Dare I Read a Nora Roberts Novel?

Parodying T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, I ask, Dare I read a Nora Roberts novel?

I ask this after coming upon Lulu Garcia-Narraro’s NYT interview with the author (November 19, 2023). Now 75 and still writing, Roberts indisputably reigns the queen of today’s romance genre, authoring some 250 novels, 224 of them making the NYT best seller list, and half a billion copies sold.

Roberts isn’t into harlequin narratives, her female characters resolute, resilient, independent women who may enjoy the company of men, but not their dominance.

Often fighting against the odds in a patriarchal world, they exemplify courage, daring and resourcefulness. They aren’t perfect, but this lends to their plausibility.

Feminists have criticized her for her preoccupation with romantic relationships, but Roberts, a self-declared feminist, sees nothing wrong in a partnership of equals: “Whether it’s a man or another woman, it’s someone you love that you build a life with,” Roberts says.

In real time, Roberts is politically engaged. She is incensed with frenzied book banning. Eight of her own books have been removed from shelves.

I remain conflicted. Do I want to enter a genre of preeminent feminine sensibility where in real life I may be resented as an intruder?

Then, too, I’ve always been suspicious of prolific novelists who seem to write effortlessly with sales in the millions. But then there was the Victorian Anthony Trollope, who could flush out a novel on a train ride, composing forty-seven of them, along with short stories and essays. Today, his books, celebrated as canonical, are admired and studied for their political and social insights.Genre writers, nonetheless, don’t win or get nominated for the literary awards that matter to the Academy, e.g., the Booker, National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Nobel prizes.

It’s grievously unfair, the line between the literary and the popular often porous. Take science fiction, for example, and writers like Wells, Huxley, Bradbury and Clarke. I think their prescience and literary acumen quite stunning. And yet they and their cohorts haven’t secured any of these prestigious awards, apart from two exceptions, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Quin for her YA novel The Farthest Shore (1973) and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story {2002). Le Quin was a fierce opponent of genre discrimination.

The other exception is Margaret Atwood, winning a Booker in 2000 for her Blind Assassin (2019) and in 2018, the Golden Booker for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, selected as the best Booker in fifty years.

I find this frequent condescension toward genre writers as faulty as it is snooty. It bothers Roberts, who now simply defines herself as a novelist.

But returning to the romance genre, the classical exemplum is surely George Eliot, whose Middlemarch excels in its delineation of relationships fulfilling or frustrating the human longing, not only for reciprocal love, but to be heard understood and free to pursue one’s authenticity.

I’ve read Roberts excerpts. She writes a nimble and witty prose.

Writing often clarifies things for me. Yes, I’ll dare to read a Roberts novel, but with this caveat—perhaps just one novel for now, knowing so many vibrant books, fiction and non-fiction, that stretch the mind, I still have yet to read.

rj