Romance

Do not let anyone tell you this is the soft wing. The Age of Innocence has the coldest final page in American fiction, Doctor Zhivago buries its lovers under a revolution, and The English Patient is a burn ward. Love has killed more characters than war. I shelve the swoons too (Outlander is here, unapologetically, because pleasure that works is craft), but the spine of this wing is consequence: what it costs to choose a person, or to fail to. Persuasion is the quietest devastation Austen ever wrote and my favorite thing in the room. Come in for the longing. Stay for the arithmetic of what people give up.

Mitchell built her epic on Lost Cause mythology: slavery appears as a benign arrangement, enslaved characters are minstrel caricatures, and the Klan rides as offstage chivalry. None of this is incidental to the romance; Tara's charm is the plantation's. A thousand pages is a long time to spend inside that view, however combustible Scarlett and Rhett remain.

— against Gone with the Wind

Eight hundred fifty pages, and the plot runs on sexual peril: rape threatened, attempted, or committed at intervals regular enough to chart. Jamie also beats Claire with a strap for disobeying him, an episode the book frames as roguish discipline, and 1991 forgave that more easily than you will. The time travel itself draws maybe ten minutes of anyone's curiosity.

— against Outlander

Everyone in the villa speaks in the same incantatory poetry, because they all speak in Ondaatje's. The fragments withhold so much for so long that the love story arrives pre-embalmed, beautiful and inert. And the prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, keeps stopping to admire itself while four damaged people wait politely for the plot.

— against The English Patient