For the Love of Work: Reading for the Cliché

In Raven Leilani's 2020 debut novel, Luster, twenty-three-year-old Edie goes on a first date to an amusement park with Eric, a married white man twice her age. After a month of chatting online, their conversation feels awkward and stilted: "I'm having trouble reading you," Eric tells her. Edie unconvincingly responds that she is "an open book."1 Thinking of herself in textual terms, as "illegible" to other men she has dated, Edie silently swears, "I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I'll just revise" (12). Told in first-person narration with sprawling sentences that go on for hundreds of words, Luster demonstrates Edie's inability to edit herself for others.2 This problem — how to cater to readers' tastes — animates another 2020 novel, also narrated by a millennial woman: Emily Henry's aptly named Beach Read. With the novel's title doubling as a marketing cliché, Beach Read invokes and largely fulfills the generic compact of the breezy read (the title, more literally, refers to the novel's setting on the shores of Lake Michigan). However, the subject of the novel is not the pleasure of consumption, but the pain of literary production as romance novelist January Andrews struggles to write a new book. Although the two novels are strange bedfellows, Luster and Beach Read reveal the conflict of the cliché: it's more work than it appears to be.

Fittingly, the word cliché has its origins in labor, referring to a plate for copying an image or text used by French printers.3 Like Sianne Ngai's theory of the gimmick, the cliché functions as a labor-saving device, but lacks the gimmick's novelty or "unrepeatability" as it is instead linked to mass production.4 By the late-nineteenth century, the cliché had migrated to the domain of language and culture, still carrying the association of the masses but now with an aesthetic judgment attached. To call something cliché is to suggest the referent in question is tired, overused, banal, lacking in any artistry. Yet the cliché poses not only a problem of production, but also one of reception. In order for something to become cliché, it must be successful enough to reproduce in the first place. To dismiss something as cliché isn't just passing judgment on the artist who fails to create something new, but also on their audiences who fail to demand more unique, creative work, thereby enabling the constant reproduction of phrases, tropes, and storylines.

Yet the intellectual laziness of the cliché is not at odds with, but in fact central to, its ability to perform affective labor, which Michael Hardt defines as the production of "a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion — even a sense of connectedness or community."5 Based on interviews with dozens of readers about their habits and preferences, Janice Radway's 1984 landmark study Reading the Romance attests that romance fiction is one of the most pleasurable genres thanks to the cliché's labor saving.6 While Ngai argues that the gimmick works too hard to win readers' attention, the cliché instead works hard to ensure it doesn't disrupt a reader's attention in order to provide a maximally enjoyable experience. "By masking the interpretive character of the act of reading," Radway argues, "the redundant and simple language of the romantic novel minimizes the labor the reader contributes to the production of the story."7 For Radway's readers, this is crucial to the escapism it offers from their daily housework as wives and mothers. The cliché's affective labor provides respite from other forms of labor.

What then might it mean to read for cliché? To become attentive to the thing we have been conditioned to be inattentive to? If the cliché is, as Namwali Serpell suggests, "resistant to analysis," I am interested in the work it performs in shaping one's affective encounters with the world.8 To refer to a cliché-riddled novel as a "guilty pleasure" is to acknowledge its power: as Adorno and Horkheimer dismissively claim, the cliché is "an embarrassingly agreeable ingredient," allowing readers to "more reliably control their own human emotions."9 But we might say that in appealing to emotion, the other work of the cliché largely goes unnoticed, normalizing beliefs via their repetition or even romanticizing them. It should be of little surprise that one of the most clichéd expressions of the twenty-first century is a maxim for the relationship between work and feeling: "do what you love and you will never work a day in your life." In what follows, I first uncover the ideological work of the cliché via Henry's self-conscious narrative fantasies, as seen in her novels Beach Read and Book Lovers. I then read Luster as an anti-romance about the unlovable work, both paid and unpaid, that Edie unwillingly performs as those around her read her as a cliché. Despite their differing views on how desirable it is to have one's identity shaped by work, the three novels question what it means to exist within the confines of the cliché and whether it is possible to become a better reader of oneself.

Easy to Love

In Stephen King's Misery (1984) romance novelist Paul Sheldon pejoratively refers to his legion of fans as the "Constant Reader," who "love[s] stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them."10 As this framing suggests, the appeal of the romance is its apparent lack of craft which allows readers to be swept away by plot. Yet the pleasure of the romance plot ultimately comes from its sameness: story only matters insofar as it is a vehicle for emotional satisfaction. While Misery revolves around the reactions of a particularly deranged reader who holds Sheldon captive after he fails to deliver a happy ending for his heroine Misery Chastain, Radway's interviewees possess a similar craving for both an absence of literary distractions and the gratification of their expectations. Aided by simple sentence construction and clichés, romance readers have little interest in a writer's role in choosing specific language or a reader's role in interpreting it, and instead focus on a character's likability or the creativity of the premise. The ideal romance is one that is easy to read, easy to digest, and therefore easy to love.

For its critics, it is easy to dismiss the romance as both unliterary and ideological: as Radway suggests, the palatable nature of the cliché allows it to perform more insidious work, smuggling in a patriarchal dictum in which the romantic heroine's self-fulfillment and social reward is inextricably tied to her ability to reorient her understanding of the romantic hero. Like Darcy in Austen's Pride and Prejudice — which has since provided an implicit or explicit blueprint for many a romance novel since 1813 — the male hero at first seems to possess a proud or indifferent demeanor, shielding a softer interior the heroine is initially blind to. She must, as Radway argues, learn "how to read a man properly."11 In exchange for the care she now shows to the hero, she achieves the benefit of a relationship that is loving and, as in the case of Pride and Prejudice and many more contemporary romances, often financially and socially advantageous. The happy ending of the heterosexual romance novel thus implies that a woman is only able to achieve full satisfaction not simply when she falls in love, but also when she learns to love the affective labor of managing the hero's opaque or even volatile feelings. The reader, who identifies with the intelligent and spirited heroine, aspires to a similar fate or at least unquestioningly accepts the logic of the romance. Within romance fiction, the ideological success of the cliché is built upon privileging one form of reading by ignoring another.

But defining the romance is not a straightforward task, given that its most essential condition — that two (or more) people fall in love — is not limited to bodice rippers or cute comedies, but can be traced to the origins of the novel itself.12 Accordingly, critics of the romance plot writ large warn against the patriarchal, heteronormative ideology that permeates its components. "Any literary convention — plots, narrative sequences, characters in bit parts — as an instrument that claims to depict experience," Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues in Writing beyond the Ending (1985), "also interprets it."13 Likewise, Joseph Allen Boone's Tradition Counter Tradition (1987) takes note of the "the metamorphosis of social conventions of love into narrative conventions of form," suggesting that the romance suffers from the limitations of both its ideological aims and its literary expression.14 To be sure, these accounts, along with Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), reflect the broader interest in feminist critique in the 1980s, but many of the formal conventions and clichés within the genre remain the same: negative first impressions, "opposites attract," and of course, the requisite happy ending.

The distinction between the literary and the generic, then, lies not within the ideological possibility or even narrative ingredients, but rather the degree of care shown to the reader. This problem animates the plot of Henry's Beach Read, which pits the romance against literary fiction before ultimately reconciling the two. The novel follows January as she falls in love with her former college rival and new neighbor Gus Everett, a critically acclaimed novelist who is struggling with writers' block of his own. The two initially bicker over their competing theories of writerly craft and the role of cliché. January accuses Gus of writing masturbatory fiction with a limited scope whereas she believes that she owes her readers something that makes them "feel known and understood" (70). Gus, in contrast, believes that January's problem is that she is overly focused on thinking about what her readers want instead of writing what she wants. But with both feeling a lack of inspiration, the two make a bet to try and alleviate their inability to write while also trying to prove to each other the merits and difficulty of their respective crafts: they will switch genres. January will try to write "bleak literary fiction" and Gus will write "a Happily Ever After" (77).

If the chief literary sin of the romance is its obfuscation of labor, Beach Read is a novel about the work that goes into producing a feel-good read, thus forcing the "constant reader" to confront the work of the cliché. As part of January and Gus's deal, the two agree to share their process for writing within their respective genres. Gus will take January with him to conduct interviews and research as a means for developing character depth. In return, January offers Gus a "rom-com crash course" of tried-and-true date scenarios, taking the skeptical Gus to a drive-in movie, carnival, and line dancing night at a local bar (79). On their trip to the carnival, January explains that they should have a "montage" of the sunny January dragging the grumpy Gus to different rides as part of "the promise-of-the-premise portion of the novel, when your readers are grinning ear to ear" (122). In other words, the novel posits an opposition that it then deconstructs: the work that goes into literary fiction is minutely focused on crafting individuating details and motives, whereas writing romance fiction requires an understanding of the role of cliché in making readers happy.

January and Gus may disagree on the relative merits of the literary and the generic, but they quickly discover their shared philosophy of work ethic. Although January imagines the value of her writing is in the service of a community of readers, she laments her struggle to work in distinctly personal terms: "it's bad enough that I feel like I'm incapable of doing the one thing I'm good at, the thing that makes me feel like me, and then there's the added fact that I'm totally out of money" (75-6). As the italics stress, January defines her identity solely through her work: interests, hobbies, and relationships need not apply. Yet as January admits, the motive of money is not enough: work must be done for its own sake. Gus agrees, "the pressure turns it into a job, like anything else, and you might as well be selling insurance" (76). Here, writing fiction of any kind is imagined as a higher form of labor: for January, it is a source of self-worth, and for Gus, it is a kind of calling.

This vision of literary labor reflects another cliché, that work should be personally rewarding. This "do what you love" ethos, Miya Tokumitsu argues, transforms the idea of work from "something one does for compensation" into "an act of self-love."15 The triteness of the expression has become so ingrained that it is impossible to identify an origin point, Tokumitsu explains, but the platitude's most conspicuous endorsement can be traced to Steve Jobs's commencement address to Stanford in 2005:

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. Like any great relationship, it just gets better and better.16

Likening one's job to a soulmate, Jobs advances a romantic fantasy in which there is a one true love waiting to be found. Only once one discovers and commits to that love, Jobs suggests, is personal happiness possible.

In Beach Read, this relationship between work and love is inextricable. January's lack of inspiration comes from her disenchantment with her own love life and Gus's struggle to write is the product of a painful divorce. Predictably, their proximity via work breeds familiarity, as the two divulge their personal secrets on Gus's research trips while flirting with each other during January's rom-com excursions. Combined, their shared work is a kind of creative aphrodisiac; fittingly, the first time the two have sex, it is against Gus's bookshelves. But even if the outings do not entirely result in January and Gus swapping styles, their finished novels collapse the distinction between the literary and generic for something more significant: novels that feel both inspired and authentic to each of them. Accordingly, the experiment results in Beach Read's own happy ending.17 January and Gus learn to love to write again as they fall in love with each other and fall in love with each other as they work. Even as Beach Read exposes the clichés of romance, it continues to endorse the fantasy of the perfect, happy job.

Lovable Work

"Love and work were once thought to operate in separate gendered spheres," writes the Marxist-feminist theorist Kathi Weeks.18 Such an opposition also undergirds the love plots of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which working women like Richardson's Pamela or Brontë's Jane Eyre cede their role in society for a happy retreat into the domestic world of marriage. But in the wake of 1970s feminism, such standards changed for both the working world and the modern romance. Instead, pop feminism dictates another cliché: that a woman's personal fulfillment can coexist with her professional fulfillment, allowing her to "have it all."19 The happy ending of contemporary capitalism is that a woman need not give up one form of love (her professional identity) in exchange for another (marriage and family). The logic affirms Jobs's: one should love one's job as passionately as one's partner and to compromise on either would not result in a truly happy ending. It is neither surprising nor intolerable that one should wish to find fulfillment in all areas of life, including one's work, but as Weeks argues, this desire encourages us "to configure work as the center of our identity."20

This concern drives the plot of Emily Henry's third romance Book Lovers which, like Beach Read, self-consciously trades in clichés, opening with a declaration from literary agent Nora Stephens that "when books are your life — or in my case, your job — you get pretty good at guessing where a story is going."21 Working as a skeptical gatekeeper of taste, Nora's role seemingly confirms Laura McGrath's assertion that "no figure is more influential ... than the literary agent.22 Indeed, Book Lovers is a novel essentially about influence and control. Framed as a battle of narrative constraints, Nora sees cliché everywhere including her personal life, accepting that she is the uptight, careerist "City Person" in a small-town romance novel, who will inevitably be dumped for the more down-to-earth heroine. She cannot find love because, as her younger sister Libby explains, "[w]ork always comes first for her" (224). Secretly hoping to convince Nora to move out of New York with her and her family, Libby orchestrates a plan to rewrite Nora's City Person life into a small-town romance of her own. Dragging Nora on a vacation to the town of Sunshine Falls in North Carolina, Libby supplies a checklist of narrative tropes for Nora to fulfill, including skinny dipping, saving a local business, and going on dates with locals.

The reluctant Nora, however, holds fast to work, compulsively checking emails, fielding calls from clients at all hours, and reading manuscripts despite her sister's protests. As the novel reveals, Nora's obsession with work and her emotional guardedness are the product of the unexpected death of their single mother, an aspiring actress, when Nora was in college and Libby was still a teenager. Faced with mountains of bills and debt, Nora supplemented her minimum wage job at a bookstore with a series of odd jobs, working as a waitress, tutor, and even ghostwriter for her classmates' papers. But rather than bemoan the economic precarity of their upbringing, Nora instead romanticizes it, characterizing their mother as "spread thin," but "also full of life, ecstatic to be chasing her dreams" of being an actress (223). Libby, however, offers an alternative interpretation: "Mom was broke, tired, and lonely. She put her career ahead of absolutely everything and was miserable because of it" (223). Here, their differing assessments of whether their mother's work left her feeling "ecstatic" or "miserable" is partially a litmus test for the two sisters' own feelings about the pursuit of a dream career, but also a question of reading their mother's own feelings. Narrated by Nora, the novel does not allow room to fully settle the issue, but articulates the novel's problem of defining what a happy ending might look like; for Nora, happiness is in the optimistic pursuit of the future, whereas for Libby, unhappiness is a reality of the present.

Sara Ahmed describes this fantasy toward the future as a belief that "happiness is what we would have, if that thing did not get in the way."23 For Nora, her job is not necessarily a source of happiness as much as it is control, but Nora rejects the idea that work stands in the way of personal happiness. Instead believing that personal relationships are at fault, Nora thinks about watching all of her

friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning (112).

Ever the reader, Nora views her friends as retired authors, no longer capable of telling their own stories. And contrasted by her friends' "shrinking" selves, Nora's expanding appraisal of clauses and qualifications performs both a verbal shielding and defense of her own life decisions. Grammatically rendering her friend's "half lives" into a half sentence, Nora instead views herself as fully complete without a love interest. But as a romance, Book Lovers demands that Nora reassess her own views toward love; what stands in the way of Nora's total happiness, the novel implies, is her belief that she can maintain full narrative control of her own life by retreating to the safety of the generic cliché.

But rather than suggest she conform to Libby's small-town romance set up or give up her desire for control, Book Lovers instead requires Nora to find a partner who shares her philosophy toward work: fellow City Person and workaholic book editor Charlie Lastra who is in town helping his aging father and operating his mother's struggling bookstore. As in Beach Read, their shared love of literary work brings the two together as they co-edit a manuscript by Nora's star client. The two struggle to keep things professional before ultimately deciding to give in to their desire for each other. The obstacle to their happiness, however, is not a series of miscommunications or misreading of feelings, but the incompatibility of Charlie's personal life (requiring him to stay in town to help his family) and Nora's career (wanting to stay in New York, even after learning Libby is moving). And rather than ask Nora to choose between him and her career, Charlie instead recommends her for his editing job in New York, telling her she "should have everything," even knowing he can't be part of that (331).

With Charlie's urging that she should not give up what she wants, Nora accepts the new job and returns to New York. Although Nora ruefully thinks there are no happy endings for women like her, Book Lovers provides one that plays out much like another work cliché of the twenty-first century: to lean in. In her 2011 commencement address to Barnard graduates, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg warned the gathered crowd of millennial women that they would likely have to make personal sacrifices for their careers so that "the most important career decision you're going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is. If you pick someone who's willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you're going to go further."24 Just as Jobs advised millennials to find work they were passionate about, Sandberg similarly extolled the personal possibilities of work, but with an important caveat: that work not only be akin to a great partner, but that a truly great partner will both understand and appreciate the importance of a woman's career. And indeed, even with Charlie and now Libby living in North Carolina, Nora finds satisfaction, not regret, in her new job. A few months later, Charlie surprises Nora in New York — Libby has taken over managing the bookstore — he proposes his editorial notes for a happy ending for them:

I get another editing job, or maybe take up agenting, or try writing again. You work your way up at Loggia, and we're both busy all the time ... We have a lot of fun being city people, and we're happy. You let me love you as much as I know I can, for as long as I know I can, and you have it fucking all (369).

It's worth noting how much Charlie's plan fetishizes work, even though both he and Nora will have taken pay cuts and will be constantly working. Book Lovers shares Jobs's and Sandberg's belief that lovable jobs are worth more than anything, and views busyness as a source of excitement rather than exhaustion. What's more, Charlie's promise to Nora reflects Ahmed's critique that happiness becomes "end oriented." "It is not just that we can be happy about something, as a feeling in the present" Ahmed writes, "but some things become happy for us, if we imagine they will bring happiness to us."25 The two will engage in an ongoing project of the pursuit of happiness, nurtured by both love and work. As a romance, Book Lovers posits an earnest vision of millennial advice in action; the less glamorous consequences of low wages, exploitation, and never-ending work experienced by many millennials — especially those from less privileged backgrounds — go unobserved. Instead, as much as Book Lovers upends the clichés that Nora believes dictate her fate, the novel advances a different, albeit conventional fantasy of romance. As the two exchange "I-love-yous," Charlie announces the novel's simile for their perfect compatibility: "I can read you like a book" (370). Nora, who had previously read her own life as an unhappy cliché, has had her life not rewritten, but reread through better eyes.

With their emphasis on literary labor, Henry's novels romanticize the publishing industry as exciting and fulfilling. This attitude is in itself a cliché of "chick lit," Stephanie Harzewski argues, and dates back to Rona Jaffe's novel The Best of Everything (1958).26 In a more recent example, Sally Thorne's The Hating Game (2016), which features two rival coworkers angling for a promotion at a publishing house, Thorne admiringly explains her heroine's commitment to "live and breathe the publishing industry" as the result of her "fall[ing] in love" with the work.27 But this belief in lovable work has also led to real world exploitation as more recent criticisms of romance fiction by Mark McGurl and Sarah Brouillette identify. Henry's success — all six of her bestselling romances were published by Penguin — is becoming increasingly anomalous, but certainly not for lack of interest in the genre which has boomed on self-publishing platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Wattpad.28 The reliable tropes of romance, McGurl argues, provide "imitable models to writers for free," making the genre particularly accessible for novice writers.29 What's more, Brouillette notes, publishers and agents have begun drafting romance readers (primarily women) into becoming low-paid content creators themselves, also asking them to perform the labor of self-promotion by way of the "love discount."30

As predatory as these practices may be, one can easily see how a reader might find such editorial flattery appealing, given the opportunity to do what they love. There are even a few fairy tale success stories to give aspiring romance writers hope: E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) infamously began life as Twilight (2006) fanfiction, while Ali Hazelwood's bestselling The Love Hypothesis (2021) was originally conceived as a Star Wars "alternate universe" story, posted on Archive of Our Own. While the odds of achieving bestsellerdom or inking a film deal may be slim, the examples of both James and Hazelwood provide another, more modest allure: what may have originally been freely written for leisure can now become a form of creative labor to be sold.

Unlovable Work

It is admittedly unintuitive to read Raven Leilani's Luster within the context of the romance, given that its premise is essentially unromantic. Despite a glowing review on the front of the paperback edition of the novel declaring it "fan-yourself sexy," Edie and Eric's affair isn't even portrayed as a particularly illicit fantasy as much as an awkward arrangement within the bounds of Eric's open marriage, governed by rules drawn up by his wife Rebecca.31 Luster nevertheless tracks Edie's attempts to write herself into the script of the romance by dutifully undertaking the role of the happy and helpful heroine who is sensitive to her lover's moods. The first date with Eric to the amusement park — the cliché that January assures Gus is a perfect scenario for falling in love — is mostly disastrous. Taking in the sight of puking patrons and dirty diapers, Edie is disappointed with Eric's choice, but still feels responsible "to manage his feelings" and "to prove over the course of this date that I Am Having a Good Time!" (8). By performing what Arlie Hochschild calls "emotion work," Edie attempts to align her own desires with Eric's in order to preserve the romantic cliché.32

This problem illustrates the distinction Lauren Berlant draws between desire (or to take Leilani's framing, lust) and love in order to demarcate the difference between subject formation and social reproduction. Desire, Berlant argues, is "the cloud of possibility that is generated between an object's specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it."33 Expressions of love, on the other hand, "tend to be so conventional, so bound up in institutions like marriage and family, property relations, and stock phrases and plots."34 In other words, desire refers to the thing that is always just out of reach, whereas love offers a normative fantasy of achievement via the ease of the cliché. However appealing, such fantasies are potentially dangerous, Berlant argues elsewhere, offering a "cruel promise of reciprocity and belonging."35 Like Beach Read and Book Lovers, Luster understands the significance of navigating clichés —for Edie, they are both romantic and racial — but while Henry's novels nurture the fantasy of "the embracing dream in which love is reciprocated" in both one's personal and professional life, Luster is instead a novel about frustrated desire.36

This desire takes many forms, as is demonstrated by the novel's opening paragraph. "The first time we have sex," Edie narrates, "we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light" (3). Despite the risqué scenario, the "sex" itself is banal: "he tells me what he ate for lunch and asks if I can manage to take off my underwear in my cubicle without anyone noticing" (3). Presented as a form of multitasking while Edie works on manuscript corrections, the act suggests her halfhearted investment in both the relationship and her job. Likewise, the encounter is generic and impersonal: "he" — Eric — is not even named until the final line of the paragraph. Nevertheless, the scene articulates Edie's deeper desire by staging the first of the novel's sex scenes as a matter of reading. In lieu of sexual prowess, Eric has "impeccable punctuation" and an eye for Edie's typos in her dating profile (3). And although Edie expresses her frustration after each of their in-person dates do not end with sex, here Edie does not reveal the content of her own messages to Eric or even that she has sent any. Instead, Edie is seduced by "the empty text box ... full of possibilities" and "the thrill of a third pair of unseen eyes" coming across their messages; Edie's primary desire is thus cast as a longing to express herself and to be read (3).

It would then seem fitting that Edie works in publishing, but Luster refuses to romanticize this work. Finding no love for it, Edie treats her position as a managing editorial consultant at a New York City publishing house as what David Graber calls "a bullshit job."37 Instead, the only pleasure Edie receives from work is sex: "the best part of the job," Edie muses, has been acting as "an office slut," providing a long list of her various office hookups (24, 23). Yet even this small satisfaction reveals Edie's deeper frustrations. In shelving her workplace conquests by department and genre — ranging from Tyler from self-help to Adam from Christian erotica — Edie recognizes the matrix of narrative constraints at play within the publishing industry. This most clearly comes into focus when Edie is fired for her lack of work ethic and sexual behavior. On her way out the door, Edie passes the "Diversity Giveaway" table, which includes:

a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father's estate; a slave narrative about a runaway's friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a Black maid who, like Schrödinger's cat, is both alive and dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who exists only within the bounds of her employer's four walls; an "urban" romance where everybody dies by gang violence; and a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods (78-9).

In other words, if Nora recognizes herself as the clichéd villain in the small-town romance, Edie realizes that the scripts available to her as a Black woman are those of the oppressed, masquerading as cultural authenticity.

What's more, there is little room to deviate. Edie's most sincere acknowledgment of her workplace desire is not libidinal but directed toward the coworker she has failed to befriend: Aria, the only other Black woman at the publishing house who is now taking Edie's role. As Edie lingers outside, Aria offers the platitude that the two could have been friends. Edie narrates her desire for that alternate universe, feeling that it is "impossible" to not "fall a little bit in love" after seeing her success as another Black woman (80). Yet, as both women recognize, the two have little in common. The hypercompetent and hardworking Aria confronts Edie with her professional shortcomings: "You think because you slack and express no impulse control that you're like, Black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you're just exactly what they expect" (80). As much as Edie attempts to "go off script," Aria informs her of the impossibility (20).38 Edie's rejection of work does little to help make her case as an asset to the company or to win Aria's friendship, but her chief sin, Aria concludes, is not only that she doesn't love work enough, but also that she fails to escape the cliché. Still, the novel suggests that the only acceptable alternative is another cliché, that of the "Grateful Diversity Hire" (72).

We see here that unlovable work in Luster is not simply dictated by the mandate to configure one's identity around work, but by how others configure that identity according to their own desires. This comes through most emphatically as Edie enters the gig economy, downloading an app for a courier service in which her livelihood now hinges upon fulfilling the wants of others.39 Edie delivers anything ranging from waffle fries to wigs across Brooklyn, but in doing so, discovers the vampiric nature of the gig economy. Part of what Anne Helen Petersen calls the "burnout generation," conditioned to continue working even as their lives are "indelibly shaped by precarity," Edie finds herself unable to muster the energy for anything other than survival.40 Yet the fear of being unable to meet others' desires saps even her most basic attempts to satisfy her own. During a slow night, the friendly waitstaff at a local restaurant offers Edie a free meal and the opportunity to stop for a few minutes of rest, but fearing the loss of a potential order, Edie loses her appetite. The next order, however, results in a job offer as she delivers an order for a cup of lobster bisque and a bone saw to Rebecca, a medical examiner in a Veteran Affairs' morgue. After bringing Edie into the morgue, Rebecca introduces the subject of her and Eric's adopted twelve-year-old Black daughter, Akila, who has no friends.

In this moment, Edie's racial embodiment becomes a kind of work of its own, realizing that this is Rebecca's "most natural conclusion ... to engage me not as a person who has just watched her dissect a man but a person who is Black, and who is, because of that, available for her support" (98). Given the choice between the grueling labor of the courier job and her climbing rent and the affective labor Rebecca craves and a guest bedroom in New Jersey, Edie accepts her new role as a kind of twenty-first century Jane Eyre. Like the job at the publisher, Edie's work is dependent upon performing the cliché, allowing Rebecca to believe that she is a "Good White Person," and that Edie will act as the "Trusty Black Spirit Guide" for Akila (120). Absorbed into the Walkers' domestic economy, Edie occupies an uncertain position within the household as part-time housekeeper, part-time mentor to Akila, part-time lover to Eric, and part-time companion to Rebecca. Neither a member of the family nor a contracted employee, Edie performs tasks on irregular schedules, helping with cooking and cleaning one week, while taking Akila to Tae Kwon Do practice another. When money appears on Edie's dresser, it comes in random amounts with no explanations, leaving Edie unsure of what exactly she is being paid to do or what the metric of her worth is to the Walkers.

The mystery is never solved, but the message is clearly received: the work is "explicitly transactional, and so of course it is demeaning," but Edie concedes, "it is also demeaning to be broke" (163). Highlighting this double bind, Luster invokes the fantasy of lovable work — that it should be done for its own sake, rather than money — only to dismantle it. After a conflict with Rebecca over a racist remark made by Akila's math tutor, Edie fantasizes about delivering a speech arguing that "her intellectual labor should be subsidized," but only feels a wave of guilt the next morning (121). While the heroine of the romance is rewarded with the hero's love and material gain for the selfless work of prioritizing her lover's feelings via feminine submission, Edie instead finds only abjection. The Walkers' treatment of Edie oscillates between Rebecca's patronizing maternalism and Eric's sexual sadism; at one moment, Eric begins to choke Edie, saying, "You want this, like it is a question and then like it is a statement" (167). If Edie's personal desires are left unsatisfied in her publishing job and all but disappear in the courier job, at the Walkers' house, Eric dictates them.

The arrangement ends, however, after one of Eric and Edie's trysts — for the most part overlooked by Rebecca — results in Eric's hospitalization. When Edie protests that it is not her fault, Rebecca cuts Edie off with the accusation of the cliché. "[Y]ou are not specific ... All of this, it has been done," she states before dismissing Edie: "This isn't serving me anymore" (192). By leaving "this" unspecified, Luster emphasizes that Rebecca fails to see any unique value in either Edie or in the work she performs. Instead, Edie's "service" is her mere presence within the Walkers' lives, allowing them to uphold their feelings of superiority over her. Cast out of the suburbs and back into the working world of the city, Edie muses on what comes next, "a job I actively do not want but that offers paid sick leave, health insurance, and a free mattress" (221-2). Aside from the mattress, Edie's next job is not unlike her first: unlovable yet salaried. But as critical as Luster is of the multiple exploitative economies Edie exists within, the novel clings to the hope that Edie will now be able to do what she loves again: making art.

Luster, with its tour through the contemporary landscape of unlovable work, harbors no illusions about Jobs's directive that one should chase one's dreams at any cost. Work in Luster is not romantic, but the novel instead imagines the possibility of work being what Audre Lorde calls the erotic: "a measure between the feelings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings."41 Arguing that the capitalist economy strips work of its erotic potential, reducing it to a "travesty of necessities," Lorde likens the impact to "blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting."42 Luster literalizes Lorde's analogy as Edie reflects that she has not painted in over two years, feeling "good, but not good enough," before taking up painting again while living with the Walkers (26). When Rebecca takes notice, she assesses that her paintings "need work," and buys Edie a set of brushes and paint, bringing her to the morgue to paint the bodies as she dissects them (183). Painting the grotesque cadavers, Edie experiences a range of emotions: "joy" and "fun" in the work itself, and a mixture of resentment and "love" from Rebecca's approval (188). While the novel's title seems to refer to the sexual want that results in both Edie's arrival at and ousting from the Walker home, Luster's truest desire is for an erotic attachment to work, not for the sake of money, work for work's sake, or even the promise of happiness, but as a form of self-knowledge.

While Edie does not exactly find respite from labor or precarity within the Walkers' household, her return to painting transforms work into, as Lorde suggests, "a conscious decision, a longed-for bed" in which one can "rise up empowered."43 And in the end, despite Rebecca's dismissal of her, Edie does find herself empowered. After Rebecca has helped her move into her new apartment in the city, Edie has Rebecca pose for a nude portrait, shaping her limbs both physically and in the paint. The act is neither salacious nor sentimental. When the portrait is finished and Rebecca departs without comment, Edie reflects, "I've made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading" (227). But even as this act of interpretation is a form of power, it is also an act of love; Edie hopes that one day someone will do the same difficult work for her in return, rather than reducing her to the cliché.

In closing, I want to call attention to the language of reading that concludes both Luster and Book Lovers, which recognizes the act of interpretation, albeit to differing ends. The romantic fantasy of cliché is that work should be easy to love, even if the ideology embedded within the cliché is that one should love work whether or not it is hard. While this logic has been thoroughly uncovered and critiqued by the likes of Berlant, Tokumitsu, and Weeks, it is nevertheless difficult to give up the fantasy promised by cliché. Certainly, it is worth distinguishing the privileged intellectual work of reading from the many other forms of work that exist, although the ability to perform this work securely is also waning. Furthermore, in a moment where literacy is constantly named as in crisis and artificial intelligence can "read" in seconds, it is worth protecting the value of this work. But I am here interested in what kind of work reading is: what, after all, would constitute an "appropriate" close reading? If the irony of romance fiction is that cliché creates bad readers of texts who believe they must bear the responsibility of becoming a good reader of those around them, I do not wish to suggest the solution to becoming a better reader — or what Robert Scholes calls a "crafty" reader — is simply to look for the ideology hidden within the generic cliché.44

While the intellectualization of the cliché undoubtedly has the power to strip away the affective pleasure of reading, I also do not want to suggest we should disavow the desire for an emotional response or to become a "killjoy" reader. It would be a mistake to suggest there is no pleasure in the act of interpretation itself. Peter Brooks proposes that "the reading of narrative ... animates the sense-making process" that functions as "a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text."45 The rigid script of romance makes this especially legible, propelling the reader to a feeling, knowing that the most important, genre-defining cliché that awaits is a happy ending. To read for cliché is to acknowledge this desire, but to also ask what work the reader performs in search of it. This is not to make some vague or universal appeal to the "human," but instead to recognize that the work of interpretation is in fact a deeply individual if not affective process that supplies meaning of its own. Although the romance plot fantasizes over the possibility of a perfect reader, sensitive to one's desires and moods, we bring our own flaws as readers. Nevertheless, the reading process is as hopeful as the romance, whether or not it results in our happiness. Always future-oriented, even in the process of rereading, the act of reading is always motivated by the desire one should find something beyond the words on the page. Loving it is an option, but finding it requires work.

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Angela S. Allan is a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focuses on American literature, genre fiction, and popular culture

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Banner Image by Dan Dumitriu on Unsplash

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References

1. Raven Leilani, Luster (Picador, 2020), 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically.[⤒]
2. In the most defiant sequence, Edie narrates doing drugs at the disco club date before driving back to Eric's house in New Jersey in 269 words before interrupting this narrative rhapsodizing with a single declarative sentence, "There is no foreplay" (39). Foreplay does not matter, however, as the scene lurches on with another dizzying 406-word sentence, beginning with sex in Eric's bedroom and ending with Edie back in the city, alone.[⤒]
3. For a longer history of the cliché's origins and evolution, see C. Namwali Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," in Critique and Post Critique, ed. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski (Duke University Press, 2017), 154-7.[⤒]
4. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick (Harvard University Press, 2020), 64.[⤒]
5. Michael Hardt, "Affective Labor," boundary 2 (Summer 1999): 96.[⤒]
6. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 196.[⤒]
7. Radway, Reading the Romance, 196.[⤒]
8. C. Namwali Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," 161.[⤒]
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002), 115.[⤒]
10. Stephen King, Misery (Scribner, 1987), 69.[⤒]
11. Radway, Reading the Romance, 148.[⤒]
12. See Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Harvard University Press, 1976).[⤒]
13. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Indiana University Press, 1985), 2.[⤒]
14. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 67.[⤒]
15. Miya Tokumitsu, "In the Name of Love," Jacobin, January 12, 2014.[⤒]
16. Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, June 12, 2005. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/youve-got-find-love-jobs-says[⤒]
17. Like the traditional romance, the novel's narrative structure requires a delay to the happy ending, which relies upon January's ability to recognize and dispel Gus's own emotional barriers, later revealed to be the product of a traumatic childhood and the divorce. When Gus becomes withdrawn, January realizes that the romantic cliché will only go so far: "his walls were so thick it would take years to chisel through them ... I knew I was not the Magical One who could fix it all just by Being Me" (263). Nevertheless, the US edition of the novel includes an epilogue with Gus proposing to January one year after their first reencounter in Michigan. The UK edition of the novel, however, does not include the proposal. Instead, it concludes with Gus receiving the advance copies of his novel, which includes a dedication — riffing on the cliché — to January: "I don't care how the story ends as long as I spend it with you" (357).[⤒]
18. Kathi Weeks, "Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work," WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3-4 (2017): 37.[⤒]
19. For an examination of the phrase's (somewhat unclear) origins, see Jennifer Szalai, "The Complicated Origins of 'Having it All,'" New York Times, January 2, 2015. Szalai traces it to a 1980 guidebook and later to Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown's 1982 advice book. The title was chosen by Brown's editors; she herself considered it "so fucking cliché," but it continues to remain a favorite for countless books since.[⤒]
20. Weeks, "Down with Love," 38.[⤒]
21. Emily Henry, Book Lovers (Penguin, 2022), 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically.[⤒]
22. Laura B. McGrath, "Literary Agency," American Literary History 33, no. 2 (2021): 350.[⤒]
23. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), 32.[⤒]
24. Sheryl Sandberg, "Barnard Commencement Address," May 17, 2001. https://barnard.edu/commencement/archives/2011[⤒]
25. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 26.[⤒]
26. See Stephanie Harzewski, Chick Lit and Postfeminism (University of Virginia Press, 2011). In a stranger set up, E. L. James's third book in the Fifty Shades of Grey series has its protagonist working at a publishing house, later bought by her husband after their marriage.[⤒]
27. Sally Thorne, The Hating Game (Harper Collins, 2016), 46.[⤒]
28. Henry's trajectory is more reminiscent of what Dan Sinykin has deemed "the conglomerate era." Appropriately, corporate expectations loom in Beach Read as January worries her new book will not fit her publisher's expectations; after it is published with another house, she admits feeling strange to not see their colophon on the spine. See Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How the Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2023).[⤒]
29. Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021), 184.[⤒]
30. Sarah Brouillette, "Romance Work," Theory & Event, vol 22, no. 2 (April 2019): 456.[⤒]
31. Michelle Hart, "Raven Leilani's Sexy-Smart Novel Luster Will Have You Fanning Yourself," Oprah Daily, August 4, 2020.[⤒]
32. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure," American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551-75. Emotion work "refers more broadly to the act of evoking or shaping, as well as suppressing, feeling in oneself" (561). Hochschild draws a distinction between emotion work, which is done for the satisfaction of others, and emotional labor, which is performed in exchange for a wage.[⤒]
33. Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (Punctum Books, 2012), 6.[⤒]
34. Berlant, Desire/Love, 7.[⤒]
35. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 45.[⤒]
36. Berlant, Desire/Love, 6.[⤒]
37. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Graeber defines the "bullshit job" as "primarily or entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or ever pernicious" (5).[⤒]
38. While the romantic script dictates the rules of the romance, Luster shows how racial scripts govern Edie's lived experience. Late in the novel, police arrive at the Walker residence after a white neighbor reports her dog has been shot. When the officer suspiciously asks if Edie and Akila live there, Akila does not assume a posture of deference. Both Edie and the officer marvel at her "departure from the script," wondering "if it is defiance or if she simply doesn't know the words" (214). Akila's inability to adhere to the script of submission results in the two being brutally pressed to the ground.[⤒]
39. Luster is not autobiographical, yet Edie's job search resembles Leilani's own resumé, including not only a job as a production associate at Macmillan while enrolled in her M.F.A. program at New York University, but also a stint working as a courier for Postmates. Concepcíon de Léon, "Raven Leilani, A Flâneur Who Is Going Places," New York Times, August 4, 2020.[⤒]
40. Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (Mariner, 2021), ix.[⤒]
41. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 2007), 54.[⤒]
42. Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," 55.[⤒]
43. Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," 55.[⤒]
44. Robert Scholes, The Crafty Reader (Yale University Press, 2001). Notably, Scholes has little interest in the romance, noting that their "templates" tend to be "highly specific and leave very little to the imagination of those authors" as well as, echoing Radway, "provide readers with a very specific sort of textual pleasure that is minimally literary in the sense that it is based mainly on recognition of the familiar and requires hardly any cognition, or new thought, at all."((Scholes, The Crafty Reader, 143).[⤒]
45. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 37.[⤒]