Fashion, I have been told, follows trends. If one powerful design house thinks mint-green will be the color of the year, then all the other houses will follow suit for no one wants to be left behind.
Actually, I have no idea if the above is true, but it serves as a decent opening line to help me arrive to what I want to explore in today’s post: Trends in Literature (or Why Does A Book Have to Be About Someone’s Wife?)
While finishing up my latest edition of Harper’s (August 2011), I looked at the inside of the back cover and saw an advertisement for The Oriental Wife, by Evelyn Toynton. The story looked interesting enough, but what caught my was when I turned the page and saw an ad on the back cover for Amazon’s Kindle that featured a snippet from The Paris Wife: A Novel, by Paual McLain.
(Quick Digression: Why is it that authors feel the need to put the words “A Novel” at the end of their titles? Do they think their readers are not smart enough to know that the book in their hands could be something else. “Hey”, Mr. Reader thinks, “Is this a movie I’m about to buy at this bookstore? Oh, no, it’s a novel. Thank heavens it says so right on the book cover!”)
(Oh, and before you say, “Well, what if the story is a short story and not a novel”, my reply is that anybody should be able tell the difference between a short story and a novel by the weight of the book)
(“Well, what about a novella?”, I hear you ask.)
(My reply is that digression has gone on far too long. Moving on.)
How odd, I mused to myself, that books on consecutive pages both have Wife in the title.
Then I recalled that The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht, won this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction.
Obreht’s book came out two years after the opening of the movie, based on the 2004 book by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife.
Of course, there’s also…
…The 19th Wife: A Novel (2008) by David Ebershoff;
…A Young Wife: A Novel (2011) by Pam Lewis; and
…The Spanish Billionarie’s Pregnant Wife (2009) by Lynne Graham just to name a few.
For all this, I blame Sena Jeter Naslund for her 1999 book, Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-gazer.
Finally, wouldn’t it be A Novel idea if authors could come up with another trend instead of using “The [Insert Male Character]’s Wife” as a title.
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