Spoiler Alert
Predictability as a Storytelling Tool and the Literary Canon's Influence on the Genre
This post contains content relevant spoilers for Ali Hazelwood’s Love on the Brain.
Two chapters into Ali Hazelwood’s Love on the Brain, and I knew exactly where the story was headed. To a happy ending, obviously, this is a romance novel so they have to get together at the end or it’s not a romance. But I mean really, who could possibly be running the Shmacademics twitter account? Did Levi really hate our lovely leading lady Bee in grad school? Or was he so overcome with adoration and desire he found himself barely able to function in her presence? Two chapters in and I could lay out the whole plot of the book for you.
And that is exactly why I plunged ahead with delighted abandon, eager to watch Bee and Levi fall in love.
Dr. Bee Konigswasser, neuroscientist-Marie Curie enthusiast-secret twitter celeb extraordinaire, discovers she is co-lead with her former arch neremnisis Dr. Levi Ward, engineer and tall hot guy, on an NASA-NIH fancy astronaut helmet project, that does… something with the astronauts brains? It definitely gets explained, and Hazelwood, an actual doctor of neuroscience, does a really good job explaining the science stuff, I’m just not good at retaining it.
In the literary world, knowing what is going to happen before the characters do because you have information they don’t, or they don’t realize what they are doing is a mistake (hi, Oedipus) is called “dramatic irony” and is often used in tragedy to underscore the fatal flaws of the character. Romance is also dependent on dramatic irony as a function of the storytelling and I would say that it is just as important to the genre as it is in tragedies. Romance novels are compelling not because we don’t know what’s going to happen, but because we do and the surprise is in how we get there.
One of the reasons I believe we come back to romances, and for their increasing popularity when book sales overall are declining (Burnett, 2023) is due to the predictability of the genre. I know that at the end of the novel, there will be a happy ending. Our protagonists will get together and everything will be ok. Nothing else in life can make that promise and be guaranteed to make good on it.
I’ve heard many an argument that predictability cheapens a storyline, but I think it can be used as tool, especially within genre fiction, to allow for the writer to subvert our expectations in the novel. Tropes are important for a reason, they tell you what kind of story you’re reading. Is there a dragon? Probably fantasy. Are we in outer space? Science Fiction. Is everyone miserable and cheating on each other and getting divorces? Literary fiction. There is no genre other than romance that guarantees a happy ending, because if it doesn’t, it’s not a romance.
Hazelwood uses the predictability as a red herring, and when we found out who exactly is the bad Guy after all (spoiler pun!), I was surprised. I knew something would go wrong with the helmet, because duh, there has to be some roadblocks on the way to happily ever after, but sabotage!? It was set up all along, the clues were all there. But I was too busy to see it, giggling and kicking my little feet in the air over the Twitter DMs where Levi-as-Shmac confesses his love for Bee AND THEY DON’T EVEN REALIZE!!! DRAMATIC IRONY!!!!!!
The idea that predictability is a reason that romance has less value is an elitist and misogynistic one. Romance is predominantly consumed by women, although as this Wall Street Journal article claims, that’s changing. “Ashley Dang, who works at Los Angeles romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice, said she has noticed an increase in male shoppers, who she estimates currently account for as much as 30% of the store’s clientele,” (Trachtenberg, 2023) which is still likely a low number.
Romance, despite being the highest selling genre, still carries the stigma of being unintelligent. The plots are predictable, and to read an average of 80,000 words about romantic, fluffy feelings? An academic’s nightmare, surely. Pain has true value, and joy and happiness are just the stupid (wo)man’s placation. Pleasure, especially a woman’s pleasure (or any minority to the white, cis-het male), is just not as valuable, reflecting the pervasive attitude in not only academia, but society as a whole, that white men and their opinions are superior. This begins while young academics are impressionable, and at the high school level becomes most obvious in literature, as texts become more complex and there is a push to ready students for college.
Only ten women are featured on the Mensa for Kids Excellence in Reading Program list for grades 9-12, two of whom are black women. There are no other women of color featured. They account for 1/3 of the total people of color featured on the list (there are four men of color). There are 116 books on the list. This list is features a number of books that are frequently tested on the AP Literature test, though that list is more diverse, with Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man being cited on the exam nearly 30 times, the most of any text. They make up the majority of the "literary canon,” a collection of texts that are considered to be of high cultural value and significance, giving historical, aesthetic, and social context to a given place or peoples, in this case, literature as a whole.
There is no set concrete list of universally agreed upon titles, but one of the closest is Harold Bloom’s 1994 publication The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. His list of 26 authors features four women (all white) and two men from South America. He coined the term ‘school of resentment,’ referring to the idea that anyone who thought his list was exclusionary was just resentful and that their arguments for works by minority authors being given the same consideration of value threatened the integrity of his listed canon.
One of the strongest aspects of Hazelwood’s writing is the acknowledgement of how difficult is is to be a woman in an academic setting, especially in STEM. When spaces are controlled by men, and the standards are written by men, and they historically hold the power, things tend to get nasty when that power is threatened by minorities, especially women. In the novel, Bee has a classifications system that identifies how many women are included in the space, using a number of variations on “sausagefest” (my personal favorite being “cockcluster”). She is undermined by the men around her, cut off when speaking, and just generally not taken seriously, despite having a PhD in neuroscience, and being the most qualified for the position she receives. She is threatened by her boss with being kicked off the team merely because she has the audacity to ask why she isn’t receiving her equipment or emails. Obviously she succeeds in the end, because it’s a romance novel and we get that sweet, sweet happy ending, but Hazelwood doesn’t sugar coat the struggle.
Hazelwood ends her acknowledgements with “if academia ever makes you feel like you’re not good or smart enough… It’s not you, it’s academia.” I had a conversation last week with a friend, who was the one who told me about the Mensa excellence in reading list, after we had been discussing lists of what’s given value and what isn’t, in regards to my 150+ title movie watch list. I said that this journey of book and movie consumption was driven by my goal to become academically interesting again, instead of just trash fire raccoon interesting. I wanted to be able to hold my own again in academic spaces.
They pointed out that academia is rife with hierarchies and attitudes that are oppressive and reductive. It is ingrained with and built by systems that are designed to put value on what is already perceived as valuable, determined by historical precedence. Precedencies that were put in place by the “fathers of academia”. The men who founded the great institutions of learning got to decide exactly what and who was worth teaching. And they continue to decide. All eight presidents of Ivy League colleges are white, three of whom are women. Of the top ten colleges ranked by Forbes, four of which are Ivy League, one (UC Berkeley) has a black man serving as president, two have white women serving as president, and three have white men.
One of the subplots in Love on the Brain is an examination of the GRE, an expensive ($220, as of publication) standardized test required by some (it used to be nearly all) institutions for graduate school acceptance. Standardized testing at all levels continue to be poor indicators of the overall student, proving only whether or not the student is good at taking tests or has the money to pay for tutoring (Sleiman, 2019). (Unless you ask the College Board, the company that writes the SAT, as well as the AP exams, and profits enormously off them. They’ll tell you that these tests are vital to college admissions. And so will all the companies that charge hundreds of dollars for test prep services).
All this to say, academia has huge influence over what we consider valuable in regards to literature, and by extension, media in general. And since women and other minorities have been historically excluded, it’s no wonder that what they might consider valuable, shown in the romance genre in sales alone, would be dismissed, since they are not reflected in the alleged standard of literature. A standard determined by people who do not represent all readers at large.
Love on the Brain gives historical context in its plot about (what I hope will be) the ultimate demise of standardized testing and the importance of purposeful, deliberate inclusion of minorities in academic spaces. It gives social context in regards to both romantic relationships and working relationships, specifically in STEM, between women and men. It gives aesthetic context by reflecting the popularity of the genre at the time it was written. Smart women (and people in general) read romances. And become neuroscientists. And write Substacks about Star Wars. They become moms. They choose not to become moms. And their joy and pleasure has just as much value as the dramatically ironic tragedies written by and about men.