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"Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport"
Some things do change: In a new anthology, women jocks take up the pen.
By Kate Sekules
[08/12/99]

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"Walker Evans"
A more critical eye could have taken this wonderfully researched life of the photographer to another level.
By Andrew Long
[08/11/99]

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"The Kind I'm Likely to Get"
Yet another collection of stories tackles downtown anomie, but this one has real feeling.
By Charles Taylor
[08/11/99]

Ivory Tower
Quantum vibe
At Potsdam's string theory conference, Einstein's heirs try to tie up an explanation for gravity.
By Douglas Merrill
[08/11/99]

You meet the nicest folks in porn theaters
Gay writer Samuel Delany mourns the late, great and sweetly raunchy Times Square.
By Craig Seligman
[08/10/99]

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Only a few weeks before, San was hiding the book from me. I'd stop into her office to see how her dissertation research was coming along, and before the door was properly open, she'd already be deep into a history of the Paris Commune or something, making brisk pencil marks in the margins while "Outlander" fluttered open in the wastebasket. Eventually, it was replaced there by the sequel, "Dragonfly in Amber," and then "Voyager," the third book. By then, she'd dropped the pretense that they were guilty-pleasure reading and had turned evangelical. "You know, you should really check these books out," she said. "One of my mom's friends started reading them thinking they were genre fiction -- but they're really not. You know how video stores always file 'Watership Down' in the children's section? Gabaldon's books aren't about bunnies either. They're rather good."

I wanted to believe her, too, except I'd already been scorched badly in that regard. Absent the Gabaldon contretemps, the only time I was ever talked into reading romance fiction was in a college class taught by a noted culture studies professor -- a leaping marionette of a man who looked like Steve Buscemi with multiple earrings and a goatee. It's snobbery, he warned, to say that romance fiction isn't just as good as capital-L, air-quotes "Literature." Well, who wants to be a snob? I gave the book a fair shot -- and it was like young-adult fiction written by Victorian pornographers; a rickety trellis of plot devices hung with obsolete undergarments and bad adverbs.

Not that I didn't learn anything from it. While the prof took the common cultural studies line on the book, finding reinscriptions of the transgressive potentialities of the subalternizing tropes of wah-wah (translation: Millions of people bought it, therefore it empowers people), I saw a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade of romance readers towing an enormous Sigmund Freud balloon. Here's how it went: A young girl has a mystical essence inside her that makes her ... fascinating, irresistible. She runs around like a brat (she's "spirited"), throwing tantrums and charming her way out of trouble, until she draws the attention of a mysterious stranger -- who seduces and tames her, and installs her as the lady of the mansion. I wrote a response to the book suggesting that millions and millions of people should maybe get a handle on their Electra complexes -- which got me in big trouble -- and that was that. There are many widely different genres of romance novel, one gathers. The one I read was a "Regency," which essentially means a rewrite of "Jane Eyre" on pep pills and Viagra. But I was fairly sure, as I am now, that I wouldn't like any of the other kinds either.

But then I read "Outlander" straight through -- and then its gigantic sequel. And then the two gargantuan books after that one. I read them all -- four massive historical romance novels -- and found that San had been right all along: Whatever Gabaldon was aiming at in writing these weird, compelling books, it had nothing at all to do with simple genre fiction.

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