Between The Covers -- Jayne Ann Krentz Romances The Big Bucks

THEY ARE THE LOWEST rung of the literary totem pole. Though their sales rack up an estimated $750 million annually, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the entire mass-market paperback industry, they rank below "literary" fiction, below mysteries, below science fiction, horror, Tom Clancy techno-thrillers, even Westerns. They are rarely, if ever, reviewed in the mainstream press. Some bookstores don't carry them. Never having read one in no way disqualifies you from having an opinion about them. Everybody knows they are formulaic, they are "bodice-rippers," they are for dizzy teenage girls and brain-dead matrons.

They were even implicated recently in the national debate on domestic violence. In an editorial-page column of a major newspaper headlined "Why Women Stay With Abusers," the authors' answer was: romance novels. These books, the column alleged, give readers "the hope and thrill of being `saved' by a strong, dominant male who will take care of them and make them feel strong." And therefore lead them to overlook the fact that the strong, dominant male is socking them.

To anyone who's followed recent trends in the field, the response to the column a few days later was not surprising. Three outraged romance novelists, an editor and the president of a romance writers group denounced the piece. In the lead letter, Seattle author Jayne Ann Krentz accused the columnists of making "ludicrous, unsupported statements that insulted the many millions of intelligent, literate women who read romance."

Krentz, who also writes under the name Amanda Quick, was the inevitable leadoff hitter. She has emerged in recent years as a kind of ever-vigilant watchdog for the romance genre, ready to defend it against the misinterpretation and calumny that seem to be its birthright.

Her own romance novels emphasize strong women with jobs and brains and leading men who (eventually) appreciate them. Recently, she edited "Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women," a university press collection in which she and 19 other romance writers, in separate essays, attempted to explain the romance's appeal as something other than retrograde or opiate-of-the-masses fantasy. It was the fastest selling book in the history of the scholarly University of Pennsylvania Press.

Krentz writes one (contemporary) Krentz book and one (historical) Quick book a year, and since 1992, all of them have reached the national bestseller lists, first in paperback and more recently in hardcover and paperback reprints. An educated guess puts her income in the neighborhood of $2 million a year.

But any serious writer wants respect, and Krentz, who is quite serious about her work, has been given very little. For example, although every book she writes appears on the New York Times bestseller list, the New York Times has never reviewed one of them.

Krentz, generally soft-spoken, barks out a trademark laugh. "Why are romance novels called trash? They're certainly no more formulaic than any other kind of genre fiction. Mystery authors use the same characters from book to book, and they always have the same resolution. Somehow, they never get criticized for that. The difference, of course, is that men read all the other genres and women read romances."

Krentz's apartment, which she shares with her husband, Frank, a retired engineer, has spectacular views of the sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west. It's the kind of place a character in a Danielle Steel novel would live in. But not a character in a Jayne Ann Krentz novel, which brings up an important distinction. While to the rest of the world, romance is a fairly broad concept, to those who read, write or publish romance novels, the term means something quite specific. Steel, Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins do not write romances. They write popular women's fiction, more specifically (in Jayne Krentz's terminology), they write "sagas." More specifically still, Collins and Krantz's books are what Krentz calls "glitz . . . the story of a woman's rise from rags to riches in a tough and glamorous world, and sometimes back again. The hero is icing on the cake."

A romance, by contrast, focuses intensely on the relationship between one man and one woman - and not just any woman and man. The heroine of a classic romance, such as Krentz writes, is a more or less virginal young woman - intelligent, independent, yet somewhat innocent in the ways of the world. Krentz doesn't consider knockout looks critical to the story. "My heroines tend to be interesting looking rather than alluring," she says. "I don't like beauty to be a distraction." (Krentz herself, who is in her "mid-40s," is slim, with wire-rimmed glasses and medium-length, straight dark-brown hair. Today she is wearing blue jeans and a sweater. Only the pink lipstick she favors, rather like the "y" in her first name, supplies a note of the exotic or unexpected.)

The hero is a darker figure, someone stoic, controlled, powerful, apparently wrestling with some inner demons. In Krentz's books, he is usually dark-haired; he is almost always tautly muscled.

Caleb Ventress, in her novel "Hidden Talents," for example, is "a tall, lean, startlingly graceful man. His hair was dark as a night in the forest, and his features as bold and uncompromising as the mountains around her. His voice had been deep but virtually devoid of any discernible emotion other than a cool civility . . . He projected the image of a man who needed no one, relied on no one, trusted no one."

There is an immediate attraction between hero and heroine, typically felt more strongly by the woman than the man, who doesn't initially realize that the bond is not just physical. There are plot complications of one kind or another, and there is sex. But the book does not end until the relationship goes beyond the physical, until the hero realizes that he deeply loves the heroine and is ready to commit himself to her through marriage.

Variations of these elements can be found in Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and, for that matter, in "Beauty and the Beast." Growing up in the town of Borrego Springs, near San Diego, Krentz first encountered them in horse books. "They're about a mystical bond between a horse and a little girl," Krentz says. "It's a powerful creature you tame with basic nurturing instincts."

In high school (her family moved to Cobb, not far from Napa, in Northern California when she was 12), Krentz's preferred reading material was science fiction. Having earned a BA in history at University of California at Santa Cruz, Krentz was working on her thesis - on the alternative lifestyle movement - for a master's in library science at San Jose State when she met Frank at his small counterculture bookstore.

Years later, when she was living in Durham, N.C., and working as a librarian at Duke University, she discovered romances and decided to try to write them. She collected rejection slips for six years, until she sold her first book in 1979 while she was working as a corporate librarian in Torrance, Calf. It was a novel about a corporate librarian who falls in love with a man who has been hired to shake up the company. Less than a year later Krentz had quit her job and was writing full time, turning out four books a year. They were all "category," or "series," novels, a term that refers to relatively short books, uniformly packaged and placed within a continuously issued series of paperbacks.

The most famous and successful publisher of categories is Toronto-based Harlequin Books, which began to focus on romance fiction in 1957, moved on to steady growth in the '60s and achieved spectacular success in the '70s.

In the early '80s, Krentz and her husband moved to Seattle when he got a job in the aerospace industry.

She continued publishing successful category novels with Harlequin and Silhouette under many different names, developing as personal trademarks the corporate settings of her stories and humorous repartee among the characters. As the decade progressed, she poised herself to move to the next rung on the romance hierarchy, to single-title sales: that is, books that aren't part of a name-brand series but designed to stand alone, with distinctive packaging, and marketed more on the basis of the author than the publisher.

As far back as the early '70s, authors such as Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers and Janet Dailey had recorded substantial single-title successes, and romance authors Jude Deveraux, Judith McNaught, Sandra Brown and LaVyrle Spencer all became huge sellers in the '80s. By the end of the decade, Krentz, having built a loyal and growing following, was ready to join their ranks.

She did so as Amanda Quick.

There are two kinds of romances, each with its own tradition, conventions and fans: the contemporary and the historical. Krentz had been writing contemporaries under her own name (as she still does), and when Bantam Books agreed to publish single-title releases of her historicals, she didn't want, she says "to give my readers the false impression that they'd be getting the same kind of book." So she chose yet another name, Amanda Quick.

KRENTZ AND HER LIKE-minded colleagues have forced into the open two related questions about romances: Are they any good? Are they good for women?

To address the first, the answer depends on what you mean by good. If your definition involves such qualities as complexity, ambiguity, psychological depth, "realism" and writing that is free from cliches, the answer will be no. Krentz and her allies say that definition is unfair. "Literary criticism doesn't have the tools to discuss popular fiction," Krentz says. Popular fiction comes out of the heroic mold, where the idea is overcoming adversity, not the modern psychological mold, where the model is the character as the victim of its flaws."

Duke University literary critic Janice Radway, whose 1984 book "Reading the Romance" was the first scholarly attempt to take the genre seriously, echoes Krentz. "Romances come out of the sentimental tradition, whereas most people's ideas about what constitutes good writing come out of modernism," Radway says. "For example, we assume that originality is good, that complex prose is good. That kind of thing just doesn't apply to romances."

To the contrary, women seem to read romances precisely because they know what is going to happen. The parallel, Krentz says, is with other genre fiction. "There's always some kind of reader expectation that has to be satisfied. Try to imagine a detective novel where the mystery isn't solved."

As for "complex" prose, Krentz and Linda Barlow (a romance writer who holds a master's degree in English) argued in an essay in "Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women" that the apparent cliches of romances were themselves a virtue. "Romance readers have a keyed-in response to certain words and phrases (the sardonic lift of the eyebrows, the thundering of the heart, the penetrating glance, the low murmur or sigh). Because of their past reading experience, readers associate certain emotions - anger, fear, passion, sorrow -with such language and expect to feel the same responses each time they come upon such phrases."

The second question, about romance novels' message for women, is more ticklish. Traditionally, women who consider themselves feminists have tended to, at best, ignore romances and, at worst, make statements such as this one, written in 1980 by Columbia historian Ann Douglas: "How can (romance readers) tolerate or require so extraordinary a disjuncture between their lives and their fantasies? . . . Women who couldn't thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality."

Krentz and the romance militants will have none of that. The key to their argument is the character of today's romance hero. He is not, they say, a "strong, dominant male" who will "save" the heroine - and certainly not someone who will cause readers to sit still for spousal abuse. On the contrary (in Krentz's books at least), the heroine is always at least the hero's equal in courage, determination and intelligence; in the end, she turns out to be the stronger, more active character. Just as in "Beauty and the Beast" or any number of horse novels, she has tamed the hero, domesticated him, brought him back to society. The message, Krentz says, is one of empowerment.

Devon Miller-Duggan, a doctorate candidate at the University of Delaware, in April presented a paper to the Popular Culture Association called "Reading with a Vengeance: The Romance Novel and Feminist Critics." Miller-Duggan sees the message of romances as quite feminist. "They say that there are men interested in marrying smart, powerful women and working out their problems," she says.

Krentz spends every weekday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the word processor, turning out 10 pages. In the late afternoon, she'll generally work out at the gym or head to Pike Place Market, her destination on this day, for ingredients for some of her ambitious cooking. She doesn't have children, and her other main pastime is conferring and visiting with her friends, most of whom are fellow romance writers. Besides Ann Maxwell, she is close to Stella Cameron, another Pacific Northwesterner, and Suzanne Guntrum, an Indianian who writes as Suzanne Simmons and Suzanne Simms. A sign of Krentz's loyalty to the romance community and her friends in particular, is that she supplied two blurbs for Cameron's latest book, one as herself and one as Amanda Quick.

At the market, she greets a produce vendor. He's never read one of her books - he prefers mysteries - but at least he knows who she is.

There's no doubt that Krentz's campaign is making some headway, but it's still an uphill battle. In January, the IKEA furniture chain ran a national advertisement that included the line "By the time our next sale rolls around, you'll be reading novels at the beach. (You know, the trashy romance kind.)" Needless to say, Krentz sent off a letter of protest to the company and also got herself quoted in the New York Times, saying, "People feel so free to casually insult the reading tastes of millions of American women whose money they want. No one thinks of talking about trash mysteries or science fiction. Romance is as important as other genres and deserves the respect other genres get."

Ben Yagoda teaches journalism at the University of Delaware. He is author of "Will Rogers: A Biography." Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.