The book title's secret meaning

Lately I'm struck by common themes in book titles. All publishers want titles that stand out, but some of the recent trends are pretty strange, and they cut across romance, literary fiction, and nonfiction.

The romance novel's tabloid titillation

For the last few years the Harlequin/Mills & Boon romance racks have been filled with ever-hokier titles. I find the new titles silly and even insulting--but they sell. In 2007, Jennifer Crusie found these titles on seven out of ten of Waldenbooks' top selling romances:

• The Future King's Pregnant Mistress (Penny Jordan, Harlequin Presents)
  
• The CEO's Scandalous Affair (Roxanne St. Claire, Silhouette Desire)
  
• The Boss's Demand (Jennifer Lewis, Silhouette Desire)
  
• The Prince's Ultimate Deception (Emilie Rose, Silhouette Desire)
  
• The Millionaire Boss's Baby (Maggie Cox, Harlequin Presents)
  
• Taken: The Spaniard's Virgin (Lucy Monroe, Harlequin Presents)
  
• The Sicilian's Red-Hot Revenge (Kate Walker, Harlequin Presents)

(These titles are a relatively recent trend. In Harlequin Presents titles from the 1980s and early '90s few heroines, and few actions, were "owned" by the hero, and titular "virgins" were fairly rare; Brittany's Castle was as likely a title as Taggart's Woman.)

Regardless of how the new titles sell to romance aficionados, they project a certain image. Even many romance readers are put off by the strange focus on virginity, the outdated idea of the "mistress", the national stereotypes, the consumerist and social-climbing dimension, and the overuse of possessives. Isn't it enough that he's a Greek tycoon/Spaniard/CEO who owns half a continent? Must he own the heroine and her virginity too?

But perhaps that's being too literal. Crusie makes an interesting point about why these titles appeal:

These are National Enquirer titles with promises of tabloid excitement–a pregnant king’s mistress, we’ve got the pictures!!!–mini-synopses with the good parts highlighted

It's true, the titles rarely reflect the style of the story, only a bare-bones setup. So perhaps the title is meant to convey excitement rather than content. The basic tabloid formula is a celebrity, a possessive, and a sex-word or shock-word: "Christina Aguilera's baby shocker!" Sure enough, we have a match. (If you think The Boss's Demand doesn’t have a sex-word... in the context of those titles, it’s pretty clear what the boss’s demand is—and it ain’t coffee.)

The celebrity tabloid interpretation also fits Harlequin Presents' recent Tips on Writing, which enjoin the author to

Remember the values that underpin the Presents series – such as, wealth, luxury, sophistication, escapism and a good dollop of passion

Historic shockers

In a 2006 NY Times article, two Harlequin executive editors pointed out that stand-out titles are harder to come by in voluminous genres :

Romance, mystery and other genre books are particularly likely to have recycled titles, because of the vast numbers that are published and their brief lives in the public's memory — meaning a name can be brought back within a few years.

But there are other ways to create dramatic tabloid titles. Sheer strangeness is pretty effective. In the 1940s Harlequin started their numbered paperback series with some distinctive titles, including:

• The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman (Harlequin #1, Nancy Bruff, 1949)
  
• Maelstrom: A Brutal Saga of Love and Violence (Harlequin #3, Howard Hunt, 1949)
  
• The Golden Feather: Flight From Bondage (Harlequin #31, Theda Kenyon, 1951)

These titles are certainly attention-getting. In fact, the older Harlequin titles would fit perfectly in today's popular nonfiction, where the more obscure or in-your-face the title, the better. Nonfiction is full of disgusting, unlikely, goofy, or mock-helpful titles:

• A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coating
  
• The Professor and the Madman
  
• People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders - and What to Do About It
  
• So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues? So Did Mine!

Sidekick makes good?

Tabloid frenzy among romance readers can't be the whole explanation, because this trend in titles crosses genres. In The Guardian, Judith Evans lists a number of titles that use possessives but not shock-words--or perhaps a different kind of shock-words:

• The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
  
• The Editor's Wife (Clare Chambers)
  
• The Abortionist's Daughter (Elizabeth Hyde)
  
• The Pilot's Wife (Anita Shreve)
  
• The Firework Maker's Daughter (Philip Pullman)
  
• The Kitchen God's Wife (Amy Tan)
  
• The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)
  
• The Gravedigger's Daughter (Joyce Carol Oates)
  
• The Alchemist's Daughter (Katherine McMahon)
  
• The Ringmaster's Daughter (Jostein Gaarder)
  
• The Zookeeper's Wife (Diane Ackerman)
  
• The Emancipator's Wife (Barbara Hambly)
  
• The Senator's Wife (Sue Miller)

Evans theorizes that these titles

[play] to another motif that pervades our culture - that of taking the neglected sidekick and making them the main attraction..... A handy formula for a magazine feature is "X gets all the attention - but why don't we focus on the far more interesting and neglected Y?" ...

So far, so encouraging; weak women emerge from the sidelines; victims get the limelight. But I'm sceptical. For a start, there's no reason - in this day and age! - that the woman shouldn't be the time traveller, Greek tycoon or gravedigger herself; the retro aesthetic that takes us back to a more or less imaginary age of alchemists and ringmasters also takes us back to a time when women were stuck being sidekicks and stalwarts.

I'm not so sure these titles are out of joint with the times. Some of these titles evoke a family that's out of step with societal expectations--a timeless topic that's especially apt in times of social change.

I also quibble with Evans' sense of currency. These days a woman can be the time traveler, but those changes have happened quite recently, generationally speaking. Many women still alive today grew up in a time when they didn't expect to be the alchemist or the breadwinner for the family. Women who stand in the limelight are still outnumbered in part (though not entirely) because lifespans are long.

However, the second paragraph in that quote sparks my curiosity. As Evans asks, "Why are we so obsessed with fantastic returns to such social arrangements? And are literary novelists who do so really any different from romance writers who dream of being overwhelmed by an untamed desert sheikh?"

Further reading

Evans mentions The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, which “introduces pithy and perceptive characters like Queen Herod, Mrs Rip Van Winkle and Frau Freud”. I’ll look for a copy.