All For You. Jessica Scott. New York, NY: Hatchette Book Group, 2019.
Jessica Scott’s All For You is a recognizable, conventional romance novel that is also refreshing and unconventional.[1] By setting her scene at Fort Hood between a Sergeant First Class and a Captain, Scott makes the genre her own. To the romance genre Scott brings her experiences as an active duty Army officer and Iraq War veteran. Scott’s novel follows the established pattern of romances and infuses it with social import and observations. All For You features Sergeant First Class Reza Iaconelli and Captain Emily Lindberg. The two are frequently at odds. Iaconelli is a combat veteran who is trying not to drink too much and is preparing for his next deployment. Lindberg is new to the U.S. Army and is a doctor committed to improving the mental health of service members in an effort to lower the suicide rate at Fort Hood. Both are dedicated professionals whose success at their work feeds their sense of self, both see the other as a serious impediment to doing their job and, of course, they are deeply and almost immediately attracted to one another.
To understand Scott’s handling of her characters, setting, and plot, it’s helpful to engage briefly with how romances work so as to grab hold of their powers and limitations. To that end, I’ll go through three important developments in the romance genre and its capacity to represent cultural, social, and political forces to establish a lens for viewing Scott’s novel; the final part of the review then examines how Scott engages with the tricky dynamic of balancing a genre built for pleasure reading with a genre consisting of stories about individuals forming intimate relations and stories about the societies in which those relationships are formed.
Romance, Military Affairs in Shared Context
The cultural critic Raymond Williams once complained that Jane Austen’s novels failed to represent war. He wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where, it is still asked, are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history?”[2] Austen’s novels famously center on courtship and marriage; Williams even riffs on the well-known first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”[3] In mouthing criticisms of Austen, Williams draws together a dense network of concerns: the capacity of fiction to represent war, war’s centrality to writing about history and the very status of women writers to engage with issues of historical change. As he makes clear in the whole piece, for Williams, Austen’s achievement is that she reshapes and reforms the novel form so the courtship and marriage plot speaks to social, cultural, and political change in Austen’s Britain. Austen zeroes in on how people within a newly empowered landed, but untitled, class of Britons interact with one another to draw out the exceedingly specific and fine discriminations of hierarchies and power dynamics. The capacity of fiction generally, the capacity of fiction about the forming and making of romantic partners, to represent a world in flux is Austen’s legacy.
Austen’s achievement, however, has not inevitably or invariably stretched to cover the writers of popular romance who came after her. Janice Radway’s study of the genre, Reading the Romance, modeled how to understand women’s reading of a seemingly patriarchal genre in ways that do not reproduce the patriarchal assumptions about how and why women read romances. Radway certainly attends to what happens in romance novels; she exhaustively chronicles the typical actions, events, and narrative patterns of the genre. What’s more, Radway understands the text and content of romances within a complicated set of relationships including the very act of reading by women themselves, the marketing of and selling of the books, and the publishing industry that acquires the books. Radway’s work is anchored in a real-life midwestern town that she calls Smithton and is based on the experiences of women in that town with a romance bookseller named Dot at the center of it all. Here’s just one example of Radway discussing how the Smithton romance readers reshaped her ideas about romance novels: “Because the women always responded to my query about their reasons for reading with comments about the pleasures of the act itself rather than about their liking for the particulars of the romantic plot, I soon realized I would have to give up my obsession with textual features and narrative details if I wanted to understand their view of romance reading.”[4] Reading for their own pleasure, reading texts they find pleasurable, and reading for escape are all important to the Smithton readers.
In our own moment, the Romance Writers Association of America is in turmoil. An organization dedicated to promoting books about escape, books that have their roots in a woman writer’s capacity to make stories about people falling in love stories about the social, political, and cultural conditions, is divided against itself over issues of equity and representation. Courtney Milan, writer and former board member, was dismissed from her position as chair of the ethics committee after criticizing the depiction of Chinese women in the book Somewhere Lies the Moon. The move against Milan, based on complaints from the book’s author and her supporters, drew widespread media attention to and criticism of the move from the association’s members to the extent that the Association has hired a law firm to conduct an audit of its behavior and decisions.
The announcement at the end of December of Johanna Lindsey’s death happened roughly contemporaneously with the fights between romance writers about representation and equity. Lindsey, a best-selling author of historical romances, was treated to obituaries in both the Washington Post and the New York Times. The treatment of Lindsey as a literary figure of enough merit to note her passing, but not one whose novels were regularly reviewed in the papers’ pages, is worth noting. It recalls the events of almost a decade ago when other women writers of popular, lucrative novels discussed their professional positioning. In 2010, Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult called attention to the different treatment of women and men novelists by major publications such as the New York Times. The occasion was the Times’s saturated coverage of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Weiner in particular was displeased with the elevation of Franzen’s subject matter in ways that are important to the romance genre. She said to HuffPo, “And then look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family, but we are told this is a book about America.” Franzen writes about America when writing about families, but Jane Austen doesn’t write about war even when military figures, Colonel Brandon and Captain Wentworth to name just two, fill her pages as they pair up with Austen’s heroines.
All For You
Scott’s novel capably demonstrates romantic fiction’s capacity, its ability to make stories about people coming together and about the cultural and social and political circumstances around that union. For these reasons, it’s important to identify both the romantic elements of Scott’s work, its social insights, and how the two are woven together.
The romance elements of Scott’s work, as is true of most works in the genre, operate in two separate and important ways. The long pull of the narrative across the entire book—that is the meeting, tension, and eventual coming together of the two lovers—is one way. Another is the individual scene that centers on a character’s attraction to the other or their mutual attraction or physical and sexual intimacy. Radway’s Smithton readers emphasized over and over again a signal feature of romance novels: they must have a happy ending. To achieve that ending, novels follow a stable, predictable narrative pattern: bring the characters together, put them in conflict with each other even as they are also drawn to one another, and then pair them off (most conventionally in marriage, but not always) at story’s end.
Scott wonderfully fits her novel to this pattern. Reza and Emily meet when he comes into her office to demand whether Sergeant Chuck Wisniak is at her clinic. Reza is irritated by Wisniak; he sees him and his mental health needs as chewing up time. On meeting, Emily and Reza repel one another—he’s annoyed that she’s defending Wisniak, and she’s annoyed that he’s annoyed that she’s defending Wisniak. Emily enters that interaction already attracted to him, “Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the single most beautiful man she’d ever seen.”[5] Reza’s reaction to Emily is a little harder to gauge but the scene ends with him observing her very closely, “He turned slowly. Studied her, standing straight and stiff and pissed.”[6] After this initial meeting between Emily and Reza the tension ratchets up as both their attraction to and repulsion from one another intensify. The novel draws them steadily into closer and closer intimacy of every kind including emotional and physical.
The point here is less that Reza and Emily start sleeping together—of course they do!—but that the narrative stakes of their relationship keep getting raised so that their coming together gets more and more urgent and their fights threaten it more and more. Scott raises the stakes in two ways. First, Reza and Emily sleep together relatively early in the novel, so how they feel about each other and how they interact with one another, especially as they are yanked by circumstances between their professional and personal roles in ways that make the lines between the two blurry, is key to the novel. Reza’s well-being is also central to the novel, and as he encounters increasingly difficult professional circumstances he comes closer and closer to drinking again until he finally does.
The pattern unfolds as Emily and Reza, both individually and as a couple, engage with incidents and events and people that bring into focus serious social, political, and cultural issues. The novel opens in 2007 with Reza drunk in a latrine in Iraq. As his story takes on more details and specifics it becomes clear the pressures of combat and leadership alone are not what led to his drinking, but also a history of family violence he survived. Scott also deftly weaves together issues of mental health, hazing, and suicide. As Reza comes to rethink his own treatment of Wisniak, as his mistreatment is disclosed to him in increasing detail, he also comes to rethink the importance of mental health treatment and attention to mental health issues. Scott brings this home most forcefully when Reza and Emily witness the suicide of Sloban, a U.S. Army specialist who is in the process of separation actions because of drug use after his combat tours.
Scott also engages with important issues around race and gender. Scott makes Reza physically imposing, Emily is drawn to him because of this, but is careful to establish from Reza and Emily’s early interactions how he sees Emily, “There was strength in this woman. Strength and courage.”[7] It’s also important to note that Reza is Italian-Iranian, and Emily is white. Emily’s family background as a young woman of privilege who is expensively educated and is supposed to conform to her Northeastern parents’ conventional expectations for her is drawn out. Reza talks of his family’s disapproval of his service, of how they wanted him to “think long and hard about fighting a war against our people.”[8] And Reza shares with Emily his own family’s history of domestic abuse by talking about his father’s fatally violent conduct against his mother.
All For You makes the coming together of Reza and Emily its central concern. In this way it satisfies the narrative requirements the Smithton readers demand from romance: it provides escape and a happy ending. But that assessment does not capture the full complexity of a novel that has its characters argue over how to provide for and take care of service members, how to prepare for deployment, and how to deal with its aftermath. And it doesn’t capture the full complexity of a novel that does all of that while pointing to dynamics of race, rank, and gender. It’s not so much that Scott handles these issues in novel or innovative ways in and of themselves, but that she is so deliberate about including them in a genre dedicated to escapism.
Katherine Voyles holds a Ph.D. in English and lectures at the University of Washington. She writes on issues of national defense in culture and the cultures of national defense. Her most recent contribution to #Reviewing focused on Garrett Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11.
Have a response or an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:
Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.
Header Image: Military Wedding Photo (Pinterest)
Notes:
[1] This review uses the title All For You. Scott’s website has announced that the updated title for the book is A Place Called Home.
[2] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 132.
[3] Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 1.
[4] Janice A, Radway, Reading the Romance : Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 86.
[5] Jessica Scott, All For You (2014),12.
[6] Ibid., 15.
[7] Ibid., 51.
[8] Ibid., 229.