Life as a mainstream novel with literary inclinations.

When I was a girl, I was hopeful. Having read every one of my grandmother's Mary Stewart novels, e.g. The Moonspinners and Madame, Will You Talk, I was fairly certain that life, for a young single woman, would be a mundane secretarial position upset by a holiday jaunt to the South of France. There, beset on all sides by gun-wielding ruffians and handsome-yet-dangerous men, she would prove her salt and win the heart of the once brooding and bitter man - who, of course, was redeemed through her strength, wit, and subtle beauty. It was a lovely thought for a young girl.

As I aged, I liked to throw in a few James Bond novels and a Raymond Chandler or two for added excitement and grit.

I was thoroughly convinced that life would model itself in the likeness of an epic myth or at least a bodice-ripping adventure in the Sahara.

But life isn't at all like a romance novel or an adventure or even a nice, reliable mystery.

Life is mainstream literary.

It doesn't make much sense (though it has lush settings and maybe a smidge too much character development).

Try as I might to understand it, to grasp its symbols and profundity (which all the great critics tell me are certainly there just beneath the surface), any meaning eludes me.

And, frankly, the ending is rarely satisfying.

Nonetheless, I force myself to nod at the rest of you with faux knowing and agree how brilliant it is just so that I don't appear to be a completely uncultured nitwit.