This post is inspired by two very different book reviews. On 7 November Laura Miller published in Slate the review of Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame. The piece is titled “‘I’ve Been Yours for Longer Than You Could Ever Imagine”: Is the dragon-school ‘romantasy’ series that’s dominating the bestseller lists actually any good?” On 10 November Jordi Gracia published in El País’s prestigious cultural supplement Babelia the review of the winner of the 2023 Premio Planeta. His review is titled “Las hijas de la criada: el fallido folletín de Sonsoles Ónega y la autoinmolación del Premio Planeta” [The servant’s daughter: Sonsoles Ónega’s failed potboiler and the self-immolation of the Planeta Award]. The two reviews have different aims: one questions the best-selling lists, the other the commercial literary awards. Yet, they raise a similar issue: why are readers satisfied with trashy fiction?
I’ll begin with Miller. Rebecca Yarros had published 20 contemporary romance novels with small publisher Entangled, when suddenly she became the embodiment of “every fiction writer’s dream of skyrocketing to success after years of scribbling in obscurity”, thanks to the BookTok fever her new saga has unleashed. Following in the wake of Cressida Cowell, Anne McCaffrey, and Naomi Novik, Yarros narrates how young Violet Sorrengail’s trains at Basgiath War College to become a dragon rider. In the process she establishes an enemies-to-lovers relationship with fellow male trainee Xaden. The first novel, Fourth Wing, has been the top New York Times bestseller for six months; the second, Iron Flame, has sold two million copies in a few days. Miller explains that the saga can be classified as romantasy, that is, romance narrated against a fantasy backdrop. According to her, this mixed genre has “the characters and conflicts of YA fantasy but with more profanity and explicit sex”. In short, it is, I’ll add, new adult.
Here comes the crux of Miller’s review: “Seemingly”, she writes, “every single sentence in [Iron Flames’s] 528 pages includes at least one cliché”. Wondering why Iron Flame is nonetheless so popular, Miller speculates that “It’s possible that many of the novel’s younger fans simply haven’t read enough to recognize how tired Yarros’ language and motifs are”. As she notes, “cliché makes reading a speedier process for people uninterested in anything but plot”. Yarros’s novel may be “risible to someone who wants something fresh or surprising from a novel” but provides “a familiar comfort to someone in search of an immersive escape”, particularly those at ease with the romance tropes. Miller ends up persuading herself that Yarros’s use of “narrative laws that are reassuringly consistent and unbreakable” provides reassurance to readers who faced with a “perilous and unpredictable (…) real world” only seek stories that “turn out all right in the end”.
Miller’s prejudiced review is based on the impression that Yarros’s fiction is appallingly clichéd, then, and although she tries not to offend readers who enjoy romance, she concludes that this author is successful only because her young readers are quite undemanding. If you recall, Janice Radway did an impressive job back in 1984 with her volume Reading the Romance, to show prejudiced readers that those who enjoy this genre (mostly women) are not unsophisticated dupes, but quite sophisticated consumers who understand the central narrative mechanisms, display specific preferences for certain subgenres and tropes and, basically, know why they enjoy what others consider trashy fiction. Miller, in fact, uses the word ‘sophisticated’ in the same sense in her review. Most has been made, besides, of the fact that romance fiction, including romantasy is, ultimately, descended from canonical fiction we all appreciate, with Austen and the Brontës as the mothers of the main lines. The difference, though, between Radway’s 20th century and Miller’s 21st century, though, is that whereas the former was battling prejudice from literary readers, the latter is highlighting the dismay of readers already convinced about the values of romance fiction.
Allow me to further explain myself. Radway and others in other popular genres, such as the gothic, science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and so on, faced an uphill battle in the 1980s to demonstrate that these genres are fundamental part of literary culture, and not simply escapist trash, and that some of the authors are producing very solid work within them. I myself joined the battle in the early 1990s, together with many other scholars born in the 1960s, mostly from working-class families. We were used to enjoying those genres and in fact had to make a great effort to accept that they were not part of the canon, until we had the chance to prove that these genres had their own canons and that the top novels could be compared in many cases with literary fiction, if not in the quality of their prose at least in the relevance of their contents. With the support of a new open-minded scholarship and of the reviewers trained using it, the popular genres grew in quality, with detective fiction crossing the barriers of prejudice and becoming generally accepted. The non-mimetic popular genres have been facing a harder time, but their own scholarly, reviewing and awards circuits have been strengthened and, in general, the fiction vastly improved.
Then the social media arrived and lent a voice of disproportioned resonance to young readers who, respectable as they are, lack experience. They have bypassed academia and traditional reviewing to persuade other young readers like themselves, first through YouTube and Facebook and now through TikTok, that their choices are the best. The publishing houses have been using the booktubers and booktokers to peddle their wares, tailored to suit their preferences. Young readers are now, therefore, flooded with an unstoppable stream of YA fantasy, which is now growing in the direction of new adult romantasy.
YA, as I have explained several times here, is not the same as traditional children’s or juvenile fiction, which was consumed in the process of maturing as a reader, until the person in question found their way into the classics and, to use a label I hate, adult fiction. YA in contrast was created for and sold to young readers who dislike reading, to impress them with the idea that it is ok not to enjoy the books the adults in their circle believe they should read, because those books were boring and, thus, to be avoided. The result, if you add social media to the cauldron, is that few young persons read and those who do so read mostly YA fantasy published to suit the tastes of, sorry, unsophisticated readers. Since these readers are not as demanding as adult readers, the general level of the YA fantasy aimed at them has been descending. Thus, whereas I do not hesitate to proclaim that Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy The Hunger Games is a key contribution to 21st century fiction of any genre, you can see from Miller’s review that Yarros’s fiction is trash. The popular genres that we, boomer scholars, have fought so hard to defend are now, then, trapped by publishing interests and the naivety of young readers into a downward spiral that seems very hard to stop.
I’ll turn now to Jordi Gracia’s bitter ranting against Sonsoles Ónega’s La hija de la criada and the Planeta award. Gracia would have never reviewed Ónega’s novel if it were not the winner of the award, which is the best paid in the world (1 million euros). He makes no bones about how much he hates being in the position of reviewing what seems to him a “failed potboiler” [folletín fallido]. To be honest, his summary and review of the novel are quite bad, and I wondered as I read them whether he was poking fun at how messy Ónega’s plot is with his own messy reviewing. The ‘folletín’, which can be defined as print soap opera, can be done “well or badly”, Gracia explains, and Ónega does it very, very poorly. Gracia finds fault with the plotting, the worldbuilding, and the style, concluding that “La sensación de ridículo es sofocante” [“the impression of ridicule is asphyxiating”]. Yet, what irks Gracia is not that this novel will be published (yes, the Planeta awards unpublished fiction), since the author, a well-known journalist, has published “otras tantas” (many others). What appals him is how the seven illustrious members of the jury (all well-known literary figures as authors, editors and scholars) have not fulfilled their mission, betraying the trust of “una mayoría de españoles con ganas de leer historias entretenidas sin que naveguen necesariamente en la indigencia moral y literaria” (“a majority of Spaniards wanting to read entertaining stories without necessarily navigating moral and literary poverty”).
Jordi Gracia is a professor of Spanish Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona, with a long prestigious career, which includes many volumes, some published with Anagrama. He does not depend, then, on pleasing Planeta, which is the biggest publisher in the Spanish language. Gracia is, therefore, well positioned to launch an attack against the award but also the wrong person to do so. Unlike other awards, the Planeta does not aim at discovering literary excellence but at selling a product than can please the Spanish average reader. In many ways, Gracia’s attack is unnecessary as anyone who follows the Planeta in Spain knows how the award works. There has always been a strong suspicion that the winner and the finalist are preselected with the jury simply lending their prestige to the choice, though this has never been proven. The Planeta has been given to accomplished writers (you may check the list of winners here) but the problem is that in recent years it is hardly disguising its commercial bent. Gracia has possibly found Ónega’s novel the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, though the irony is that his outburst will not have the impact he was seeking. Quite the opposite. I read this morning that Queen Letizia queued for 40 minutes to have Ónega sign her copy of the novel. Both women are friends, but even so the public spectacle of the queen endorsing a trashy novel is quite chilling.
I think that the right person to have reviewed Ónega’s novel is my sister-in-law, as she is the type of middlebrow reader that buys every year the Planeta award-winning novel. I did tell her about Gracia’s review, but she has decided to buy anyway the novel. For her, like for many other Planeta-award readers, Gracia is a nobody in comparison to Ónega (currently the host of a TV talk show). My sister-in-law agrees that giving such huge quantity of money to a novelist makes little sense (this is money that Planeta advances on the basis of expected sales, and this is an award that sells massively). As for the writers, Catalan best-selling author Marc Pastor’s (@DoctorMoriarty) tweet sums up the situation perfectly: ‘Posa’m una crítica sagnant i dona’m un milió d’euros’ (‘Get me a caustic review and give me a million euros’).
Gracia, in short, has no business ranting against the Planeta, though he has a good point to make about the dubious function of the jury. Miller, a journalist and critic, who cofounded Salon.com (she was for 20 years the editor of its Readers Guide to Contemporary Authors) and author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, also seems overqualified to judge Yarros’s dragon-riding saga. In both cases, El País and Slate pay attention to novels about which it is perhaps better to keep silent, since nothing a learned reviewer may say will alter their course toward commercial stardom. I have learned from writing a negative review which I later regretted publishing that one should only endorse valuable books, and let the bad ones sink into oblivion. Hopefully.