who gets the job done. So stay out of my way.”
One of the challenges Romance writers face is finding believable reasons to keep a couple clearly meant for each other apart. The hate to love trope is a good one (recently done very well in The Hating Game, another workplace romance with a woman who is not fresh off the farm). Christina Lauren put their too new to be solid couple into an impossible situation with the kind of external stressors that can’t be solved by just a conversation. Evie and Carter have to get to a place where they don’t like each other and they don’t like themselves before they can find their way back to what’s important – personally and professionally.
Dating You Hating You is my favorite Christina Lauren book to date. It is almost perfect. You should read it.
A lot of people with more experience and greater eloquence have responded to Gottlieb’s bullshit. One interesting analysis was done on Twitter by Jen, a reviewer at The Book Queen. She applied Joanna Russ’ methods of suppression to Gottlieb’s article. A friend kindly storified the tweets for me. It is well worth a read. Joanna Russ is now on my list of must reads.
At the the end of his roundup, Gottlieb declared Romance “harmless” and posited that it was ok for women to dream. Harmless dreaming. You only have to read the many romance reviews on the Cannonball Read to see that there is more than harmless dreaming going on.
I debated for the longest time about reading that stupid NYT piece, but in the end, I couldn’t help myself. As expected, it infuriated me, but I very much liked the rebuttal (and read much of it out loud to my husband last night).
I’m really glad you liked the book and didn’t feel you wasted your gift card money. At full price is costly, so I wouldn’t have recommended it if I wasn’t pretty sure it was a good buy. I got the Audible audio, myself, which is excellent.
It was an awful article. Thanks for always being such a good friend.
My favorite thing here is that someone on Facebook asked for an in depth response to this, and you were like, “you know what? I haven’t written it yet.”
And then you were like, take this, Bobby.
As I’ve said before, this isn’t my genre (and as you and a few others so patiently showed me, I don’t even technically know what does or does not belong in this genre), but even I could see the bullshit in this NYT article.
Bravo.
Thanks. Other people did much better rebuttals. There was so much more I could have said.
Fantastic review.
That NYT piece infuriated me. So many bones to pick with it that I’m still thinking about it and all the things I wanted to say but didn’t. The E.L. James crap? Don’t get me started. And even the Nora Roberts comment didn’t sit well with me. I love Nora, and when she’s on, she’s on, but it does a huge disservice to the rest of the (very talented) romance writers out there to only call on her and Danielle Steele, who, in my opinion hasn’t done anything truly great since “Zoya”, as being the only to “real” writers in the genre. And that’s essentially what he was doing.
He and Jonathan Franzen should go have dinner together; I’m sure they’d get along swimmingly.
Also, Courtney Milan’s tweet is everything.
He managed to turn every compliment into an insult. So, Fuck you, Bob!
I’m finishing Once Upon a Rose by Florand tonight, probably, and reviewing this weekend. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have things to say to Bob myself. Jerk.
Lovely review and kiss off, our lovely queen of the upvotes. When someone is so wrong, there’s always more that we could say.
I can’t wait to read it.
Though I mourn for the lost review that was (#BlameMalin), this review was great, and your anger is beautiful.
We can always #BlameMalin. She’s always putting such good books in our faces.
I am stupidly happy about having my own hashtag. Being blamed for bringing reading joy into other people’s lives is pretty much fulfilling my life’s ambitions.
I fully share the feeling that Gottlieb’s piece is appallingly condescending, and even wrote a comment to the NYT to that effect.
It escapes me why genre fiction is regarded with such contempt: surely, the constraints it imposes make the quality of the writing all the more important, not less so, and it is I would have thought a fundamental critical error to assume that the defining characteristic of a romance novel is that it is a romance, rather than whether it might be good or bad novel in the opinion of the reviewer.
But perhaps there is hope: at one point, Gottlieb describes Heyer as “superb”, and so she is. However, I seriously doubt whether anyone of his eminence in the literary world would have described her so thirty years ago – during her lifetime, she was not I believe seriously reviewed at all. But her reputation has gradually been growing, of which Gottlieb’s comment is an indication, and perhaps – eventually – this growing critical acclaim will result in romance following crime fiction (once an almost equally despised genre) and being treated with greater critical appreciation.
Thank you for reading and commenting. I hope the authors whose work I love don’t have to wait until they’ve been dead for 40+ years for the New York Times to give them some credit. I thought it said a lot that the authors Gottlieb held in highest esteem were either dead (Heyer, Cartland, Jaffe), the daughter of a well respected male poet (Eloisa James), or Nora Roberts, who is her own industry and on whom he showered the very faintest of praise. Frankly, as much as I have enjoyed both James and Roberts’ books, I would never consider them either the best writers in the genre or at the cutting edge of the genre. I’m truly not concerned about whether Gottlieb has some sort of epiphany about the Romance genre. I do hope the NYT book review felt some sting and will reconsider their genre coverage. Cheers.
Don’t dispute that it is relatively cold comfort. He describes Cartland as “formidable”, which I feel is a personal rather than a literary quality. Though opinions must be subjective, speaking for myself, if Gottlieb really feels that Cartland (whom Heyer came close to suing for plagiarism) is in the same class as Heyer, then there is even further to go than I thought.
I suppose I hoped that if one is willing to admit that one author in the genre is worthy of respect, then perhaps others (including those still living) might eventually be allowed to have some merit also – though I would not suggest for a moment that romance authors and readers need to wait for Mr Gottlieb to have an epiphany before deciding this for themselves.
He describes Cartland as “formidable”, which I feel is a personal rather than a literary quality.
Beyond that, his loftily ironic tone suggests that it’s not the kind of formidable that actually inspires respect, but rather the kind you’d associate with a scary headmistress whose authority you only begrudgingly acknowledge.
I don’t trust praise from men when the underlying presumption is that the woman in question primarily achieved being an exception to the rule of female inferiority.
This makes me so mad. I haven’t read the article but I really don’t understand why why why NYT has writers who are unfamiliar with genres or are not open-minded enough to try new genres to write these reviews. Why alienate your readers of diverse tastes?? Why half-ass a review with a reviewer who knows nothing about it??
I listened to Gottlieb on the Inside The NYTimes Review of Books podcast. He thinks he is an expert. I don’t think he has any idea how dismissive, condescending and awful he is. He would say that he appreciates Romance novels for what they are, while entirely missing the point. It’s like having a group of male doctors run a women’s health clinic. They are doctors, so obviously they are qualified to run the clinic.
Great review!
Thanks!