A Question About Romance Novels

I consider myself a good and flexible reader but on a recent visit with a good friend, a romance writer, she pointed out that for all my talk about reading books on their own terms I had never read a single one in her genre. She was right. I've read Austen, I've read Eliot, but I have actively dismissed contemporary romance my entire reading life. The genre felt bound to the kind of person reading it and I didn't see myself as that person. Of course, I had no real basis for the dismissal. I'd just never picked one up.

She suggested I start with one of the better-written examples, one that invests heavily in its unusual subculture: the world of rodeo circuits, where the workers distract bulls after the bulls have thrown their riders. The book is called Reckless in Texas by Kari Lynn Dell. I know romance has subgenres and traditions I can't speak to. I'm reading one book. But the book knows where it's going and carries no embarrassment about that. Within a few chapters I was inside the modest concerns of these characters on a Texas ranch where the biggest stakes are whether any of them will let themselves feel protected. A problem created by their own self-conceptions. The happiness waiting for them feels inevitable and I found the relief of that surprising.

It has been a long time since the history of “serious” literature favored that kind of certainty. The omniscient narrators in fashion when Clarissa was written gave way, slowly, to Sartre and the postwar anxiety over subjective truth, to novels that stripped away the all-knowing voice in favor of a single limited perspective. Today most serious literary fiction works as hard as possible to erase the narrator mechanism entirely — hence the sharp rise in autofiction and memoir. I've spent years of my reading life inside that tradition. I trust its instincts. But the romance novel, at least the one I'm reading, does something older. It tells the story from above and lets you into both characters at once. It uses that access to build an intimacy between them that is slow, teasing, and deliberate while keeping the reader apart. Being once removed actually frees the characters to get really hot and heavy without implicating the reader directly, which turns out to be an effective point of craft. Dell has organized everything toward resolution and years of reading the same literary tradition have trained me to distrust that. Ambiguity is the truth I’ve learned to trust, but that same ambiguity costs something in 2026 that it didn't cost me in college. The fractured postwar forms I admired at twenty felt like freedom then but now they feel like freefall.

Late in the novel there's a conversation between the two main characters that I keep turning over. Delon pulls away after being turned down but Tori won't let him:

"So it's just me." His hands dropped hers and he slumped back against the couch.

"No! Lord, Delon. Look at yourself." She sketched a frame in the air around him. "You're amazing — a helluva bareback rider, a great guy, a wonderful father, and gorgeous on top of it. I've gotta be some kind of fool not to be in love with you."

The order of her list is what interests me. She names his physical mastery first: his ability to ride a bull bareback, to master an animal with nothing between them. Kindness comes after. Beauty comes after. Fatherhood comes after. The world of the novel prizes competence above all, what a body can do when it has nothing to rely on but itself. And then there's the word fool, which keeps surfacing throughout the novel in a way I don't think the author is doing on purpose. Tori sees everything admirable in Delon but she frames her inability to love him as looking foolish. The fear underneath the love story is that the community will see her at her most vulnerable, watch her get hurt, and cull her for being weak. That tells me something about the world Dell has built. It's a world that still assumes the community is there, watching and judging a person on their mistakes. That assumption is doing a lot of work in the novel and I think it might be the thing I find most foreign about reading it right now.

There's a concept in philosophy I've been circling lately, the line of flight. The idea is that inside any system that presents itself as sealed or inevitable, there are always cracks where something escapes and moves in an unexpected direction. Writers who worked through the Cold War, the postwar wreckage, or plague years, or any other time of conspicuous uncertainty, found those cracks. They refused to let the dominant structure be the only thing moving them forward. I had assumed that refusal lived only in literary fiction, in the open-ended and the unresolved. But I'm starting to think the romance novel does its own version of the same thing. Its certainty isn't naivety. It's a commitment the genre makes before the reader even arrives. A novel that insists love is enough to resolve all psychological problems isn't describing reality but it is refusing to hand its ending over to a world that says nothing will work out. And a world where the worst thing you can be is a fool in front of your own people is at least a world that still believes people are there. That's worth something. I think it might even be worth a great deal.

I believe in all of this. I've come to respect what the romance form does, what it offers, and the seriousness underneath its old-fashioned conventions. But I will tell you honestly that I still wouldn’t be caught dead reading this book at the bus stop while waiting for my kids after school. I don’t know what that says about me except that, like Tori, I too feel like I need to hide my new interest from the public lest I be judged. I’d be a fool not to!