Nora Roberts Enjoys the Simple Life

By Neal 

Just yesterday, I’d mentioned Nora Roberts’s galley disposal tips, and here she is in a NYT arts section profile, being celebrated by Ginia Bellafante for her glitz-free ways as both a homeowner and a writer:

“What distinguishes Ms. Roberts from a lot of other writers like her is a certain indifference to the material ambition that often supplies the genre’s narrative girding. To read a Nora Roberts novel is not to feel as if you are flipping through a Neiman Marcus catalog. Wealth and glamour are neither the prerequisites nor essential residuals of falling in love. To marry is not necessarily to marry up.”

Interesting that Bellafante should call the classification of Roberts’s work as romantic suspense “at least semantically misleading,” on the grounds that “while Ms. Roberts’s books always join the subjects of love and felony, the resolution of the principal affair is never in question.” Isn’t that pretty much standard for the genre, despite the reporter’s invocation of Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight? (Which, at that, is like judging contemporary chick lit by Valley of the Dolls.)