About that Night, by Jeanie London
The plan is simple. Julienne Blake will use self-hypnosis until she's discovered the sexy woman inside, then she'll seduce Nick Fairfax during an unforgettable night. And with a tantalizing performance for an audience of one, she does just that. But her sensual plan seems to have worked just a little too well, because Nick is begging for a return engagement.
Nick has never met a woman who could capture his attention so completely as Julienne has. Her risqué moves have him pursuing her all over sultry Savannah just to be alone with her. But he's not a long-term kind of guy, so his desire to extend this passionate affair has him completely baffled. Somehow he has to convince her there's more than that night between them....
The Chronicler will get back to the joys of My Fair Viking, no doubt, but first just a brief summary of the horrors of About that Night.
The Chronicler admits the use of the word "horror" is largely unjustified; the book was by and large quite s quite dull. The sex scenes were tepid, the choice of words routine (pebbled, check; turgid, check; suckled, check; use of sex to mean cunt, check) and really, even at less than two hundred pages, the London is distinctly running thin of ideas. The book smacks of the sort of three-year-old naughtiness, back when it's edgy to say "damn" when no one's looking.
But a reader who buys a book marketed containing hot, steamy sex (it is a "Blaze," after all) should really be less easily shocked.
(Or perhaps this all speaks of the youth of today being rubbish. Who knows? But Description Inflation is always a problem that haunts us all...)
London is far too fond of the word "naughty." It comes across as childish, especially from a woman who is three decades in age. Admittedly, that's her theme, but the words "naughty boy" elicits not a the mental image of some unrepentant playboy, it reminds me only of bad governess fantasies and that scene in Child in Time. Really. There is nothing remotely sexy about "naughty boys."
Jules (or Julienne) self-hypnotises. Yes. She repeats uninspiring phrases to herself repeatedly to condition herself to be more "naughty", and the reader has to suffer with her as London threads these phrases in italics throughout the narrative.
Naughty girls feel good about being naughty.
The Anthropologist thought this was a novel about a really sexually repressed woman discovering herself, fighting the expectations of a sexually conservative (probably quite religious, this being set in Savannah, Georgia) society around her. But there is no evidence of this. If anything, the heroine (or the author) has so completely internalised her "nice girl" attitudes that there are not expectations for her to defy and confound besides that of her Uncle Thad (but we'll come to that.) No one even raises an eyebrow over Risqué Theatre, a building allegedly festooned in plaster phallus-wielding cherubs (also an unsexy image, seraphim maybe, but not cherubs. I'm not sure any world of politicians capitalising on the fundamental interest humanity has in sex can really justify government funding for this. Is there no one who thinks its tasteless and pornographic in all of Savannah? In a society so comfortable with its own sexuality, why is Jules so very uptight about hers?
The Chronicler also categorically state here, dear reader, that there is nothing remotely sexy about winged children with erections.)
Where is she getting her "good girl" ideas from? Maybe it's just Uncle Thad and she really has no other friends, thus giving him plenty of space to instil his ideas of womanhood into her. Jules doesn't need to escape the judgement and hypocrisy of the tag "good girl", there simply isn't the chorus of condemnation needed to create that atmosphere. Jules' friends and students and colleges all cheer her on and even the scandal that looms towards the end of the book over her sleeping with Nick is really rather tame. Hardly anyone is scandalised by it; instead the campus coos over how sweet and wonderful it all is. I suppose London has to construct and environment that Jules can later be comfortable in, but it results in creating a heroine with seemingly completely groundless neuroses.
Naughty girls feel naughty.
Jules is, frankly, stupid, when it comes to trying to self-hypnotise herself into self-confidence. For starters, she decides to unleash her inner sex kitten on one man and only man – Nick Fairfax, the man she has stalked for years (technically she's only obsessively read all his articles, books, theses and know about all his projects). This plan is ever so doomed to trample on her poor, poor ego if this book was set anywhere other than RomanceNovelLand. After all, whilst he has a "naughty boy" reputation, he might not be into her type. He might be having a bad night. He might have already made plans. Who knows? But the point is, it opens her up to the very real possibility of rejection and rejection for reasons that have nothing to with her. Hanging all her hopes of self-confidence and self-discovery on Nick flirting back seems unwise, to say the least.
Naughty girls talk the talk.
She is naive to the point of oblivious, especially since she allegedly regularly visits the Risqué (for architectural appreciation, I'll have you know) and has a saucy-speaking stylist. She is ridiculously surprised that phone sex involves masturbation:
"Touch yourself, Jules." [...]
Julienne lost her fragile hold on her growing confidence. Poof. [...] She supposed she should have seen it coming. After all, she was playing naughty with a man who'd honed the concept to a science.
Phone sex really isn't that scandalous. The whole business of Jules running into something and getting entangled deeper than she expected is tedious and rather insulting. I suppose it boils down to "nice girls don't ask for sex", but this never played with in the novel. It really just reinforces the ideas, if anything. "I dress in really provocative clothing and then flirt with a man with a reputation, after a sex show might lead to him trying to get me in bed? I couldn't have guessed." "You mean trying to arouse someone by talking sexy to them on the phone might lead to masturbation? I'm so surprised I get shocked out of my self-hypnosis!"
"I don't see what can be accomplished by making our relationship public? What's the point?"
"To broadcast we like kinky sex."
Dear reader, you misled by the above throwaway line that there is anything other than vanilla sex between the protagonists. There is talk of exploring fantasies about halfway and the Chronicler thought we might dabble in... no, just no. There isn't. London has no idea what she's writing. Maybe she thinks "kinky" means "really hot." The closest they get is the use of a sex swing, which whilst unconventional doesn't qualify as "kinky."
Nick wonders about women-who-you-marry and women-who-you-shag-and-leave. Whilst I'm really not that keen on secret-identity plots this book could actually have benefited from one, because his wondering over the woman is silly when he knows, frankly, both Jules (the naughty girl) and Julienne (the unsexy professor). He knows both of them and sees them work in their capacity, both inside the bedroom and out.
Most of the self-agonising comes from Jules wondering about how to reconcile the fact that she's now self-hypnotising herself to be with Nick. She thinks that it's a Deception and it makes her an evil woman. Equally she's lying to Uncle Thad as he disapproves of any possible relationship between Nick and herself (EVIL!)... but the argument that self-hypnosis is an external force that obscures the "true self" is somewhat odd. As the Anthropologist pointed out, that makes sentences like this possible: "Oh, I started going to Yoga class and then I met this guy. But he doesn't know the real me, the pre-Yoga me that isn't as calm and flexible. I'm deceiving him!" or the more extreme: "I'm bipolar and I take mood-stabilisers, but I shall never know True Love and no one can possibly know the Real Me that I'm suppressing!"
Incidentally, these neuroses over her own are cured by Nick telling her (talking to her ex, who's the a professor of hypnotherapy) that hypnosis can't make you do anything that isn't "in you" already.
Seriously. It's at the beginning of every book of the subject. A big warning sign to all who think they can use hypnosis to convince a stranger to kill their enemies for them. It's all about giving the control back the patient, not taking it away, accessing inner selves and resources and all that. How can she miss it?
And having sex. Which proves she's actually a passionate woman, deep down. The Anthropologist thinks she's really just a very lazy woman and blames the whole nice/naughty dichotomy for her failure to quite a dull five-year relationship and actually do anything worthwhile with her time.
There are minor wtf?! moments that reminds the reader that this book isn't set anywhere near reality. This is a world that takes active tabloid-sprawling interest in the love lives of its preservation architects. This is a world where it's unusual for graduate students to be used as a source of cheap labour (seriously, ever spoken to an archaeologist? A biologist?) and instead they hire random, seemingly untrained, locals. This is a world where a radio play called Hush Hush Honeys about an illicit, yet idyllic, love affair is the most popular thing on a student radio station named "Rebel Radio." This is a world where nepotism is perfectly acceptable and normal. This is world where snogging behind the bleachers qualifies as a naughty high school fantasy, where no one complains about students being made to work in a cock-studded theatre (seriously, it's America. Land of Abstinence Education. Surely some interest group will pick up on it.) This is a world without standardised data sheets (yes, this surprises us). This is a world where your professor's uncle can hijack the lecture and tell instead a random unrelated, but cute anecdote about your professor as a child (without anyone complaining that they'd really rather things went back on track. Like really. It might be useful.)
But really, what gets me the most the Great Plot Revelation: the hero and heroine conduct their super secret torrid affair, really rather badly. There is then the radio sensation that is Hush-Hush Honeys, about a pair of illicit lovers named Darling and My Love that seems eerily akin to their affair.
"Damn. That sounds like a guided tour of our weekend. We should check our clothes for surveillance equipment."
Who would go to such efforts to tacitly expose (or threaten exposure) their rather sedate sexual escapades? Is it the desperate debt-worn student who runs Rebel Radio and can benefit from the programme's phenomenal success? Is it Jules' bitter ex who wants to tear apart the couple by threatening exposure and thus shaming the hussy into getting together with him again?
No, it's Uncle Thad. The man who raised Jules himself. His source was listening to their phone conversations which he taped. He didn't just listen to some idle chatter and suggestive weekend plans. He was spying on their phone sex. And he didn't just end up listening to them out of a morbid and masochistic curiosity, a sort of inability to press the stop button when realised what the voice mail accidentally picked up. He listens to all their conversations, repeatedly to write the scripts of Hush Hush Honeys.
And instead of being horrified and saying something along the lines of "I understand you did this because you care. I love you, but I really don't think I can face you right now. And I'm moving out," Jules swiftly reconciled herself (after a brief bout of shame and mortification) with Uncle Thad and is understanding of his motives. He made her fling all about him and his relationship with her (as though everything in her life was about him) and then claims that he's actually letting her go.
His admission filled the ensuing silence with such richness of emotion that Nick had never before seen the like. Jules seemed to melt before his very eyes, her gaze suddenly bright with tears. She lifted trembling fingers to her mouth and blew her uncle a kiss. With a wink, he pretended to catch it in some private game. A charming little girl and her devoted uncle.
The whole confrontation scene is riddled with unintentional creepiness.
...as long as his dating Julienne hadn't harmed her relationship with her uncle...
No, Nick. Your dating Julienne doesn't and shouldn't harm her relationship with her uncle. His listening to the two of you having phone sex repeatedly, however, is a different matter altogether.
I can't really explain as well as Uncle Thad himself why he did it:
"I didn't write the serial to throw you to the wolves. I wrote it because I couldn't see another way of getting you both to wise up. You seemed quite content to treat your relationship with very little respect, like you were conducting some sort of sordid affair. I hoped if other people vied it with an equal lack of respect you might just come your senses."
And at the end of the day, the book doesn't celebrate "naughtiness," all it does is tell us what we all know already. Good little heroines are allowed to have good sex with the hero, but they must buckle down, get serious and get married at the end of the day. And it's not an affair coming maturity (forgetting to end, even) so much as showing how very damaging the assumption of no-strings-sex can be and that a Conscious Decision must be made before a relationship can be truly considered "serious."
Afterthought: Why is it that heroines are almost inevitably in the careers of their fathers/mothers/uncles? There's a creepy little bonding moment between Nick and Uncle Thad as Nick tells him that he'd always admired and been inspired by the veritable Titan of preservation architecture that was Uncle Thad, even from a young age. And Uncle Thad confesses that he greatly admired Nick even though he disapprove of his personal life. Now, Uncle Thad alo has a protégé in Jules, who admires and is inspired by Nick... There is something to be said for male bonding through an exchange of women.
Not to mention he plans her future life and job with Uncle Thad before he consults her about it.
"As much as I enjoy our sexy phone conversations, I want to be with you, which is why I spent the afternoon talking to your uncle about a solution."
Unsure whether to smile or cringe when she imagined Nick and Uncle Thad with their heads together over a drafting table, Julienne braced herself for the worst.
Seriously, if you're searching for a solution as to how to best avoid a long distance relationship with the woman you love, shouldn't you talk to her instead of anyone else? Even if he is her respected and revered uncle who spies on your phone sex?
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