Coming Out, by Danielle Steel
She's a blue-blooded WASP married to a Jewish appellate court judge; her shallow ex-husband (and father of her daughters) is an elitist anti-semite. When their twin daughters -- one materialistic and status-conscious, the other left-wing and rebellious -- get invited to a cotillion ball, tensions run high. So will our sensible, intelligent, professional (but a good-mom), centrist – did I mention sensible? don't get me wrong, she has a sense of humour and keeps things in perspective as well, she's not boring -- will our sensible heroine be able to steer a middle course and get everyone to appreciate that, despite their differences, we're all in this together?
Steel is the best-selling living novelist and, by reputation, an absolute machine, an energetic alien who sleeps four hours a night and spends all the other hours writing:
If I am working on a book and haven’t had a chance to write that day, I usually start writing around 8 pm and go until about 3 am. But if I start writing in the morning, whenever that is, I’ll start on the book and keep going through the day. I work, on average, 20 hours a day. Sometimes 22.
Obviously I know nothing about this person but from the one profile I read of her once, 1) I fear her workaholism may be a trauma response, I hope she's ok, and 2) I can genuinely believe she's turned out 140 novels in 50 years, whereas for some of the other authors at the top of the list I suspect ghost writers may have been involved.
The main striking thing about this book is how absolutely heavy-handedly, repetitively tell-not-show it is: the intro is literally a description of the characters and their characteristics and relationships, no subtlety or implication, just explicit explanation. The very simple facts of their various dynamics are repeated throughout the book, explicitly and unchangingly, to make absolutely clear you got it. (One could compare this to the use of epithets in Homer, where the listener is reminded of which character is which by the use of oft-repeated descriptors, but there are only ~6 characters in this book and the descriptors are multi-sentence re-hashings of the fairly simple tensions between them).
So e.g. when the letter comes in about the Coming Out ball, the protagonist's sensible point of view about it -- that this is an archaic tradition, sure, but also just a bit of fun, and that neither being too serious about it nor boycotting it completely is appropriate -- is conveyed to the reader through barely-mediated free indirect third-person narration. Then each of her daughters and husband and ex-husband all have different but non-sensible responses, all explicitly announced with no inference or subtlety.*
I repeat that this is the best-selling living author. I have read many other romance-adjacent ance novels and most of them are not like this. It is hard to suppress the feeling that Steel's novels are successful not despite but because of the heavy-handedness and repetition; that readers like being told exactly what is happening and who thinks what. (I do notice that, in contrast to many other books I read, I at no point find it hard to remember who is who and what their deal is).
I don't know what to do with this information.
Steel has said that her books aren't romance novels, and she's right, this isn't a romance novel, but at first I struggled to explain what it was instead. By the end, though, I think I understood: it's a fantasy novel (small-f fantasy, in the way that romance novels are a fantasy), but the fantasy is about being a fully-competent wife/mother/white-collar professional, who rolls with the punches and understands her children like nobody else could and superhumanly manages to Get It All Done despite last minute surprises and is ultimately right about everything. (Did I mention she's very sensible? But she has a sense of humour).
There is something endlessly fascinating about fantasies, and what we choose to idolise, and what it says about us -- about what we want, and what we're lacking, and what the world is not like, that makes us need to fantasise it differently.
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*The one I-would-say truly offensive thing about this novel is that the protagonist's Holocaust-survivor mother-in-law and also her successful-professional-woman law firm partner who "happens to be black" both 100% affirm the protagonist's position about this cotillion ball: the black civil rights lawyer promising us that anyone refusing to go is the actual bigot here, partly because her own mother's bingo club in Harlem doesn't have any white people in it (????), while the Holocaust-surviving mother-in-law finds deep personal meaning from being invited to join at the ball, since it symbolises her acceptance into elite society after getting out of poverty and the concentration camps (????).
I swear the book is otherwise not like this, but also it has this in it.
One thing I tried to remind myself while reading is that 99% of people are not like me, and that Danielle Steel presumably has her fingers much more on the pulse of the median voter than I do, and that maybe I would understand the world better if I read more Danielle Steel novels.