Julie Bruck, the long-time Montreal poet (now relocated to west coast USA), has a poem in this week’s New Yorker: The ‘World-Famous’ Lipizzaners, a lovely, tight portrait of horse dancing at country fairs. Congrats, Julie. Last week, the same august cultural organ carried a disturbing profile of romance novelist Nora Roberts.
Well, I was disturbed, though there was nothing very offensive in the pen portrait of this insanely productive writer. Described by journalist Lauren Collins as having “a dirty mouth, a smoker’s cough and a closet full of Armani”, the Irish-American romance novelist published 10 books under two by-lines last year, generating $60-million US in revenues.
You will learn a great deal about her process, her wit and wisdom, her iconic position in the romance genre, though her personal life is skimmed over, divorce from her childhood sweetheart, as gauzy as a chick-lit sex scene. What you will not get is a whiff of sarcasm or a hint of reservation about the point of all that typing. I wonder whether a profile of Martha Stewart would be so kind.
As with most New Yorker profiles, the author seems to have spent weeks, nay months, hanging out, eating in her subject’s home, watching her chat with fans, everything but trailing Roberts into the bathroom. Yet she came up with no dirt, no irony, and never once raised the question of whether what she’s doing is worth knowing all about. In fact, there is no apparent point to the piece except to marvel at Roberts’ sales and how wonder (seriously) she does it.
There are, however, a few tips that could serve any writer of any ambition. The big secret is: ass in the seat. Some writers claim to be thinking about writing while they’re at the beach or drinking G & T or catching up on their tan (working it out mentally, saving paper, ruined drafts, etc). Roberts proclaims a sober truth. If you don’t get at the typing, no book will emerge. Although Hemingway, who had back problems, claimed he typed standing up.
What irony the profile offers must be extracted by the reader herself, by overlooking Collins’ self-insertion into the narrative. “One day, as we were talking, I mentioned sheepishly that I’d never read Proust. ‘I don’t particularly want to,’ Roberts said. ‘I do not feel obliged in my reading. I read to be entertained and to relax, and to go into another world, not because it’s good for me.’ She paused, nostrils flared, and said, ‘I don’t eat broccoli, either.’”
Whew! I’d never imagined Proust might be good for me, like I know broccoli to be. So it’s all right to go around saying you haven’t and won’t read the bed-ridden little bore. You don’t need to feel bad, or say he’s over-rated and risk meeting someone who has read Proust.
Seriously, the Roberts profile, so ably written and well-researched, offers one more example of how fully marketplace values now dominate our cultural life. If you can’t sneer at pulp fiction, what’s left to sneer at? Poetry?
