Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.

It was not always so; the English novel once carefully examined the feelings of young women who sought and eventually found refuge in the form of wealthy husbands. As women made social and political gains, that narrative could no longer be written in the same way, yet no new account of female experience really replaced it. Fiction about that specific realm retreated either into the fantasy world of the romance novel, or into its modern counterpart, chick lit, which transplants a version of the story into a contemporary urban setting, where the protagonist only gets her happy resolution after much drinking and shopping. For many decades now, the detailed treatment of conventional love and its happy endings has been all but exiled from serious fiction. Long after Jane Austen came Georgette Heyer, and the love story never found its way back.

The romance novel’s exclusion is made more obvious by publishers’ attempts to disguise its true nature, and many books are pitched awkwardly halfway between literary fiction and bodice-ripper. Short Books, originally a publisher of non-fiction, has begun putting out novels of this kind, claiming in their press handout that they “just couldn’t say no” to submissions of “such originality and quality”. However, the essential story remains that of a plucky young woman, poor, or at least a misfit in some way, who struggles to make her way in the world, facing loneliness and adversity, before at last being rewarded with a conventional happy ending: successful love, and perhaps babies. The world she strives in is often slightly different from our own, either an earlier period or an exotic locale, and ideally both, as in Hong Ying’s The Concubine of Shanghai – early twentieth-century China – or Betsy Tobin’s Ice Land – Iceland, 1000ad. The cover of Andrea Barrett’s The Air We Breathe (which is set in a TB sanatorium) has a sepia photograph of a lone woman looking out over a body of water.

Happy endings are now risky for an author, as is the privileging of romantic love and relationships over everything else. The five novels under review seem determined to make a virtue of this myopia. Hong Ying’s narrator summarizes the political events of the period she has chosen in under a page, and concludes that the only way to understand Shanghai and “the unmistakable flavour of 1925” is through “the people that I write about”. Andrea Barrett’s characters, a group of sanatorium patients in the Adirondacks during the First World War, narrating in the first-person plural, begin by defending their overwhelming interest in relationships as the result of enforced isolation and inactivity – “we gossiped as eagerly as we drew breath” – and end with the realization that “we could have learned what we needed about the world and the war simply by observing our own actions and desires”. Though not untrue, this is unambitious. These books are for the most part not badly written; yet their authors feel they must build excuses for their trivial preoccupations into the narratives.

Barrett’s novel is uneasy in tone; it cannot decide what it is aiming for, at some moments moodily imagining time “clotted like blood in a bowl”, at others uncomfortably entangled by the mechanics of the plot: “Ignoring whatever was going on with Miles and Naomi, and also Irene’s remark about Leo, Eudora followed Irene out the door”. Hong Ying knows that the scraps of history or politics she pastes in around her romping concubine are just touches of local colour, but The Air We Breathe is freighted with so much detail, so much research into the period and the surroundings, that it seems to be yearning to be something other than a love story. Barrett knows all about tuberculosis, and she brings in relativity theory, explores notions of collective responsibility, quotes whole sections of Mendeleev’s Principles of Chemistry, grafting it all on to a sentimental tale starring the wonderfully named Eudora. Eudora is a Cinderella type who endures long hours of demeaning work, uncomplainingly mopping the tubercular blood from the floors, and sweetly assumes that her more attractive, selfish young friend will interest the brooding male protagonist, who shares Eudora’s interest in chemistry and stares lustfully at her in the basement laboratory. This is the occasion for descriptions of “smooth-bellied glass vessels and the sinuous tubing pulled fine as thread, the purring, nearly invisible flame of the Bunsen burner”.

As the case of the lovestruck chemists may suggest, romances are in some ways more like pornography than crime novels or thrillers. In their purest form, they are wholly instrumental, manipulating the reader’s emotions and providing reliable effects, without encouraging different interpretations. The romance novelists of today do try to complicate things, with moments of oddness and ambiguity. This is best seen in their treatment of relations between women, especially those between older and younger generations, where combinations of admiration, envy, jealousy, support, understanding, curiosity, contempt and a confused kind of lust are allowed to coexist. In The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller, the central relationship, and by far the most interesting one, is that between Meri, a young, recently married woman still aware of her humble background, and that she “has nothing, and nothing is coming to her”, and Delia, the “deeply lined” but elegant, “patrician” woman who lives next door and is married to a famous senator.

The tensions between the two women cannot be properly resolved, and at last they are instead rather spectacularly (if disappointingly) exploded. Meri, in a series of scenes involving Delia’s husband and her own “spurt[ing]” breast milk, turns the older woman into an old-fashioned rival and uses her best weapon – youth – to destroy her, before moving on into her own happy family resolution. Despite the pleasing “Chloe liked Olivia” element, the older generation is almost always eventually humiliated and supplanted by the younger; perhaps that is meant to add an enjoyable poignancy to the happiness of the young – Madame Emerald, the ageing ex-proprietor of a brothel where Cassia the concubine made her start in Shanghai, bravely advises her that a woman begins to age as soon as “she starts to pity herself” – but more likely there simply aren’t enough happy endings to go around.

The complicating factors in these books sometimes accentuate the conventional restrictions that do remain in place. A baby is meant to resolve the frustrated, chatty love story in Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti, but by the time one has reached that point, all the small problems the two protagonists have piled up between them have started to seem insurmountable, and it is a relief that one doesn’t have to stick around and find out how the fragile little family fares. Mazetti’s is a book unusually concerned, for a romance, with the quotidian workings of love; here it isn’t merely a feeling but a series of things you are willing, or not willing, to do for someone else. Though Shrimp does vanquish a love rival to get to Benny, the usual epic obstacles aren’t otherwise in evidence. We simply see how hard it is, in a pragmatic, mundane sense, for a relationship to work, and for people to communicate with one another out of their own petty isolations. When baby abruptly trumps all this at the end, it feels like an awkward jolt back into a quainter genre.

Hong Ying gives her heroine several happy endings, none of which quite works out, until eventually she and the narrator, a self-proclaimed “feminist writer” who has been studying Cassia, decide to “work out an ending for ourselves”. This seems to be the resolution of an earlier moment in which Cassia accosts a feminist speaker, asking why her speech about equality makes no mention of sexual relations, and whether she thinks men should be allowed to dominate women in that arena. Despite hints that Hong Ying may have wanted to subtitle her novel “Tales of a sex-positive proto-feminist in 1920s Shanghai”, the author has chosen to pose for the book’s cover in revealing concubine gear, her skin blurred as if with Vaseline on the lens, the title scrawled in pink lettering beneath her. As if she has had second thoughts, there is a different author photograph on the back, in which she is covered up in a demure cheongsam, eyes cast modestly down. Inside the book, as in all the books here, great emphasis is placed on the women’s bodies (usually voluptuous), and their desires (barely satiable), how they “want and want and want”.

The novels do try, at times, to struggle free of their own skin. There are flashes of self-awareness, as when Madame Emerald and Cassia are described as being “over-sentimental” in order “to hide something from each other”; or when Cassia reflects that the “sentimental love plays” in which she stars are irresponsible, that her stage tears are “merely water moistening the stone on which real knives were sharpened”. When one of the amorous chemists writes the other a farewell note in which he says “I love you” for the first time, Eudora feels that he is damaging the “delicate and interesting thing” that has developed between them, that the conventional words “only served to hide everything worth talking about”, their individual feelings crushed by the sentimental formula.

It is not entirely clear why efforts to take romance out of its ghetto haven’t worked (unless it is because the publishers don’t really want that; they want the appearance of seriousness but their interest is still primarily commercial). The genres that have made the leap – John le Carré’s spy thrillers, J. G. Ballard’s science fiction, Raymond Chandler’s detective stories – have the same sweaty, mass-market paperback past as romantic novels: churned out swiftly and regularly, repeating their familiar structures with the details changed for novelty’s sake, they have all been sneered at by the literary establishment, and devoured in great quantities by loyal addicts and bored train travellers. One thing holding popular romance back may be that it is aimed so explicitly at women. Women are used to reading things not written especially for them. Getting men to take an interest in female-focused fiction, no matter how well disguised, will always be trickier.

Crucially, romance doesn’t seem dark enough. The geek boys have emerged from their bedrooms and become acceptable, even admirable, because their fantasies are allowed to be nakedly steeped in power, and the misery of not having it, whereas girlish love stories deal with similar feelings under several stifling layers of cotton candy. Science fiction lends itself to political and social allegory, filled with lurid fears made real, but the romance novel knows you must be perky to survive. It encodes female fear – of helplessness and destitution, of violation, of ageing and abandonment – so that all that is left in plain sight is its inverse, the narrative of love, motherhood, and wealth, which, if not ideal wish-fulfilment, has so often proved to be the safest bet.

Hong Ying
THE CONCUBINE OF SHANGHAI
288p. Marion Boyars. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 7145 3150 2

Betsy Tobin
ICE LAND
368pp. Short Books. Paperback, £12.99.
978 1 906021 14 6

Andrea Barrett
THE AIR WE BREATHE
304pp. Hutchinson. £17.99.
978 0 091 92 094 4

Sue Miller
THE SENATOR’S WIFE
320pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £10.99.
978 0 7475 9483 3

Katarina Mazetti
BENNY AND SHRIMP
224pp. Short Books. Paperback, £12.99.
978 904977 41 4

Lidija Haas works at the London Review of Books.

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