Formula Fiction

The abandonment of Fifty Shades … is more puzzling,considering over a staggering 50 million women are thought to have bought a copy. They can’t all be wrong. EL James is to publishing what Roger Federer has been to tennis: a dizzying sensation,a one-of-a-kind. But the http://www.goodreads.com survey suggests that readers also aim to be literature snobs,and let’s face it,there’s very little highbrow stuff in this trilogy. The oldest and cheesiest fairy tale of all,Cinderella,re-imagined with a fashionable BDSM fantasy and some random sexting. Not that I have anything against lurid sexual content in books,bring it on,in fact,but is it too much to expect it to be central or at least have something to do with the plot? Taming a deviant handsome billionaire and turning him into a loving husband has been an enduring theme in women’s romantic fiction since Jane Eyre. It would have been a lot cooler if James had been brave enough to abandon the cliched ‘happily ever after’ ending and had not turned the dashing Christian Grey into a regular guy. But surveys like the one on http://www.goodreads.com suggest that rich dashing tycoons have to,in the end,become lovelorn spouses or the book won’t sell 70 million copies. What’s remarkable is that though the erotica market is glutted with every type of pornography available at the click of a button,on the internet and phone,James chose the most dated and old fashioned way to get risque,in print. And it worked. Rather,it thrived beyond anyone’s imagination.

In keeping with the bondage theme,every writer in reality is actually a slave to the reader,who can whimsically and tragically destroy an effort with a two word review online,like “extremely stupid” and such is the ripple effect that the Fifty Shades… magic has waned. Maybe what the reader is actually “bored” of is a pedestrian,retrograde fairy tale and ready for a more empowered Ana,who won’t want to convert the red room of pain into a guest bedroom.