Elinor Lipman on "Romantic Comedy" I started writing fiction at twenty-eight in an adult ed workshop at Brandeis University. I was a slow starter, there on a busman's holiday, since I wrote for the Massachusetts Teachers Association by day, and had no burning desire to sit at the typewriter by night. But then I got hooked. As I began to submit manuscripts, I knew exactly what I wanted from the process. I wanted my stories read in class; I wanted people to laugh and to think I was talented. I wanted my teacher's praise. I wanted to be part of the family, to fit in, to be the best student at the table. In other words, I wanted the workshop equivalent of critical and popular success.
My workshop phase ended a dozen years ago when I left the Boston area and moved to Western Massachusetts. But recently a reporter brought it back to mind when she asked me what I hoped my work evoked in readers. I realized that I was still going after the workshop buzz; that what I wanted was what I got from my workshop on a good night: approval, laughter, admiration. I didn't write much of anything as a child except for the occasional holiday poem, but I read all the time. I loved novels with smart and witty heroines. I didn't like tragedy - I refused to read further in Black Beauty when the puppies' ears got clipped, and I haven't picked it up since. I liked hardship of the plucky, silver-lined kind - Daddy-Long-Legs and the Five Little Peppers, Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables. I loved orphans, orphanages, picaresque girls away from their parents (Our Hearts Were Young and Gay). If I loved a book I reread it several times a year. I didn't like animals who talked except for The Wizard of Oz and Charlotte's Web. I had a love-hate relationship with Grimms' Fairy Tales, the scary unabridged version. It was bedtime reading for months at about ten or eleven, but only the same few non-gory stories: prince, princess, frog. Good triumphed over evil. Endings were happy. I read every Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, Happy Hollisters, Honey Bunch and, at fourteen, every O. Henry story ever written.
From junior high school on, my father pressed Ring Lardner's short stories on me. I came to believe that funny equaled good. What else could people possibly want? Except for one afternoon trying to adapt P.G. Wodehouse's Damsel in Distress into a movie, in my math notebook, I didn't dream about being a writer. After all, my parents read constantly, and they weren't writers. Neither was anyone else I knew personally. I was pragmatic: I was going to be either a lawyer, a meteorologist or a pharmacist. I wish I could say it mattered to me then if the authors of the books I loved were men or women, but it didn't, as long as I loved their stories and their characters.
And now, even though I don't consciously avoid it, I have a hard time writing the fictionalized human analog of puppies getting their ears snipped. If I'm going to create a world and be its god, then I want to be a benevolent one. If I create characters and come to love them, why torture them? Why let their children drown? Certainly not for reasons of literary fashion. Accordingly, my work sits under a banner that proclaims it "romantic comedy." It's taken several books for me to wear that label comfortably, and to remind myself that it's not only what I write best, but what I look for in other voices. When I do readings, I choose chapters that make people laugh. How else can I judge its success? How do writers of sad books get by? On a soft approving purr in the back of the audience's throats?
Now notice I said "sad." Not "serious." This is about to be a theme.
In 1992, when The Way Men Act came out, a reporter for my hometown paper came to my house, sat in my living room, drank my herbal tea, asked lots of questions and generally led me to believe I could keep my head up on Main Street after the piece was published. And then she poised her pencil and asked, "Are you ever going to write a serious book?"
I wish I had quoted Woody Allen, who has said, "Comedy writers sit at the children's table." I wanted to say, "You are an unsatisfactory reader. You, whose husband teaches literature at Amherst College and should know better, are being literal; you who don't realize that so-called serious books are a dime a dozen, think, If a book makes me laugh, well I guess it must not be serious." I took a deep breath and said it had taken years of editorial therapy for me not to apologize for the humor, which many people--critics at large newspapers, in fact--valued. In the world of publishing I'm considered, you know--literary. I should have stopped there, but I said rather archly that a woman was teaching Then She Found Me (my 1990 novel) at Mt. Holyoke as well as other colleges too numerous to mention, and the course, as far as I know wasn't called, "Lite and Slight Romantic Comedy."
After she left, I called my editor, who I knew would be properly indignant. She said, "Oh, yeah? How does this reporter like Jane Austen? And what does she say about As You Like It, huh? How does she like the arc of that story?" (When the piece came out a week later, the subhead said, "Lipman calls critics of her comedy 'pretentious.'")
And at the risk of citing only dyspeptic reviews, I'll quote another. It was a review in The Short Story Review of my story collection Into Love and Out Again (1987): "Lipman's characters," it said, "are charming, but charm is the blight of the Eighties, to wit Ronald Reagan." They wouldn't, for example, care about events in Latin America. I wrote back, the only time I've ever sniped at a reviewer, and said, essentially, "Dear idiot. You are confusing character with characterization. Do characters succeed only if you'd want to have dinner with them? Is it good writing only if you follow a character into the voting booth and he or she pulls the same lever as you would?"
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More recently, I felt the burden of what I'll call "pop depth," a literary cousin to political correctness. I was asked to judge a writing contest, and had to read ninety-two book-length short story collections. In a majority of manuscripts, writers chose for their characters and settings things outside themselves that seemed selected for weight and depth. Latin America for sure. Mexico. Trailer parks. Diner lunch counters where the Formica was cracked in a symbolic manner. Most characters were in broken marriages and abusive relationships - all grist for fine literature, don't get me wrong. But there was something about the sheer repetition --so many angry lunches on Mexican verandas with bougainvillia scenting the air, that I was crying out for something unexotic. Something in Newton or Scarsdale. Here is what I concluded: Many beginning writers feel that there is no depth, no meaning, no poignancy, and consequently no stories inside their own houses and their own families. Outside and far away was the key to deep and important, as if they're saying: "We whose parents are sending us to graduate school are by definition shallow." It made me wonder if all over America, graduate creative writing programs were saying: "Always use bougainvillia instead of violets; always choose a trailer over a house; always choose a Bud Light over a glass of chardonnay." I came away thinking, You can't get a leg up that way. It's all fiction. It's all made up. It's all from thin air. There shouldn't be any givens that confer automatic nobility... Isn't it all a blank page, with no inherent depth or weight?
In 1992 I reviewed The Republic of Love, a novel by Carol Shields. At the time, I was worried about how my own soon-to-be-released screwballish love story (The Way Men Act) would be received. And here was a sister book I loved - romantic comedy and social satire for intelligent adults! I raved about it, all genuine and all deserved. I quoted with a touch of narcissism what I called a model "dear-reader" passage: "Fay's noticed something she's never noticed before. That love is not taken seriously. It's not respected. It's the one thing in the world everyone wants to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.
"Work is important. Living arrangements are important. Wars and good sex and race relations and the environment are important and so are health and illness. Even minor shifts of faith or political intention are given weight that is not accorded to love. We turn our heads and pretend it's not there, the thunderous passions that enter a life and alter its course. Love belongs in an amateur operetta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card, or in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society... It's womanish, it's embarrassing, something to jeer at, something for jerks. 'Just a love story,' people say about a book they happen to be reading, to be caught reading. They think of it as something childish and temporary, and its furniture--its language, its kisses, its fevers and transports --are evidence of a profound frivolity. It's possible to speak ironically about romance, but no adult with any sense talks about love's richness and transcendence, that it actually happens, that it's happening right now, in the last years of our long, hard, lean, bitter and promiscuous century."
When I called Carol Shields to ask permission to quote from the above, we talked about this double standard - about love being unfashionable on the page. She said, "And don't you hate that question people ask - 'Are you ever going to write a serious book?'" We laughed before she added, "People don't want to write about it anymore. But what's more important than love and loneliness? That need hasn't changed." This comes up often - men and women who want this universal longing to go away, thematically. It's serious business in the therapist's office, but on the page, trivial.
I was talking to Meg Wolitzer, the novelist, after she'd come from a meeting with some Hollywood people. The producer, a woman in her thirties, had said very blithely, "This stuff? About women needing men and vice versa? It's retro." Meg repeated the line to me and said dryly, "What a relief. I'll call my friends up and tell them they're not lonely anymore."
And what do my readers want? I believe they want to feel better when they finish a book than when they start it. They want to be amused, moved, befriended, included. Once I heard Robert Stone speak, and he said he thinks the real purpose of a novel is to make the reader feel less lonely. I don't think readers want messages. They want to inhabit the world my characters live in, or at least visit it comfortably. Sometimes they write to me, and often I meet them at readings. They feel as if they know me, and they do. My first novel, Then She Found Me, was the story of April Epner, a quiet Latin teacher, who finds out her birth mother is an obnoxious TV-talk show hostess. At a reading I gave in New York - and I can't resist saying it was mobbed mostly because The New York Times had run a feature the week before titled, "Readings as an Opportunity for Romance" - a woman raised her hand during the Q & A. I had read from The Way Men Act, and most questions were about that. I called on her, and she asked simply from the back, without preamble - "How's April?" Nobody looked puzzled; nobody asked, "Who's April?" It meant a great deal to me, to have a reader inquire after a fictional character as if she were a mutual friend. I thought, what more could an author want?
I said, "She's fine. She's happy. She sends her love."
© Copyright 2012 by Elinor Lipman. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
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