CS: I love those movies. I think those are really well done. I’m 40 now, and feel like I’ve aged a lot with those characters, even though they may be a bit older than me. Those movies do a great job of showing character development through dialogue—how having those developed characters make the emotions matter so much more.
Trespassing, Uzma Aslam Khan
AVC: This one has a little more of a political bent to it.
CS: Which I like. I feel like for me—this might make me sound anti-intellectual—it’s almost hard to truly love a book that contains no romance or no sexual tension. I like it when a book combines romance and romantic tension with other subjects. That’s the ideal, to me.
I view Trespassing as a kind of Pakistani Romeo And Juliet. You have the boy, Daanish, and the girl, Dia—I may be pronouncing those wrong—that’s one of the things that happens when you read a lot more than you speak—and what I like about the book is that I feel like their story sort of personalizes the political.
AVC: Their struggle as a couple sort of mirrors the struggles of a post-Gulf War Pakistan.
CS: I can see that. I’ll give you that. The book tells their story, but it also has a lot of flashbacks that kind of explain what’s going on in the region, the political currents. I really like having that as a backdrop for the romance.
How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid
AVC: Here is another story about love in a time of big social upheaval.
CS: I think this is such a fascinating book. I agree the book is about social change, but this is another one that is much more interesting and involving to me because it contains a love story. If it was just about social change, with no love story, I don’t think I would like it as much.
However, it also does these incredibly interesting things with time—basically the time period the book covers doesn’t make sense, even though it works within the context of story. I went to a reading that Mohsin Hamid did and I asked about this. He said that basically the book is taking place over the present day, even though the main character goes from birth to old age throughout it. Basically he’s in an eternal present, which I think is a really cool idea. There are a lot of weird and smart things the book does.
AVC: How do you feel about the second-person narration?
CS: I liked it. It worked for me. It’s simultaneously written in the first and second person. Like, the protagonist is written in the second-person, but there’s also a first-person narrator telling the protagonist’s story. I really admire books that really get away with impossible tricks like that. More importantly, I think the love story it tell is very romantic, very full of longing. The man and the woman at the heart of it aren’t really together for most of their lives, but in a very powerful way they’re touchstones for each other.
“The Surrogate,” from Sunstroke And Other Stories, Tessa Hadley
CS: This story was in The New Yorker a few years ago. It is about a woman who is a university student and who has a huge crush on her professor. She ends up working in a pub—she’s English. There’s a customer who comes in one day. He looks almost identical to her professor, but where she feels very bashful around her professor, she’s very brazen with the customer, while the customer is quite shy with her. She ends up having a physical relationship with him for months, wherein she pretends that this man is her professor. They hook up repeatedly, and she doesn’t really care about this guy, who is much more working class than her professor.
This is another one that jumps ahead quite a ways—I’ll tell you the whole thing, so be forewarned if you don’t want to know the ending. It turns out that the student and her professor fall in love and get married, but it ends with her yearning for the guy from the bar, who she was so cavalier with. There’s this phrase in creative writing—attributed to Flannery O’Connor, though I don’t know if that’s accurate—that the end of a book should be surprising but inevitable. The ending of “The Surrogate” is a weird twist, but it feels surprising and inevitable.
“Tricks,” from Runaway, Alice Munro
AVC: Like How To Get Filthy Rich, this short story also involves people being touchstones in each other’s lives. There’s a chance meeting, a promise to reunite in a year.
CS: Have you read this one?
AVC: This is a Munro I haven’t read.
CS: Oh, you have to read it! It’s so good! I probably shouldn’t say too much about it because there’s a big twist in it and I feel like people would be better off going in blank. I’ll give you a little bit of it. Basically, there’s a young woman who lives a not-very-exciting life in rural Canada. I think it takes place in the early 1960s. The woman goes by herself annually to see a Shakespeare play. One year she ends up not at the theater, but nearby, meeting this man. They’re very attracted to each other, but she’s very inexperienced.
They agree to meet in a year, and to not keep in touch between the time they meet and the following year. The book then describes what happens the following year, and then it jumps ahead decades into the future, where there’s what I would describe as a shocking twist in the story. As with what happens with “The Surrogate,” the ending here feels very surprising, but also inevitable the more you reflect on it. I’ve been haunted by this story ever since I first read it, which was maybe 10 years ago.
AVC: A lot of your choices could be considered “tragic romances,” rather than ones with happy endings, which is what I default to thinking about when I consider romance as a genre. I’m interested in how you view these romances compared with Pride And Prejudice, given the premise of Eligible, as well as the fact that Pride is probably the quintessential swoon-worthy romance in literature.
CS: The books I’m recommending have a lot of yearning and longing in them. I think sometimes wishing for romance is more romantic than actually experiencing romance or being part of a couple. A lot of these books light upon the uncertainty and the novelty of a new love, which can be eroded by time or familiarity.
Something that’s interesting about Pride And Prejudice is that, as with many romances, it essentially ends with the wedding, or weddings, in some cases. It doesn’t show the marriage. It is all about courtship and uncertainty and insecurity and confusion. Something I like when I’m reading a book or watching a TV show is when there are two characters who are attracted to each other, but who have other commitments, or can’t act on their attraction because of decorum or their own shyness. As a reader or viewer, you’re just like, “Kiss! Kiss!” I love that feeling, when the romantic or sexual tension is so thick that you want characters to act on it. I think Jane Austen does that really well with Darcy and Lizzy in Pride And Prejudice. There are a lot of moments when there’s a discrepancy between how the characters feel and how they act—that can be very romantic. It can be torture, but it can also be very romantic.
One common thread I think exists across the books I selected is their emotional richness. “Tricks” is incredibly rich, and you can’t be invested in the romantic state of a character if they’re not well developed. So it starts with the character development and then the situation matter. If you understand the internal conflict they’re going through, it’s very romantic.
