Published in 1993, Built To Last is a far cry from Castles in the Air. It was part of a special series of romance novels about working-class men. Apparently a soft answer to Rule 34, since these books aren't super porny. In fact, in this novel, there's only one sex scene, which starts on page 138 out of 182 and is incredibly demure in its rendering. If you can believe it, pretty much all of the action is delicately insinuated, and neither her vadge, nor his willy are actually named or described. Not even in terms of "his hardness" or "her warm and inviting embrace." Somehow, via little more than suggestion and mentions of passion and general feelings-of-grooviness, Ms. Copeland constructed a sex scene with no actual sex. It really boggles the mind. So much so, that y'all get photographic evidence. Just a minute; I'll be right back with the goods:
Pretty masterful, no?
Anyway, now that we have the sexy-sex out of the way, on with the narrative (maybe they should make actual-porn that way. Just open with the huffin'-and-gruntin', then get on with the pizza delivery or boiler mending, or whatever pretext there was for the ugly-bumping.
I digress. Good shit, do I digress.
Anyway.
Christine is a hard-working, conscientious, recent college graduate from Iowa who has made her way to Santa Cruz, California to work in a tech company. She's been rocketing up the corporate ladder and is a project manager, not because she's especially career-ambitious, but because she feels she must pay off her student loans and car note as quickly as is practical. However, she's been finding that her hotshot corporate job is less-than-fulfilling, and so she determines to volunteer in her free time to a Habitat-For-Humanity scheme which is renovating abandoned houses for low income families.
Christine pulls up to the renovation house in her well-kept, red, secondhand BMW 318. Bear Malone*, the project foreman for the renovation scheme immediately pegs her as a yuppie dilettante, showing up for a couple of hours so she can clock some do-gooder time on her karma chart. As such, he is gruff with her initially, and puts her to work doing scut-work. As the day wears on, he discovers she's more competent than he'd given her credit for, and they begin to work together well.
* Lookie here...another digression. Throughout the entire book, I was giggling myself stupid over the name "Bear." It's meant to be a nickname from his footballer days, like Moose or Tank, but every time I crossed it, I thought of very hairy and stout gay men, possibly inclined to lumberjack wear.
So once they start getting along, they still have preconceived images of each other. She considers him a bit of a meathead, and he has it in his mind that she's a prissy yuppy. So, they set a bet that they'll take each other on a date, and theoretically put the other one out his or her element.
On the first date, Bear takes Christine to a seedy, downmarket bowling alley. Although he's not a regular there, he tries to make her think this is the sort of joint he frequents. After a couple of beers and a reasonably decent game of ninepins, they concede that they've actually both had a lot of fun.
On the second date, Christine has scored free tickets to the Nutcracker, so she hauls Bear to the ballet. Initially, she meets him at a snack-bar they frequent, and he's dressed in jeans and a workshirt. But then he asks her to make a pit-stop at a dry-cleaners, from which he emerges fully gussied up in a well-cut suit. She'd believed that he had no appropriate clothing for a fancy venue, but he'd gone to the effort to have his suit cleaned and pressed for the occasion. Again, they go on a date and have a good time, ending it up with a walk on the beach, where naive Iowa girl Christine gets herself soaked to the skin in chilly Santa Cruz seawater. Some kissing ensues.
So, they continue on with the house. Christine's networking skills help them get free or cheap materials and other donations of labor and equipment, and their excellent progress is noted by the local planning commission who appoint Christine and Bear to head up a committee on further low-income housing renovations. About this time Christine's office holiday party comes up. She's already called it quits with Percy, the man from her office whom she'd been dating in a desultory fashion before she met Bear. So, she asks Bear to the party with her. He accompanies her, of course, and they meet a few people who are interested in helping with the renovations project. The party, on the whole, is a bore, and Christine ends up in a bit of a slagging-match with her ex, Percy. Christine and Bear leave early and embark upon the strangely chaste lovemaking scene cited at the head of this entry..
Soon afterwards, Christine is called up to the head office and accused of arranging for her volunteer commitments on company time and ordered to quit the volunteer project or risk her job. Seeing as she is committed to paying off her car and student loans, she backs down.
Embarrased and confused, Christine doesn't offer Bear any explanation of why she has disappeared, and resigns from the City low-income-housing committee. He think that she's getting all greedy and yuppie again and doesn't want to get messed up with a manual laborer. She continues to work at the renovation project on weekends and some very late nights, and she and Bear manage to kind of scrape along, but resentful, hurt, and suspicious.
During this period of tension, a man Christine knew from her job and from the City proposes a venture for further renovations, but on the stipulation that she and Bear go into it as business partners, her for her networking acumen, he for his construction know-how. Since she and Bear are on the outs, however, she turns him down.
Blah, blah, blah, Christine and Bear are miserable. Confessions are made. The relationship is patched back up. They determine to go ahead and go into business together. Christine sells off her BMW and buys a very used minivan for cash. Bear, who throughout all of this has been learning to drive, buys a flashy convertible, because unbeknownst to Christine, he's actually a retired NFL footballer and banked the bulk of his hefty NFL paychecks, choosing to live a low-key lifestyle and work construction on renovation projects because he wanted to commit himself to something positive. The ending, of course, is happy and wedding bells are on the future for the Iowan Yuppie and the hammer-handling ex-Bronco.
During the course of this bad-books project, I will probably read books in pairs or groups per theme, as I have been so far. Thus far, I've had a pattern, of the first book I read being completely awful, and the second being a welcome improvement. So far the pattern continues. While both of these books are set in the same region (San Francisco Bay Area) and in the same milieu (construction), they couldn't be more different. Part of it is just that it is two different authors and two different decades. The biggest difference, however, is the characters. In Castles, both characters were really loathsome. There was nothing especially prepossessing or charming about either; they were both total assholes. In Built To Last, both characters are sweet. Sure, they misunderstand and stereotype each other at first, but they are both intelligent and compassionate enough to look deeper and discover that the other is actually a decent human being. They stand on much more equal footing, as well, both being highly competent in his or her field. There is none of the dominating or breaking down that we saw in Castles, either. The virgin sex trope is alive and well, but the approach to her losing her virginity is much more affectionate. Bear wants Christine to have a good time, whereas Mike wanted to MAKE Samantha to want him.
My next two books are both called Duchess. I wonder which one of them will suck. I guess there's only one way to find out.
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