That seems to be especially true for love stories, which are the most commonly and yet also often the most badly written, with the same old characters going through the same old motions and saying the same old things.
On the other hand, "bad" can be fairly relative, as the hordes of love-story buffs who buy these same old novels by the cartload will attest. Perhaps we should say that the popular love story has a dynamic – a set of conventions – of its own, having more to do with delivering on preset expectations than departing from or subverting them.
Most popular love stories have happy endings, which sell well because they offer hope on fairy wings, even and especially for muddy-footed gnomes like us. It’s different with the news, which depends on the bad stuff for its sustenance, and on which we depend for our daily dose of catharsis, or the relief that comes from seeing nasty things happen to other people. We demand that the news mirror the awful truth, if only to confirm our suspicion that someone out there is worse or worse off than us; we demand that fiction (and the movies) provide us with escape, with the fantastic alternative, hoping that it will fortify our spirit when we next have to deal with mundane reality.
Unfortunately, what we often get are sappy or improbable stories that don’t get taken seriously by the critics and other writers, or – even more likely – dark-browed treatises on the ugliness of human society and the general futility of life. (And the consensus seems to be that sadder and grimmer stories win more prizes and get more attention.)
What I’m looking for is a story dealing with a real problem employing credible characters who use their wits, their hearts, and their guts to arrive at a solution that may have seemed improbable at the beginning but now appears inevitable at the end. I don’t want easy, deus ex machina endings; neither do I want (just for the present purpose) artily muddled and inconclusive bitin endings designed to rob me of my smile. I want a feel-good story – beyond mere affirmation or optimism – but one that makes perfect if unpredictable sense.
There are, of course, many kinds of happiness, from the breathless delirium that attends a reunion of long-lost lovers to the almost grim satisfaction of justice won (and somewhere in between them, the quiet, transcendent tenderness of mature affections). Iris Murdoch, the subject of renewed interest after the recent film on her life, would say that "Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."
Other writers don’t think much of happiness at all. Jamaica Kincaid, a West Indian writer who burst onto the American literary scene with her explosive talent, says that "I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. Perversely, I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all – absolutely not at all – interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite. Americans like to be funny, they like to laugh and they like a happy ending – which accounts I think for the sorry state of American writing life, but that’s a whole other story."
Well, okay, Jamaica – but what’s the good of truth if it doesn’t lead to some form of happiness? I agree (along with about 80 million Filipinos) that life is difficult – but it can’t be just that. I’d rather go by what a friend and mentor, the late playwright Bienvenido "Boy" Noriega, told me decades ago as we were starting out in our writing careers: "You know, Butch, all these characters and all their problems – it’s all about happiness."
For a truly happy ending – and invoking the kind of academic privilege that we UP professors console ourselves with come paydays – I am announcing that I will give a grade of "1.0" flat to any student who can write me the kind of happy-ending story I’m looking for, between 15 and 25 pages, double-spaced (my semestral quota is 40 revised pages). They can still earn a "1.0" the unsmiling, old-fashioned way, but I think it’ll be worth the experiment to be, for once – and to borrow from C. S. Lewis – surprised by joy.
"Professor Dalisay," Ephraim wrote, "If you really want to improve the local publishing industry, I don’t think going for less expensive cover designs is actually going to help. That’s only going to attract academically-informed readers, not the common reader who wanders into the bookstore looking for a good book to read, his criteria for a good book being one that looks good on the outside. If such a reader were to enter a bookstore and find all fiction books – both foreign and locally published – on a single shelf, he wouldn’t be drawn to those books which have little giraffes sprawling over their front covers, or the books which are ‘pretty unexciting on the outside.’ He’d be drawn to those books whose covers suggest that what’s inside is as good or even better that what’s outside, to those books which on the outside assert that they have to be read.
"Of course this is all conjecture, and a bit of depressing conjecture if you’re into the pure good of reading. But in this day and age, when self-consciousness and performance have become big, vital things, you’d be better off with a book that in its physical appearance knows itself to be a cultural artifact/treasure/product."
Well, Ephraim, I’ve spent years arguing for smarter book design, more attractive covers, and better paper – not as a reader or publisher, but as an author who believes that we deserve better-looking books for our creative labors. (I’ve also argued that authors and publishers should work more closely together in promoting books, such as through school tours, mall readings, and such.) And we authors got what we asked for, too, from such progressive publishers as Anvil and UP Press and designers like Fidel Rillo.
The problem is, well-designed (and more expensive) literary titles continue to languish in the warehouse despite these efforts. It’s probably about time an in-depth study was made to find out just what makes books sell, or don’t, and how much of a factor design is, among others, in selling titles.
I don’t know of a single author who wouldn’t want a hefty, handsome book with his or her name embossed on the spine. And then again, I don’t know of a single author who wouldn’t rather have more readers than more books sitting on the shelves.
Ephraim continues:
"On the matter of encouraging writing that appeals to the contemporary reader, I think the bigger problem lies in generating a culture of reading. We don’t have a culture of reading.
"I have this theory that the biggest book local writers are competing with isn’t Shakespeare or the TV Guide, it’s the Bible. A lot of people see the Bible as the big book of knowledge, possibly even the only book of knowledge, the book that leads to the single, ultimate, truth. [Uh-oh, I just heard a flurry of doors shutting behind all the Bible readers dashing for the nearest Internet cafe to write me a note of protest – BD] As long as this sort of thinking exists, that there is a single text that provides the key to life, you won’t have a lot people interested in reading fictions that attempt to make sense of the complex, multi-layered thing that is life. [Amen to that! – BD]
"I just think that fiction sells better in the US and in the UK because people there aren’t as satisfied with a single explanation as we seem to be. It’s a huge problem in terms of education, one that’s going to take years, or a really big ad campaign, to solve."
Now that’s a very interesting theory, and one that the agnostic in me really wants to buy, except that we have to ask: just how many Filipinos read the Bible these days, anyway? I submit that it isn’t God, but Grisham and Clancy (to some, just slightly lesser beings) we’re up against.