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And so much for the other popular genres, in which good and evil are allowed to mingle. Think of all the seedy detectives and flawed spies. Romances must end happily; the spirited heroine must bring the male of her choice to heel--"civilize" or "tame" him, as romance authors like to put it--before the final clinch and fade-out. Defenders often point out that mysteries must also conclude in a predetermined manner: the crime is solved, the suspect unmasked. But that analogy won't wash, since the identity of the guilty party in mysteries is withheld until the end. Romance heroines and readers rarely doubt which man is in her sights or whether he will succumb.
It is impossible for contemporary romance writers to subvert or extend their genre in the way that, say, John le Carre upended conventional spy fiction when he killed off the sympathetic hero of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Fiddle with the romance formula--make the heroine a passive office temp with an eating disorder and the man of her dreams a philandering salesman with a wife and three kids in Cleveland--and the story suddenly resembles ordinary life.
Which is apparently the last thing romance readers want to confront in their spare time. The rift between those who dote on and those who disdain romance novels really centers on the question of fantasy and its proper place in adult imagination. Here again sexism may play a part. Patriarchs have traditionally fretted about their womenfolk's being ruined by a book. Flaubert's Madame Bovary graphically portrayed the ruin that ensues when a young female's head is filled with romantic fancies. Can it really be good, modern critics wonder, for women to be whiling away so many hours reading impossibly glamorized love stories? Which begs a question: What about all the time male readers spend on page-turning fantasies of casual sex or violence?
The romance genre will never have its Le Carre, but spy novels have never had a Nora Roberts--an author who has made the transition from paperbacks beloved by the romance cognoscenti to hard-covers marketed successfully for mainstream readers. "Nora is the standard that nobody's going to eclipse," says Kate Duffy, an editorial director at Kensington Books, America's largest publisher of romance novels--but not, to Duffy's regret, of those by Nora Roberts. "Authors don't know how Nora does it. She is unique. She is a phenomenon. She has a gift, an extraordinary talent. It just doesn't get any better than Nora Roberts."
It certainly doesn't get any more prolific. Since she launched her writing career in 1981, 134 novels have been published under her name and her pseudonym, J.D. Robb. Let's go over that again: 134 novels. Roughly 106 million copies of her books have been printed. Last year 14 of her titles appeared on New York Times best-seller lists. This year she will have seven new novels and six reissues published. Spoilsports who say Joyce Carol Oates writes too much have obviously never heard of Nora Roberts.