Tell the truth: Do you wish we could go back? Because lately, it feels like many of us are looking to the past with longing. We pine for yesterday somehow feeling that the past was better—love was purer, books mattered more, and people knew how to treat each other. It is a seductive premise, is it not?
Fiction thrives on this longing. The success of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe proves people are desperate to hold onto a vanishing America. These stories do not celebrate conquest; they mourn what is being lost. Romance novels often tap into the same impulse. And perhaps readers love dukes and arranged marriages not because they want to live in the past, but because the past makes sense. Choices were fewer but clearer. In much of romance set in earlier times, characters do not suffer from paralysis by possibility. They choose this life or that life, this lover or none at all.
Modern life does not offer that clarity. Research shows too many choices make people miserable, and we are drowning in them—who to be, whom to love, how to live. The rules that once governed romance, family, and ambition have fractured. For some, that is freedom. For many, it is exhausting. Fiction focused on the times and/or mores of yesteryear offer relief, they promise a world where struggles exist but within a structure.
The past, of course, was not simpler—just smaller. It silenced many voices and security was, for most, hard to come by. Yet nostalgia remains powerful because it offers the illusion of order. It does not ask readers to navigate infinite choices or constantly redefine themselves. It offers a world with rules, one that feels stable. But, let’s be honest, right now stability feels like a balm.
So what do you want from the books you read? Are you looking for an escape from the uncertainty of now, a reassurance that the past was better, or a reminder that moving forward is worth it? The past is not coming back. But in a world where every expectation is in flux, it is worth asking: Do we really want more choices, or do we just want to feel certain about the ones we make?
Not sure about wanting escape or wanting to go back in time ,I’m looking for depth and complexity in my romance.But something that’s missing in books in general written in the last five years or so.
In short I’m not not a very sentimental person so I don’t really give much thought about it.
When I first started reading romance many decades ago, I was reading the books the adults were handing down to me, and there were more romantic historicals than historical romances as we know them today. It’s early days to say whether that is coming back but I *think* I am seeing a trend in that direction. Frozen River certainly had that vibe, and Susanna Kearsley’s latest, The King’s Messenger, does, too. Those tales might give you the depth and complexity you are looking for.
Eleanore of Avignon is a similar vibe as well.
Thank you I will try them much appreciated :-)
I’m an offbeat reader, and I would guess a lot of others at AAR are also, simply because they are here. Readers taking the time to read reviews are selective about what they read. They aren’t pulling volumes off a best-seller list or seeing what is popular on Book-Tok or Bookstagram. (I’m not saying those books can’t be good; I’m just saying that audience has other factors playing into their reading choices). I think the answer we will see most among ourselves is that we are looking for the proverbial good read. It may look different to each of us, but we’ve learned to find reviewers who help us wade through the astronomical number of releases to find the novels we love. We’ve also learned to pick through reviews to know what does and doesn’t work for us.
The social nostalgia gripping the nation hasn’t affected my reading choices other than leading me to books like The Way We Never Were to understand it. 🙂 From my understanding of it, which is admittedly shallow, that’s more a marketing effort than an actual love of history. It’s an overstory designed to make you respond how whoever is steering the ship wishes you to.
The Yellowstone thing is real, though. On those shows, the values are right out of the 20th century–there’s not a sane happy career woman in the realm and men are the saviors against a woke world.
His shows are the most popular thing on TV. I feel as if a big swath of our world is sure the answers to the future are in the past.
Short answer: Yellowstone resonates with people who want to believe that 20th-century values support their current political ideology and prove that history supports their particular viewpoint, while everything else is a 21st-century fallacy forced upon them by a dangerous minority.
Long Anwer:
Here’s a quote from a real Montana rancher: Yellowstone has its place as the modern-day version of the 1980’s tv series Dallas. It is basically a soap opera set in a majestic landscape with handsome men in cowboy garb and beautiful women with lots of lip gloss, who even at the ripe age of 35, still call their fathers “Daddy.” There are tons of articles on the inaccuracies of the show, but to summarize, like all TV, Yellowstone gets some things right, some things wrong, and some things just don’t belong.
The issue of values, especially for the 20th century, is tricky. So the 20th Century began on 1 Jan 1901 and ran through Dec. 31, 1999. The values at the start did not include a lot of what we think of as 20th-century values today. The ideas of In God We Trust, School prayer, a woman being a happy homemaker, and an appropriately adorable family in which Father Knows Best are all a result of the communist scare. If communism pushed women in the workforce and army, atheism, belittled the family so the state was more paramount, and education, we had to lean hard on our Christianity (adding things like In God We Trust to our money), traditional roles of men and women, and the idea education will turn your kids into commies. It was a carefully curated formula to establish an “us” and “them” that were distinctly different and politically expedient. So why do people not remember the construction of a myth that took place in front of our parent’s and our own eyes? Here is how the author of The Way We Never Were puts it: Nostalgia is a very human trait. When school children returning from summer vacation are asked to name good and bad things about their summer, the list tends to be equally long. As the year goes on, however, if the exercise is repeated, the good list grows longer, and the bad list grows shorter, until by the end of the year the children are describing not their actual vacations but their idealized image of vacation. So it is with our collective “memory” of family life. As time passes, the actual complexity of our history – even of our own personal experience – gets buried under the weight of the ideal image. In his books on The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about overstories and social constructs. One such overstory is being told in Yellowstone.The myth of the valiant Western white male keeping hostile forces at bay, a tale that has launched all kinds of things for centuries, from the Crusades to the Vietnam War.
To sum up, Yellowstone appeals to people who have been carefully crafted to believe a carefully crafted image of America being their country and reflecting their values. You can read about some of the crafting that took place in God’s Own Party by Daniel K. Williams.
I hear you. And that view is WINNING. So obviously it resonates with many. I’m curious how we address that and why a majority of Americans seem to feel that way.
If you are talking about a political solution, the best answer would be a multi-party platform. If we had five viable parties to choose from and those people had to form a government together, we would do some serious damage to the either/or mentality gripping the U.S. It would not solve everything, but it would make it less stark and extreme.
An easier solution would be for the Democrats to change how they treat elections. They keep acting surprised when we vote for President every four years like they had no idea it was coming.
Culturally, it is to find an overstory that reaches the 1-2% and swing it towards you. I would recommend Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point or Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized if you want to go down the rabbit hole on how that’s done.
I am a big fan of multi-party elections but I don’t see us embracing that any time soon.
I’d agree–if that’s what you’re saying–that the Democrats have been terrible at overstories.
I think the Democrats have two overstories that work. The first is of a young man bringing change which Obama and JFK both used effectively. They personified the promise of a better tomorrow, and people loved it. Another is what Clinton and Carter both used, the kind of “I’m you only in the White House” schtick which helps voters connect to the candidate. Clinton did a bus tour and played the saxophone on a talk show and it seemed young, fresh, and relatable to a lot of people. The problem is that the dems often put up overly polished politico candidates like Hillary who can’t pull that overstory off.
Hmmmmm…. I’ll think about that.
I guess I think the best overstory is one that a plurality of voters buy into. What that might be is hard to suss out. I personally think the Democrats have made a huge mistake in not putting families first.
I think the Democrats have made many mistakes, but to me, the biggest one is that they have failed to unify their voters. You will hear plenty of people saying they are voting for the Republican platform rather than the candidate. The GOP has been good at getting the voters to see beyond the individual to the collective. But the Democrats have pushed an overstory of individual needs/wants/rights being paramount, which has caused their coalition of voters to be fragmented and willing to take their vote and go home (or elsewhere) if they don’t like who is running. There was just enough leakage of young men not being willing to vote for a woman that we lost. And I am not saying that was the only problem. Jake Tapper has a book coming out in May called Original Sin looking at Biden’s decision to run again in spite of serious decline that I want to read. I agree with Tapper that that might have been part of the issue as well. But again, I think it is individualism and fragmentation that is costing us. And the smallest groups/coalitions seeing the largest gains while large swathes of voters are expected to sit back and wait their turn. Or are barely mentioned or invited to the table at all.
Yes, I do wonder how all of those pro Palestinian people who thought Biden wasn’t pro Palestinian enough feel now. That to me is a good example of how the Democratic party fragmented against its own interest.
And don’t even get me started on Biden deciding he needed to be a two term president. I think it will go down in history is one of the most ruinous decisions a president ever made.
It would lead to coalition governments. Look to Europe to see how fractious and uselessly difficult coalitions often are.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Though coalition governments can be flawed, I see them as better than mono governments which seem to be the world’s other frequent option.
I agree, Dabney. Our two-party government is certainly nothing to be enviable of. Until we can find perfect people, we won’t have a perfect government. We have to make do with what is available to us.
And there is my life motto!
“there’s not a sane happy career woman in the realm and men are the saviors against a woke world.” and that’s one of the reasons I could never watch the original show or any of the other spin-offs for that matter. No offence to anyone who loves it or the actors themselves – I think they do a pretty good job bringing the characters to life, but everything on the shows seems to be so heightened and dramatic. Nothing is ever simple with those characters.
“I think the answer we will see most among ourselves is that we are looking for the proverbial good read. It may look different to each of us, but we’ve learned to find reviewers who help us wade through the astronomical number of releases to find the novels we love. We’ve also learned to pick through reviews to know what does and doesn’t work for us.”
This! A thousand percent.
I am not watching Yellowstone; yet one more streaming provider I won’t pay for. I think that westerns in general are much of a much with a similar message, similar characters and situations though some films I do fondly re-watch occasionally like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
I read mainly HR and have an admitted fondness for books set in the Regency or Georgian periods in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc. So that’s my starting point. I find them comfortable, in the main, to read. I agree with Hannah who said: “I am looking for depth and complexity … something that’s missing in books ….. written in the last five (longer IMO!!) years or so.” Too many turgid, badly written books masquerading as HR are my favourite pet peeve: The Regency in Mini Skirts. I am a stickler for accuracy, maybe to an extreme degree but it is the historical framework that I want to be correct as well as depth and complexity. Otherwise, it’s wallpaper and a DNF, off the kindle or to the charity shop.
I am not avoiding the real world as I also have a very deep interest in current affairs and have worked in high level politics in the past in my varied career. Most things these days I find so shocking, horrifying, insane and frightening (or downright weird) that some weeks I can barely listen to the news. I keep myself informed but also find myself scared witless at times. They say the past is a different country. So very true. But nice to explore when well written, accurate and not crappy wallpaper.
Yes–I think the past, especially when well done, is a balm. It makes sense AND–I think this is key–we believe we can learn from it.
I’m wondering though what it is people want to take away from the past these days.
Good manners, joined up handwriting and NO social BS. Sorry, no flood of social media.
Could the pull be as simple as the fact we are an aging population and the young people who normally push us towards the future lack
the numbers to be impactful?
I dunno–I think many young men think the answers were in an earlier age.
I think many young men want to go back to an era when men were men and women were chattel.
I think that’s a much lower number than we think.
Here’s Jessica Grose’s take on it from the NYT.
Young men are, in fact, largely supportive of gender equality, though most are reluctant to call themselves feminists. The majority of young men support legal access to abortion, though the issue is not as important to them as it is to young women.
Young men tend to prioritize the economy over social issues, Deckman told me, though economic anxiety runs through all of Gen Z. “Women tend to think about the economy as, is it good or bad for society? What’s happening? And men often, historically, have thought, well, is it good for my pocketbook, my ability to actually provide for my family?” That dynamic hasn’t really changed, even though Gen Z is waiting longer to form those families.
What’s changed is that young women have more of a voice. According to Deckman’s research, Gen Z women are more politically active than their male counterparts — a major historical shift, as men have heretofore been more politically active than women.
The reason that the gender gap in voting seems so pronounced is not because young men have become dramatically more conservative. It’s because of the political galvanization of the young women who came of age during the #MeToo movement, watching Donald Trump remain the leader of the Republican Party despite numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, and witnessing the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“For Gen Z women, women’s equality has become a defining issue of what they care about and how they perceive politics,” Deckman, who is also the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. She quotes a female student from the University of Maryland who told her in a focus group that “Trump winning just kind of scared us all to our cores.” The woman added: “My rights are being threatened and just walking down the street I am being threatened, and I need to do something.”
In terms of the election, according to the most recent edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, among likely voters under 30, women overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris over Trump by a nearly 50-point margin. But young men also prefer Harris; 53 percent of likely male voters support the vice president versus just 36 percent for Trump.
I haven’t seen Yellowstone, so I can’t speak to that directly, but I think that the general appeal of things set in the past is that we know how it turned out. An American in 1863 didn’t know how the Civil War would turn out, but I do. An Irishman in 1847 didn’t know how the potato blight would play out, but I do. And so on.
That means that any historical drama/novel can concentrate on human relationships, which are the things that actually can make us happy. Governments, politics, current events cannot. They can make us miserable, of course. Governments can wage war, something that is guaranteed to make a great many people miserable. And in a positive direction, they can, to a certain extent, create a safe, stable environment in which people can feel secure. But most people find their greatest happiness in their relationships with other people, with those they love, whether family or friends.
The appeal of fiction is that it concentrates on those relationships and comes at the end to a satisfactory conclusion—something we don’t often get in reality.
Yes!!! This is a big piece of it: the known.
Personally I think there’s something very strange going on, where discussion of social and cultural trends still don’t take into account how fragmented our media spheres are now. Out of curiosity, I looked up streaming data for 2024, and it claimed The Landsman premiere got about 5 million views over the first two weeks. That’s a lot of viewers relatively speaking, but it doesn’t suggest that the Yellowstone-verse has the cultural clout that a Friends or an ER or even an NYPD Blue had back in the day. But when magazines run “What’s the hot show?” articles, they can’t shrug and say, “Eh, it’s a lot of different things,” and so shows like The Landsman get to punch above their weight.
Same thing with Twitter/X — even before Musk’s purchase, there was a huge power-law issue (25% of users producing 97% of the tweets) and now there’s even more bot distortion. But it was easier to write about what was getting attention on Twitter than about something more niche, when there are so many different niches — I browse /r/hobbydrama every so often, and it’s always amazing, how passionate people get about their hobbies or favorite media properties — often things I’ve never even heard of.
I do feel like there’s this increasing bleed, where a distorted primarily-digital world seeps further and further into the “real” world. If you pay enough attention to the bots, the bots become reality. Politics becomes less and less about actual policy and more and more about beefs. If enough people believe that young men are increasingly right-wing and misogynist, then it doesn’t matter whether young men are becoming more right-wing and misogynist or not: the feedback loop will be well enough established. It’s very unsettling. I don’t know if proverbially “touching grass” is a good counterattack.
If there’s a trend towards looking to the past (and I’m really not sure there is, though that may be my bias — I don’t write, and very rarely read, historicals) then it may be simply because the sense of unreality in the past is less. I think Lil makes a good point: it’s one thing to write a book set in, say, 1943 and have characters expressing uncertainty about the future, it’s another to read it, knowing what we know. I do wonder if we have a hard time imagining how uncertain the past must have felt. Periods like 1789-92 in France or the early ’30s in Europe and the US, or times of epidemics, must have felt horribly destabilizing and bewildering.
It takes a lot of work to figure out what is really happening–in today’s world, as you point out, perception is reality.
It’s not my sense that most young men are misogynistic but enough are and their stories swamp our media.
You’ve raised some really excellent arguments about how hard it is in this feedback loop era to be certain of what drives what. Facebook reaches an alarming number of people and has such an outsized impact on politics, given the nature of the platform, that it is downright scary.
The word “utopia” comes from a root that means either “good place” or “no place” depending on whether you assume it came from an eu root or an ou root. The various utopias that have been imagined since the word was coined suggest that both meanings apply: utopias are good places that don’t exist in the real world, so we can only visit them in our imaginations.
Fairy tales, a source of the HEA most of us insist is a necessary part of any definition of the romance genre, are also a source of the phrase “Once upon a time”, which cues the reader to expect an unreal past: a nominally historical setting with details removed to take it out of real history.
The science fiction genre includes a number of utopias, but even more dystopias intended as cautionary tales.
A point I read many years ago is that most genre fiction is positive: romances have a relationship reaching a HEA, detectives solve crimes, westerns have a hero win, science fiction stories solve puzzles or problems or make discoveries, etc.
I don’t think there is so much a desire to go “back” to any real historical world as a desire for a more perfect world.
The problems come from how to define a more perfect world.
One thing that really caught my attention when I listened to the Great Course “Why You Are Who You Are” by Mark Leary (about personality traits) was the ties between personalities and values / ethics / morals. Most people agree with the Hippocratic “first, do no harm”. Most people value fairness and justice. Only some people see loyalty to a group as a moral value. Only some people see following traditions as a moral value. Only some people see sanctity or spiritual purity as a moral value. According to the course, more conservatives than liberals view the last 3 as moral values.
I can certainly see that in my own thinking: when group loyalty was mentioned as a value my immediate reaction was that an unfair or unjust group is not worthy of any loyalty.
To sum up, I suspect that a lot of the people who read fiction at all probably enjoy it more when it is set in more “ideal” worlds, but what counts as ideal depends on reader personalities.
As someone old enough to remember JFK’s assasination, the civil rights riots, MLK, etc, I definitely don’t want to go back. All my life I’ve been naive enough to think we were, as a people and a country, going forward. For decades I didn’t scrutinize events enough to see the cracks forming amid the progress on civil rights, bodily automomy, LGBTQ rights and more. The shock to my system over the past 8 years or so has been about the realization of how easily the social progress can be undone. I don’t think there was ever a time when people were nicer, kinder, or cared more about each other in the grand scheme of things. It’s almost always been more about caring for the people in your circle of influence.
I don’t read for nostalgia. While there are many things I wish I’d known and could have done differently in my life, I would never, ever choose to relive any part of it. I, as a person, have definitely gotten more self-awareness and understanding as I’ve aged. Even in these troubled times I don’t wish to go backwards.
I also am of the opinion that if Harris had won, we’d still go through this turmoil at some point. The far right wouldn’t have gone away. Who knows? Maybe this debacle (when Trump goes too far even for the conservative voters) will bring us back to a survivable middle ground again. At least for a while.
I had watched a few episodes of Yellowstone and with a huge dose of skepticism. I definitely do not want a literary version of it. And, I certainly do not feel nostalgic about how it was one hundred years ago and I certainly do not want to go back to a period where a small group of people had huge amount of power and privilege at the expense of vast majority of people.
U.S. is not a perfect place today but it has become a better place than what it was hundred years ago. Over the last century, especially in the last several decades, it has become more democratic-in its broadest definition- than what it was at the beginning of 20th century. The forces of revanchism fighting back ferociously (as they are wont to do) and for every three steps forward we slide 1.5 steps back but we are still ahead. And once the genie of democracy is out it cannot be put back into the bottle of dictatorship, authoritarianism, divine rights of kings and patriarchy. Those who try will inevitably fail (history attests to that).
I agree and I really don’t want us to be wrong!
Depends on how far back. History hasn’t been kind to women, particularly towards women of color. Not to play the race card here, but history is history. So no, I don’t think I would. Not even to my childhood (although there’s nothing wrong with my childhood). I’m one of those who’s content with my present life, I think. If anything, I can’t wait to explore my future and all the adventure I’ve already planned for me.
I tend to think that since we can’t really travel in time, it makes the most sense to embrace the present and plan and dream for the future. So, I am with you!