weekend reads: on indeterminacy, fandom, and Sarah MacLean

here there be literary theory (but also hot romance heroes)

Sometimes my students look at me and say—with slight horror—“wow, you were really meant to be an English teacher, huh?”

Because I love analysis. I love the meaning I take from a text when I’ve had to hack through the thickets of interpretation first. I love how it feels at once like a creative impulse (for what is analysis if not making something new in response to a text?) and a mindful one (sitting with one thought, one moment, to see where it leads).

So stay with me for like three paragraphs while I drop some literary theory? I promise I will then apply it to descriptions of handsome men.

When I teach ninth grade, we start the year by introducing a few critical lenses for looking at literature: New Criticism (the old-school, close-reading, “what is the purpose in this metaphor” kind of reading) and Reader Response Theory (which says the meaning of a text is constructed through the interaction the reader has with it; their own lived experience and POV are essential to filling in the gaps that are necessarily left when something is described on the page).¹

One of the most challenging teaching points of Reader Response Theory was always around indeterminacy—the bits of the text that might elicit a variety of readings, or contain ambiguous events, or even include words with multiple meanings. It was hard to explain that you couldn’t just make up anything—the author has still laid the parameters for meaning. Has, in fact, carefully crafted language and narrative structure to create your experience (as the New Critics would remind us).

To get at this interaction between the work of the author and the work of the reader, I often asked the framing question: How, exactly, does the text’s indeterminacy function as a stimulus to interpretation? In other words, how does what is not explicitly stated by the text lead to a reader’s interpretation of the text’s meaning?

While reading and writing lately, I’ve been thinking about the particular magic of indeterminacy in “commercial” fiction.

Sarah MacLean’s upcoming These Summer Storms had me by the throat this weekend. I promise, as always, to refrain from spoilers and stick to the first few chapters in my discussion.

But please, just take a look at this short pitch:

Alice Storm hasn’t been welcome at her family’s magnificent private island off the Rhode Island coast in five years—since she was cast out to build a life beyond the Storm name, influence, and untold billions. But the shocking death of her larger-than-life father changes everything.

Now Alice plans to keep her head down, pay her final respects (such as they are), and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans. Before his death, The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his family a final challenge—an inheritance game designed to upend their world. The rules are clear: spend one week on the island, complete his assigned tasks, and receive the inheritance.

A week in isolation on Storm Island is no easy task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting with chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s unyielding arrogance. Her younger sister’s constant analysis of the vibes. Her mother’s cold judgment. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s intriguing, too-handsome second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape unscathed.

I KNOW. PRE-ORDER NOW.

It’s snort-while-reading funny, and viscerally sensual, and page-turningly paced even in its quieter moments—but you get the impression every detail has been measured out for you, titrated to give you the least in a way that will also give you the most. It’s restrained.

It’s masterful.

So I started thinking about indeterminacy.

For example, in the first few chapters, the protagonist has a one-night stand—and it happens entirely off the page. The next chapter begins:

“It was not a walk of shame.”

SARAH. I simultaneously want to have words and am also giggling and kicking my feet—because no, I actually don’t want to know what happened. We get just enough detail to know she enjoyed it, and that is the perfect amount. Because we’re certain this man will return, and we want to relish the slow build of chemistry and connection until they give in to this pull again.

And the description of that love interest?

• “A tall, stern-faced white man in his thirties, leather duffel in hand, backpack slung over his shoulder.”

• “It shouldn’t have surprised her, but she startled anyway, straightening to meet the serious, gray gaze of the man she’d seen on the platform earlier—tall and stern… Dark brows rose, punctuating the question as he tilted his chin in the direction of the seat next to her…”

• “He folded himself into the space she’d cleared, knees pressed to the back of the seat in front of him. On another day, she might have paid closer attention. But she did not have time for noticing him. In fact, she vaguely resented his presence for reminding her that she was single again, for filling up the seat with his long legs and the kind of judgment that came from strangers who had no idea that you’d had a day.”

We get a few more glimpses of him in that first chapter—his thumbs as he scrolls on a phone, his knees pressed into the seat—but we’re in Alice’s shoes, hyperaware of someone’s presence while only allowing ourselves the briefest of sidelong glances. We know he’s attractive—on another day, she might have paid closer attention… reminding her that she was single again—but that’s it. No time for noticing him.

And that just makes us want to see and know MORE—while simultaneously letting us fill in the blanks with whatever we, personally, find most appealing.

There’s even a particularly iconic scene where Jack demonstrates a surprising competence with a skill Alice did not expect. I won’t say more because I want you to experience it yourselves, but man, I love a moment where the protagonist’s experience mirrors the reader’s—where the author is teaching us how to read their book.

Alice has so many questions about this man. She is absolutely consumed with imagining the rest of his story. And so are we.

This same pattern holds for the voice (arch, wryly understated) and the narrative structure (dipping into other family members’ POVs just enough to fill in some gaps and leave us wanting more).

Friends. This is what fanfiction dreams are made of.

I know I’m kinda stretching the bounds of indeterminacy here, but all of this makes me think of Jennifer Lynn Barnes and theory of fandom. Full credit for this connection goes to the

Turning To Story

podcast—when Lyssa & Anna first brought this up on a fan favorite episode (I think this one!), I immediately had to read more.

There’s a lot to dig into here, but my biggest takeaway was essentially: when readers do some mental work, their engagement with the story, world, and characters skyrockets. Some of her research (and others’) breaks down the mechanisms that engage readers in this way, like:

• Co-Authoring: interpreting subtext, theorizing about a character’s backstory, imagining counterfactual scenarios, resisting declarations made by the author

• Gap-Filling: addressing elements of the story left open, unspecified, or vague by the author (indeterminacy!!)

• Theory of Mind: considering why characters act the way they do, puzzling over inscrutable characters, imagining how characters might act in completely different situations (AU, anyone?)

We typically apply this kind of thinking to literary fiction, widely acknowledging that it requires a reader’s mental work, but I think the best genre fiction understands this dynamic implicitly.

A Reddit comment (I told you I did a deep dive) summed it up nicely: “fandom can come from a setting that has the right balance of structure and permission, e.g. a world or a story that you can picture clearly and has space for you to imagine yourself in it.”

Sounds like a page that’s richly crafted in a way the New Critics would love, yet leaves the open playground the Reader Response Theorists are interested in, no?

Which brings me back to These Summer Storms, and indeterminacy in romance. In just the first few chapters, we’re filling in the gaps left by Alice’s narrative (what kind of day did she have?!), coloring in the details of the mysterious stranger on the train, interpreting the subtext beneath their spare interaction. A perfect example of what it looks like when a master of craft is creating a beautifully-realized—but tantalizingly incomplete—world for us to enter.

I wonder if this kind of indeterminacy works on a few levels. Part of the fun of romance (and genre fiction in general?) is knowing that a lot of these questions will be answered… eventually. They create the tension that keeps us turning pages while searching for answers to mysteries, vulnerability that explains the subtext of tense conversations, and the resolution of the HEA. We will find out what happened to Alice, and what’s up with Jack, and whether they’ll end up together.

I think MacLean’s style takes it up a notch, though. It brings to mind an Impressionist painting where each detail is chosen or withheld in order to recreate the sensation of looking—and in the case of this novel, desiring.

And perhaps another level entirely is created when a few questions aren’t answered. Maybe that’s when a great romance turns into a fandom, which MacLean definitely knows something about. Isn’t that how we get companion novels and universes full of interlocking stories? Isn’t that what keeps us holding on to the world long after we finish the final chapter?²

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In the inimitable P.H. Low’s latest newsletter (a must-read), they include a final note that could not have come at a better time:

i’ve been thinking lately about the restrictions we tend to place on the novel, especially in modern commercial (“commercial”?) fantasy: the belief that its conclusions need to be airtight, every strangeness scaffolded and locked in by internal logic. el-mohtar’s and bender’s books both feel like unfoldings of possibility, in different ways, an embrace of the make-shit-up part of writing fiction. magic as an opening-up instead of a sealing-in.

Where can we hint at the lives that our characters lead beyond what exists on the page? How can we make our worlds feel edgeless, infinite, expansive?

How can our books be an opening-up instead of a sealing-in?

As always, I’m curious for your thoughts, since I’m very much working this out on the page in real time. And please, if you made it this far and somehow haven’t added These Summer Storms to your TBR, for heaven’s sake, what are you waiting for?! The end MORE than sticks the landing—one of the best romances I’ve read this spring.

Much love always,

🤍 Emily

1. I’m vastly over-simplifying, of course, but this will do for our purposes today! Thank you for letting me play fast and loose in the rest of this letter—I hope it will lead somewhere interesting.

2. I thought about this a lot while writing Heart Check for reasons I can only hint at, but I loved the idea of leaving some Easter eggs to titillate readers. Possibly to frustrate them. Just a little. In a fun way. 😈 And as I work on some new projects, I’m trying to lean into intentional indeterminacy even more, with the hunch that it will create characters that live in your mind rent-free and plots that keep you turning pages.