Word: beauman
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That thriving thatched-cottage industry of Britain -- writing very, very long romance novels -- is carried on these days by a new generation of hard- fingered women with tea cozies, cats and killer word processors. Close in the wake of Sally Beauman's Destiny comes Celia Brayfield's first novel, Pearls. Brayfield's protagonists are the fabulous Bourton sisters: Catherine, the "Mona Lisa of Wall Street," and Monty, the international rock star, who wake up one morning to find priceless pink pearls under their pillows. What do the gifts mean? Can they have anything to do with the sisters' late father...
...suggestion of a King-Michener-Sheldon-St eel collaboration, there is not much to celebrate. For one thing, a cool million no longer induces the slack-jawed awe it once did; everyone knows that insider traders on Wall Street can steal that much before lunch. And British Author Sally Beauman is not really a first novelist. She has written nine Harlequin romances under a pseudonym...
...hired hands ordinarily labor for far less. Destiny will be talked about, doubtless picked up by a few people new to the current state of the romance genre and hence ignorant of just how wretched such fiction is required to be. There will be cries of disbelief; Sally Beauman may want her pseudonym back...
...hero, Edouard, who has more vowels in his name than seem strictly necessary, and a heroine, Helene, who suffers from a superfluity of accent marks in hers. A lot of ink is wasted just getting these characters on the page. Given its initial investment, Bantam might have urged Beauman to save money by calling her romantic leads Ed and Helen. Anyhow, Edouard is impossibly rich and handsome; Helene is impossibly beautiful; together they are . . . a word comes to mind but then vanishes in the general miasma of implausibilities and sex, which is regularly rapturous and accompanied by sensations "smothering...
...thinking is really required: Destiny is far too slick and mechanical for that. True trash buffs like to watch authors sweat over simple declarative sentences. Beauman, 42, who has written a history of the Royal Shakespeare Company, published by Oxford University Press, is not a ninny. During this interminable exercise in the imbecilic, it is possible to perceive a writer who knows better, sneering at her readers and laughing all the way to the exchequer...