Book Review: Beverly Rowley’s ‘Relationship Contract’: Let’s Keep It Real’

So, here I am again…the fork in the road, the Shakespearean crisis: “to be or not to be” a book reviewer. Beverly Rowley’s book, Relationship Contract: Let’s Keep it Real, places me at, yet, another crossroad dilemma where – as a book reviewer – I am forced to reconsider my time and efforts, whether worth the sacrifice, or is it all just a waste of time. As Sheryl Crow once said, “This is the meltdown.”

Rowley’s book arrived at a time when I was struggling to get back to completing a hefty reading list of fine novels by authors whose works I felt would take me to a whole other level of writing, criticism, craft, style, aesthetics, literary culture etc: Flannery O’Connor, a D.H. Lawrence bio, Capote’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Langston Hughes’ collection of short stories, a Nabokov bio, John Steinbeck, Gayl Jones, Dostoevsky, Saroyan, Fante, Baldwin’s freshly collected selections, The Cross of Redemption (which I surely feel will liberate me), Anne Lamott (a neat little book on the writing life, which I’d carefully swiped from LFs personal library); and, Katherine Mansfield’s collected short stories. All of these wonderful treats were pushed aside for the sake of reviewing Rowley’s book – which had arrived on the same day as several of the aforementioned reads, including August Meier and Elliot Rudwick’s Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 – a book I desperately needed to finish reading for a term paper due by the near end of the semester. (This is important because my MA studies are approaching the last semester of thesis writing followed by thesis defense in May. I had no time to waste on mediocre reading.) But, I gave Relationship Contract the benefit of the doubt, took a gamble and crapped out on the hard eight. I spent much of the first few chapters wrestling with Rowley’s profound sense of one-sidedness and the incorrect information she tries to pass off as collected data. The contradictions began to shine like sunrise to dark, and by this time I felt compelled to call Rowley to gain some perspective on the matter. We talked, briefly, then I returned to the book and tried to get through the read as quickly as possible. I stopped just three pages shy of the third chapter. I had enough.

From the beginning, Rowley’s book agitated me. The book is poorly arranged; I noticed at least four different font settings – the “acknowledgement” font setting being the most irritating. And the title is boring and unimaginative. The only redeeming quality of the book is the cute lil photo of Rowley on the book’s back cover…. and it really shouldn’t have been there. But I would have let all that go if not for the other stuff. Books of this nature (those claiming to be inspirational and educational and informative) should be serious, particularly the use of language. At times, Rowley’s language went from semi-academic to professional to colloquial and back to street-slang (in 0 to 60 seconds), leaving me with mixed feels of how I should interpret her point of view. Shows gives no attention to stated statistical quotients but presents questions she claims to back up with interviews and surveys. For example, she wrote,

I asked some of the women how did they feel about what those celebrity wives had to say. Shockingly, 8 out of 10 agreed with celebrity wives. The two women who didn’t agree with the others said they would not stay in the marriage where the man is blatantly sleeping around, no matter how much money he made.

Huh!? This is research? These are statistics? This is how Rowley gets her facts? This is what quantitative and qualitative research reads like? But, wait! There’s more of the same:

When I asked a group of women how they felt about some women who dressed half-naked, 8 out of 10 agreed that a lot of women weren’t leaving much to the imagination. The two women that didn’t agree were wearing jeans with the crack of their asses and draws showing, accompanied by a bra and a see through shirt. A lot of men say that they don’t find this look sexy.

Again, where is the observation to support this shoddy claim? Where is the critical reflection? At this point, it seemed to me that Rowley wasn’t really trying to write a good relationship book based on research, data, study, and reflection, instead, it seemed to me her only aim was to perpetuate myths, stereotypes, fear, and discontentment. She posits age-old, uncritical, unoriginal, rhetorical questions disguised as serious inquiry, then makes no attempt to analyze them in-depth and at length. All we get is Rowley’s acute proclivity for verbosity (and personal baggage):

Some women may put up with a lot of things to stay in a relationship or just to say they have a man or a husband. How can you be so lonely and so desperate that you are willing to belittle yourself and lower your standards to be with a man, any man, no matter how he treats you? Are you serious? Do we no longer want real love anymore? Do we no longer want to be respected by our men anymore? Are we really going to accept infidelity in our relationships as if it’s an everyday occurrence, like changing our underwear?

At this point I began to ask my own questions: “Are you willing to belittle yourself and lower your standards by continuing to read this book, which is really more of a girls-night-out/stella-got-her-groove-back bar-scene roast-fest discussion (like the one Drew-n-crew were having in the Spike Lee Joint, Jungle Fever – when the wife caught Flipper having an affair) than anything that could be called literature. It isn’t even an inspirational book, dude.” (I talk to myself a lot.) But I kept the faith and forged ahead. Rowley goes on to make pretty wild statements, at times contradicting herself as well: “A mother can’t really shed light on what it is to be a man”; “Unfortunately, it seems as though we don’t have many of those [men] anymore”; “It is a rare thing to hear a man say that he wants to be loved.”  The latter statement is just pure bs! Men have said it for centuries. From Motown to the Rolling Stones; from the Isley Brothers to Steve Harvey; from R. Kelly to the Beatles, men have begged for a woman’s love! Finally, Rowley cites The Maury Povich Show as a reliable and critical source of reference! At this point, I shut the book.

Although I never got beyond chapter three, I could tell early on that the book had nothing new to offer to the dialogue on

relationships and love. I never saw anything remotely fresh, new, invigorating, enlightening, or original during the first twenty-eight pages, so I could not trust that the reminder of the book would change into something dynamic and spectacular. That’s not how it goes. That’s not how any good book would go. If it starts of lousy, it will be lousy and it will end lousy. And, for once, I did not want to take that chance, only to regret it later.

Furthermore, any book’s opening should captivate the reader’s attention. From the moment his story begins, Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary immediately sets the pace and we get jolted by an electrifying opening: “My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five-minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there but I was never accepted because I wore a white tie. The real people wanted no part of me.” The opening passage of Truman Capote’s magnum opus is nothing short of pure lyrical brilliance, the stuff of good writing; no books opening line more demonstrative of such a masterful command of the English language (not even Robert Goolrick’s unforgettable memoir, The End of the World as We Know It). In Cold Blood begins  

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

For the record, I never expected Rowley to come anywhere close to these literary greats, but I expected better than what she delivered. Perhaps her book would be better had it been written as a novel, and the rambling serve as dialogue between a group of women. I don’t know! But, during a time in which we seek critical advice for complex matters of love, Rowley’s book is silly at best, and deleterious at worst. It will not fix that which ails us in love, nor will it offer any real food for thought. We already know what Rowley has written. We have heard enough tired anecdotes, dinner-time talk, and hair salon solutions. We need real advice, and Rowley doesn’t deliver. Maybe nobody can.

Push Scale: 2/5

Cop the book !here!

Rowley’s book trailer below also features an original song (which she penned and performed) titled “Cheating”. Check it out!

Tip-of-the-day: I would suggest reading Nika Beamon’s impressive book, Why Did I Get Married.