| Review: Danielle Steel, Leap of Faith |
| It took me approximately 70 minutes to read Leap
of Faith by Danielle Steel. It might have taken five or ten
minutes less if I hadn’t been reading in bed, if the light was
better, if my neck hadn’t kept getting stiff so that I had to
shift position every few minutes. After a chapter or two, I thought perhaps I should read two Steel books, on the chance I’d inadvertently picked up one that had been published by accident. But then after four or five chapters, I decided I couldn’t read another if my life depended on it. By the time I got to the last page, this was my thought: I can’t review this book. There’s nothing to review. I just spent 70 minutes of my life reading nothing. I turned the light out and went to sleep. By morning, my thinking had altered. For one thing, I’d taken this review on willingly. In fact, I’d actually thought it was a good idea, although at that point I’d never read Steel, so what did I know? Besides, there was nothing ready to put in its place. So here goes. The plot: Eleven-year-old Marie-Ange, blue-eyed and golden-curled, lives in France. She is adored by her handsome parents and gently teased but much loved by her older brother. She spends her days in the apple orchard, day-dreaming, climbing trees, dirtying her Paris-bought frocks. Life is idyllic. But the monster is at the door. You can hear him breathing, smell his breath. Marie-Ange waves goodbye as her parents and her brother John drive off, pathetically unaware that she is also waving goodbye to the life she’s always known. Orphaned, she is sent off to live in Iowa with a cold, unfeeling aunt who forces early-morning barn chores and provides meager meals. Hungry, badly-dressed, and love-starved, Marie-Ange retains her sweetness. She makes one friend, freckle-faced, red-haired Billy, who adores her. At 18, Marie-Ange inherits 30 million dollars. She kisses Billy good-bye and flies off to Paris, where she meets the new owner of her former Chateau, a count. They marry, have two children, he spends her money. Then he sets the house on fire and tries to burn her up in it. His plan fails and the gendarmes cart him away. Marie-Ange calls Billy. End of plot. This is what I know about Danielle Steel: She has sold close to 500 million copies of the approximately 50 to 60 books she’s written. Perhaps with the exception of Harold Bloom, everyone recognizes her name. It’s hard not to recognize it because it’s everywhere. All of which means there’s something going on here. I’m just having trouble figuring out what it is. I saw her interviewed once, and she seems like a perfectly intelligent, well-spoken woman. I think she has lots of children. Because of her extreme writing success, she’s wealthy. I know she’s experienced the same vagaries of life as the rest of us because the interview centered on her son’s depression and death. This is what I know about writing: Writing is evocation. Writing is showing, not telling. Writing is rendering. Writing is trying your darndest to get your reader to disappear the page the words are printed on and enter the life beyond that page. According to what I know about writing, Steel has it all wrong. She has it inside out, upside down, backwards, and all a jumble. Nothing is evoked. She never shows, only tells. She doesn’t render. And she doesn’t try one little bit to ever make you forget you’re reading a book. Her plot is simplistic and unbelievable; her characters are barely one-dimensional; and her use of language is so clichéd that I found myself playing a game. I could always, not almost always, but always predict the words that were to finish a sentence before I turned the page and actually read them. So how has Danielle Steel become one of the most popular and widely read authors on the planet? Perhaps it has something to do with My Antonia. Bear with me. I read Willa Cather’s My Antonia for the first time in Junior High School. I liked it. At least I liked it until I got near the end. Then I didn’t like it. Antonia had been the sort of girl I wanted to be. Pretty. Vivacious. Outgoing. She loved pretty clothes and dancing. She was attractive to boys. Especially attractive to Jim. But then the story went wrong. Jim and Antonia went separate ways. And after twenty years had passed and Jim and Antonia were finally reunited, she’d become old before her time, “…a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled.” And practically toothless, to boot. I was crushed. I hated what she’d become. It ruined the book for me. Why would anyone write such a miserable ending? But I was only 14. I re-read My Antonia in my thirties. It had the same ending. But this time I was moved not by what she’d lost, but by what she’d kept and what she’d gained. A husband and children she loved and who loved her. The same hunger for life despite the fact she’d lived hard and poor. All her values in the right place. Antonia had triumphed. Life had beaten her, but only marginally. Only on the outside. I suspect that in Danielle Steel’s version, Jim and Antonia would have ended up together after a hundred pages apart and after an attempted murder or two. Oh, and Antonia would have been as lovely at 40 as she was at 20. Plus she would have inherited 30 or 40 million dollars somewhere along the line. At 14, I would have been so happy with that ending. But I’m not 14 anymore, so here’s what I think: Danielle Steel should preface all her books with Once Upon a Time, just so there’s no confusion in anyone’s mind about what it is she’s doing. She shouldn’t dictate her books. It’s too easy to forget that you’ve already said the same thing seven or eight times. She should avoid telephone conversations because people can’t see each other, and you have to write stupid things like: “So will I,” he said, smiling, and looking more boyish than ever, although she couldn’t see him. She should avoid having a wife say about a husband who has just tried to burn her alive: “…But he scared the hell out of me the way he spent money.” And one more thing…she should pay me back the $6.75 I spent on her book. She can afford it.
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