In Defense of Leisurely Lit: A Guest Post by Clea Simon

Clea Simon's latest book, Shades of Grey, featuring doctoral student Dulcie Schwartz who specializes in gothic literature, is now on the shelves in bookstores. With a hint of romance, a ghostly cat, an intricate mystery (or two) Shades of Grey is a promising start to a new series. Please join me in welcoming author Clea Simon to Musings of a Bookish Kitty.

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Whatever happened to the good read? I mean, the kind of book you lose yourself in, that invites you to sink in and draw up the covers?

Now, I just finished Hilary Mantel’s marvelous 650-page Wolf Hall and Wendy has posted her “Chunkster’s Challenge” with several hefty tomes in it, so I know these books still exist. Maybe I should rephrase the question: What happened to the respect? I almost didn’t read Attica Locke’s utterly marvelous debut, Black Water Rising, because the New York Times review referred to it as “wordy.” Like that was a bad thing! (Luckily, the same paper had a long feature on the author that made the book sound so interesting I got it – in hardcover, no less – and devoured its Southern gothic/racially tense/conflicted character stew of a mystery.)

I love plot, don’t get me wrong. And in my Theda Krakow mysteries, I worked hard to get the pacing fast, fast, fast. But when I wanted to try something new, I thought about those big, old books that I used to love. I thought about character and setting. I thought about tucking myself in with a book on a stormy night and reading till the wee hours. I thought up Dulcie Schwartz.

Dulcie Schwartz, I should explain, is the heroine of my new mystery, Shades of Grey. Unlike most of today’s critics (or academics), she adores the original Gothics, the mood-rich otherworldly adventures of the late 18th Century, books like The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, and The Ravages of Umbria. (Okay, that last one doesn’t really exist, except in Shades of Grey, but don’t tell aspiring PhD candidate Dulcie that. She’s betting her academic career on this tale of ghosts, beleaguered heroines, and a forbidding windswept castle.) She likes a book you can sink your teeth into. And if those original Gothics went a little wild – piling on an unlikely number of specters and plots – well, so much the better.

Not many people read these books today. Critics and theorists point out that authors like Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole were very much products of their times. All the turmoil in France and America was putting a good scare into British readers, and the social unrest revealed itself in some nasty anti-Catholic and anti-Continental biases (mad monks, duplicitous dukes, you name it). Plus, these books were so popular that they spawned a lot of second-rate spinoffs, potboilers that played up the sexual dangers besetting innocent young heroines without giving a thought to why the insane nobleman would want to imprison his young ward or who the ghost thought he was bewitching.

Certainly, one reason these books have fallen out of favor is that their writing is leisurely. Wordy. Descriptions go on for pages, and characters talk and talk and talk. (In all fairness, even though Dulcie loves these books, I don’t go quite so far with Shades of Grey.) But I’ve found that once you get into the rhythm of a book like this, you don’t want to cut to the chase. You want to enjoy the mood and the atmosphere. You want to spend more time with the characters, real people with interesting lives whom we come to know and to care about.

Isn’t that why most of us first fell in love with books? Didn’t we all, at some point, open the covers and find ourselves in another world – a world we hated to leave? Don’t we want that transformative experience again? I read my share of thrillers – they are good distraction when life gets crazy. But if we always know that the body will be found by page 10, the love interest identified by page 25, and the chase scenes begin by page 50, where’s the surprise? The magic? The enchantment? But where are these books today? They’re relegated to younger readers (think Harry Potter) or the scrap heap. They’re “wordy,” “slow,” or just not reviewed at all.

It’s old hat to blame TV or our accelerated lifestyle, and I don’t think Twitter or Facebook are responsible either. I think we’ve forgotten how to enjoy ourselves. How to let pleasure build up. How to let a book envelope us completely, before giving us the payoff of action or resolution. I don’t know if I’ve achieved that with Shades of Grey, whether my new series (yup, the second, Grey Matters, is already in the works for early spring) will weave the same kind of spell. But I hope it does, because I believe that a book should surprise and delight with unexpected twists and turns. Should lure you in and keep you engaged, introducing you to characters who have real lives that don’t only involve solving crime. Books that are big enough to provide a portable vacation, whenever you can get away.

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Clea Simon is the author of three nonfiction books: Mad House, Fatherless Women, The Feline Mystique; and the Theda Krakow mystery series (Mew is for Murder, Cattery Row, Cries and Whiskers, and Probable Claws). Shades of Grey is the first book in a new series featuring Dulcie Schwartz. You can learn more about Clea Simon and her books on the author's website and on her blog, Cats & Crime & Rock & Roll.

Be sure and stop by Musings of a Bookish Kitty tomorrow for my review of Shades of Grey!


Other Tour Stops:
Lesa's Book Critiques, Sept. 1 (interview)
The Conscious Cat, Sept. 4
One Writer's World, Sept. 5
The Well-Read Donkey (Kepler's Books blog), Sept. 8
Lesa's Book Critiques, Sept. 8 (guest blog)
Caroline Leavittville, Sept. 9
Mayhem and Magic, Sept. 10
Cozy Chicks, Sept. 13
The Well-Read Donkey (Kepler's Books blog), Sept. 15
The Lipstick Chronicles, Sept. 23