The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

Literary Scrivenings 3: The Romance of Reconciliation

Literary Scrivenings 3: The Romance of Reconciliation An unlikely juxtaposition of novels works toward reconciliation and forgiveness in the final scrivenings and the conclusion of this book: Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love (1991/1997), a Christian inspirational romance novel that retells the biblical book of Hosea in gold-rush California and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), the fictional memoir and apologia of a pedophile. Though it seems reasonably assured that these two texts may never elsewhere come into as close proximity as they do in this book, they do have a few things in common. Both novels take up childhood sexual slavery and pedophilia; both push boundaries; both are significantly revised versions of other works; and both cultivate strong intertextual relationships with other works. Even the covers of recent editions share features, from emphasizing partial faces of young females—a move that emphasizes the lips—to choosing florid cursive titles and prominent anniversary-edition labeling. Most importantly, they both deal with questions of forgivability and redemption; they are, at bottom, attempts to reconcile with the strictures and possibilities of art. Redeeming Love is an evangelical inspirational romance, a subcategory of romance genre fiction. It is a particularly successful 235 member of the popular genre: having sold more than a million copies, it has even greater reach than sales numbers demonstrate, since inspirational fiction physically circulates among readers—primarily women—who share it between family members, church members, and friends. The publisher reissued a twentiethanniversary edition of the text, and it continues to sell well across paper and electronic formats, even getting some high-profile press: in 2012, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks declared in both Ebony and Entertainment Weekly that Redeeming Love is her favorite novel, one that she has read more than ten times.1 Yet, it remains unabashedly an inspirational romance novel, a member of one of the most maligned of genres. I have been accustomed to thinking of romance novels as a dismissable genre. This thinking never came from the moral high ground of a mind untainted by them, however; I read Christian inspirational fiction in early adolescence and was familiar with both early and contemporary examples. But it nonetheless seemed to me that in a reading subculture so tied to abstinence before marriage and faithfulness even in unsatisfying marriage, romance novels functioned primarily as a form of soft porn. I suspected the genre of causing dissatisfaction within marriage. I suspected it of presenting as unquestionable ideas about gender and relationships that ought to be questioned, much discussed, and played out in community. But, in the developing of this book’s argument, it became clear that even these areas of offense—perhaps especially these areas of offense—are the ground from which the future of the word proceeds in making community through the reconciliation of the word. The author of Redeeming Love, Francine Rivers, has published more than twenty novels, including two New York Times bestsellers in the last five years; her book The Last Sin Eater was made into a film. She has received numerous awards and has been inducted into THE FUTURE OF THE WORD 236 the Romance Writers Hall of Fame. Redeeming Love is only one of several of her books to have sold more than a million copies—and more than one has been rereleased in an anniversary special edition. Yet Rivers seems to have a conflicted relationship with the romance novels that have made her so successful. Her body of work is starkly divided in two: books from before her conversion (1976–85), when she wrote what she calls “steamy historical romances,”2 and books from after, when she felt called to become a Christian writer, “to present a story that is all about Jesus. The Lord is the foundation, the structure, and Scripture has everything to do with the creation and development of the characters in the story. . . . If you remove Jesus and Biblical principles from the novel, it collapses.”3 Though Rivers was clearly on her way to a very successful writing career even before her work changed—she won several awards even early on in her career, including a RITA, her website indicates that she has let her earlier books go out of print and that they “are not recommended.”4 Rivers describes in an interview how her conversion changed things: “I had been a writer in the general market for a number of years. . . . After becoming...