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[jethrien]

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.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

At the same time, people do make assumptions about you based off of what you drink, in real life. Which is a lot of why my boss got me off amaretto and onto gin in the first place.

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.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

One interesting 1980s-centric example that is the classic definition of this problem is American Psycho. Nobody reading it or seeing the movie now would understand that half the joke is that the combination of items the main character details down to the last stitch would look ridiculous...for the 1980s, even. The obsession over clothing and what it communicates about a character is still humorous--you can still read into it all the contempt the author has for the phonies fretting about their ties and glasses--but the punchline's flatter for not being able to know, just from reading, that their humorous obsession is all the more so for it being obsession in the pursuit of some seriously ugly shit. Shit that was ugly for the 1980s.

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.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Well, yes - it's not an important plot point, and there are plenty of other clues to the character. So I wouldn't necessarily say that Roberts has failed here - I still read the character pretty well, I think.

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.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I know! It's so funny to me, too, to see how poorly sketched out characters change with time, too. Like, even if she meant "white wine" to be the measure of sophistication, here we are two decades (almost three!) later going, "What, would she like some WHITE WINE brand white wine, like bootleg VODKA-brand vodka? Like hobos drink?"

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I want me so hobo-brand vodka!

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

American Psycho was published in 1991, too, so it was set in the past even at the time.

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.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, my favorite example of this is Jeeves and Wooster. In the books, Bertie talks with a very particular type of slang. To the modern reader, it just sounds of the time period of the books, but it's actually about fifteen years previous to the setting of the books--it's meant to indicate that Bertie still talks in schoolyard lingo. Like having a character nowadays saying "rad" or "don't have a cow" all the time.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Hmm...makes me wonder about the advent of wine bars. It could well be that it was really unusual to order wine in a bar, so there'd be only one. And in that case, it could be a way to communicate the sophistication of the character.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

It might be. I can't really ask my parents, either - it's not like my mom was really a barfly at the time.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking this might very well be the case. I think wine snobbery/interest in the US really took off in the early 1990s. I remember my parents talking about going to Germany in the 1980s and it being a whole different world - everyone drank wine there.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

I should add - drank wine, and knew something about it. At least about German wines.

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