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I'm reading the last novel in this Nora Roberts collection. (I'm stubborn.) It's not as bad as the first one, at least. Anyway, though, my reactions remind me somewhat of my reactions to Heathers, oddly enough.
It's written in I think 1984, and set in the same time period. So I was technically alive, but not aware of anything at the time. And, like Heathers, I can see that there are social cues that I'm missing because I don't know what they mean. In Heathers, the clothes were totally over-the-top, but I didn't know enough about eighties fashion as an adult to be able to tell whether they were supposed to be normal, high-fashion, or ridiculous. I'm having the same kind of trouble here - she's mentioning specific hotels and clothes and such, and I can't tell what the implication is supposed to be. Among other things, her heroine is at her favorite, classy bar at which she's a regular, and when asked for an order, says "White wine". I don't think I'd ever tell a bartender just "White wine". I'd ask them what whites they had by the glass. Or if this really was my favorite bar where they knew my name, I'd know. I'd at least order by varietal - "a Riesling", if not a specific winery. 'Cause if the bartender knows my first name, I'm probably there enough to know what my favorite wine they carried was. And this woman is supposed to be a blue-blood, Ivy League grad from Westport - they keep making a big deal of how sophisticated she is, so she really should be a bit of a wine snob. Thing is, I also know that American wine culture has significantly grown in the last couple decades.
So is it that the character doesn't know any better? The author doesn't know the character should know better? The character is trying not to be too big of a snob? The bar only has two kinds of wine - "red" and "white", and will look at you funny if you try to ask for something more specific? The character could order something more specific, but is trying not to look like a snob? The author wants her to look like a snob for ordering wine at all instead of beer? If this were set right now, I'd feel more comfortable trying to draw a conclusion about what the author is trying to reveal about this character based off her drink choice. But I honestly can't decide whether she's supposed to come off here as sophisticated, snobbish, sensitive, or clueless.
It's kind of amazing, when you think about it, how fast these kind of subtle indicators change. (Seriously, the difference between a character eating sushi in the 80s or now is enormous.) Makes you wonder how many of the chick lit books will even be understandable in twenty years, when people can't quite remember which brand of shoes it was that was desirable at the time. And it makes me wonder how much I'm missing in, say, Jane Austen. Because surely there are subtleties in which books people are reading or what color dress they're wearing that are just slipping right by me.
It's written in I think 1984, and set in the same time period. So I was technically alive, but not aware of anything at the time. And, like Heathers, I can see that there are social cues that I'm missing because I don't know what they mean. In Heathers, the clothes were totally over-the-top, but I didn't know enough about eighties fashion as an adult to be able to tell whether they were supposed to be normal, high-fashion, or ridiculous. I'm having the same kind of trouble here - she's mentioning specific hotels and clothes and such, and I can't tell what the implication is supposed to be. Among other things, her heroine is at her favorite, classy bar at which she's a regular, and when asked for an order, says "White wine". I don't think I'd ever tell a bartender just "White wine". I'd ask them what whites they had by the glass. Or if this really was my favorite bar where they knew my name, I'd know. I'd at least order by varietal - "a Riesling", if not a specific winery. 'Cause if the bartender knows my first name, I'm probably there enough to know what my favorite wine they carried was. And this woman is supposed to be a blue-blood, Ivy League grad from Westport - they keep making a big deal of how sophisticated she is, so she really should be a bit of a wine snob. Thing is, I also know that American wine culture has significantly grown in the last couple decades.
So is it that the character doesn't know any better? The author doesn't know the character should know better? The character is trying not to be too big of a snob? The bar only has two kinds of wine - "red" and "white", and will look at you funny if you try to ask for something more specific? The character could order something more specific, but is trying not to look like a snob? The author wants her to look like a snob for ordering wine at all instead of beer? If this were set right now, I'd feel more comfortable trying to draw a conclusion about what the author is trying to reveal about this character based off her drink choice. But I honestly can't decide whether she's supposed to come off here as sophisticated, snobbish, sensitive, or clueless.
It's kind of amazing, when you think about it, how fast these kind of subtle indicators change. (Seriously, the difference between a character eating sushi in the 80s or now is enormous.) Makes you wonder how many of the chick lit books will even be understandable in twenty years, when people can't quite remember which brand of shoes it was that was desirable at the time. And it makes me wonder how much I'm missing in, say, Jane Austen. Because surely there are subtleties in which books people are reading or what color dress they're wearing that are just slipping right by me.
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It always irks me ( a tiny bit) in TV/Movies where a character sits down and is like "Beer please". ... like WHICH BEER? At least say, "Domestic draft, I don't care which." *eyeroll*
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But you're right - it was the same level of weird to me as someone just asking for beer. It's like "we've got six beers on tap and another half dozen in bottles, you want to narrow that down a little? Can you really not tell the difference?"
I guess what really confused me is that I felt strongly that the author was trying to convey some kind of information with this line, but I haven't the slightest idea what.
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It is similar to asking for "a beer" in anything but the trashiest taprooms; the bartender should answer, "Which?" But not as similar; many places will only carry 1 white and 1 red wine, while almost no one only carries 1 beer.
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Still, the weaker writers rely too heavily on "Ooh, she listens to Oingo Boingo?"-type references to communicate everything about a character. And it's not wrong to fault them for it when they do so and are lazy.
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The thing is, I feel like you can also learn certain things about a writer or a time period based off of what a fairly consistent character orders at a bar, for example. Which is what is driving me crazy here. The character is, in general, very genteel. So is it that the character thinks this is a sophisticated order, Nora Roberts thinks (or thought, rather) this is a sophisticated order, or Americans in general in the 1980s thinks it's a sophisticated order? I'm completely willing to let Nora Roberts off the hook here - it may be that the fact she's ordering wine in a bar at all was a rarity at the time. As a baby, I typically did not frequent sophisticated bars.
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So, yeah, I get it. Nora Roberts making a wine reference is hoping to convey something about the character that will read differently across decades, and it's fair for her to do so since those clues point to character. Where there's a weakness is in assuming that even contemporary audiences will know, just out of the blue, what some of those clues are supposed to indicate. Even a 1980s reader might not get what a woman, supposedly a sophisticate, would prove by ordering just white wine.
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But it really emphasizes how superficial and ridiculous some of our shorthand is. But it's really hard to go without it - while choice of clothes, car, shoes, restaurant, even job does not reliably indicate the true soul of a person, it does say a lot about their values and situation. But only if you know how to read it.
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I'll also point out that the Nora books jethrien is reading are Harlequin Silhouettes, which were never meant to have a shelf life. They're published like magazines--on display for a month and then junked. The only reason these ones are still in print is because they are by Nora Roberts, who wasn't "Nora Roberts" when she wrote them. So I doubt she paid any attention at all to how it would read a decade or two later.
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Daily consumption was not common until the 1990s. Article below notes the sea change occurring in 1991 with the first TV special about "moderate wine consumption being healthy."
http://www.cyber-spy.com/ebooks/ebooks/The-Curious-History-Of-Wine-Consumption-In-America-%28ebook%29.pdf
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I'm not so sure that this is laziness rather than the style of a lot of women's fiction. I mean a lot of women's fiction I've worked on has talked about La Perla lingerie--it seems almost expected, like that's part of the fantasy in reading about this heroine. Me, I hadn't even heard of it before reading these books.
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Couple things...
2) My mom tells this hilarious story:
She was in 11th grade English class when the teacher (Mrs. Rosenbaum, her husband was a Reform Rabbi at a local temple -- in her younger days, she dated a very young Jonas Salk!) starts criticizing a paper handed in by saying it was a plagiarized version of a Harlequin romance novel with a few details changed.
The student in question asked: "how can you know that?" and she answered:" Because I WROTE IT!!"
apparently, she worked for Harlequin back in the day when she was living in NYC and she proceeded to tell them all mesmerized what it was like, back then, doing that! There was a formula they all had (there was a group of 6-7 writers busy churning these out) to follow, the plot line was all pretty similar, the cover artists told the writers what color hair etc... the characters would have and then they just let go! They were paid by the page of output!
at the end of all this, my mom asked: "You mean, these stories are NOT REAL??" with like tears in her eye's!! (you have to know my mom to appreciate this)
and Mrs. Rosenbaum just said: "No dear, they're just the figment of MY imagination, but they "could" have been quite real! -- real life is much more complex and messy, and sometimes the good deserving girl does not get the right perfect guy."
heh, my mom was crushed, she stopped reading and buying those romance novels, and went for her Masters in Library Science...