G
Guest
Guest
Interesting take on erotica, and some outrageous comments. - Perdita
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Some Like It Hot EMILY NUSSBAUM - NYTimes, May 23, 2004
MAKING LOVE - A Romance By Lucretia Stewart.
IN HIS ARMS - By Camille Laurens.
AFTER - By Claire Tristram.
FAITHFUL By Davitt Sigerson.
FROM an early age, every reader learns how to flip to the good parts, whether one happens to be thumbing through Judy Blume, Philip Roth or Leviticus. But there's a breed of book that provides a better payoff for such dexterity: the highbrow one-handed read. Think of Josephine Hart's ''Damage,'' Anais Nin, the lesser Henry Miller or, more recently, ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,'' a memoir. It's a genre that might be said -- like Sara in Joyce Cary's comic novel ''The Horse's Mouth'' -- to ''commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.''
At their tawdriest, these books are merely porn for the nervous: raw enough to titillate, but decorous enough to read on an airplane or leave lying on a cafe table. Literary sex writing is easy to make fun of when done poorly. Which is most of the time. But when these books succeed -- think of the better Henry Miller, Marguerite Duras or, more recently, Mary Gaitskill -- they are a real gift: agile explorations of a subject that, even in the hands of the most skillful writers, can lead to wildly purple prose. On some level, these novels can be seen as a higher form of eavesdropping -- and as with eavesdropping, some confessions ring truer than others. Humility may be the secret ingredient. Among its signatures: a narrator who is willing to expose his or her own foolishness; sexual descriptions that transcend lacquered acrobatics; and a willingness to cut through -- and undercut -- all the philosophizing. The best of these books are stimulating on more than one level, performing the difficult task of making an obsessive love meaningful to someone standing outside it.
Despite its awful title, Lucretia Stewart's first novel, MAKING LOVE: A Romance (University of Wisconsin/Terrace Books, $21.95), is one of the good ones. A dryly funny account of a bohemian life on the skids, ''Making Love'' is an affecting meditation on the aphrodisiac effects of mutual misery. The narrator has led a life of ''rapture and paranoia,'' her bed populated mainly by pot-smoking rich boys and fey narcissists (plus one cuckolded nice guy). When the book begins, in the aftermath of her father's death, she has entered what she thinks of as a predestined last chance -- only to find herself in the most doomed affair yet. Her lover is an ex from her beautiful youth: an abusive, alcoholic, manic-depressive philanderer who isn't even especially good in bed. Somehow Stewart -- she is also the author of two travel books and the editor of ''Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad'' -- manages to make this dreadful love affair meaningful and understandable. ''The fatal conjunction of sex and neglect'' did it for her every time, she writes with rueful pride. ''It never occurred to me to turn my back on romantic love.''
Sex in ''Making Love'' is rarely a matter of mere pleasure: it's a force that glues people together, mostly in the sense of a bad practical joke. But Stewart's heroine is lovable even at her most self-destructive, in part because of her insight into her own worst impulses. At one point, she recounts an archly pretentious conversation with her lover to her closest friend, and her friend replies in astonishment, ''You don't actually talk to each other like that, do you?'' (They did, she admits.) When Stewart writes about sex, it's with an eye for its sadder contradictions: ''I hardly felt a thing but Louis showered appreciative kisses on my face.'' Stewart's gift for self-examination lets no one off the hook, elevating her protagonist's erotic calamities into something darkly moving.
Like Stewart's heroine, the narrator of IN HIS ARMS (Random House, $22.95), Camille Laurens's first book to be translated into English (by Ian Monk), is the hyperobservant survivor of a series of catastrophic love affairs. Each of them seems to have left her slightly dented, and more than a bit addled about men. In fact, she's obsessed: she stalks a therapist, aiming to unfold her fetishistic admiration for masculinity session by session (and chapter by chapter), examining each man in her life for clues to the whole gender. In one chapter, she compiles a madcap personal ad that rolls all single men into one (this everyman seeks a woman ''remarkable sincere with pierced vagina''); in another, she condenses an affair into a darkly witty list of phrases, from ''I adore your mouth'' to ''I never promised you a thing.'' It's all extremely French (the book was a best seller in Laurens's native country) and at first glance may resemble the quasi-decadent, semi-erotic pseudo-wisdom of Nin. ''When he comes,'' Laurens writes, ''long after her, he shrieks like a wild beast (luckily the party is in full swing), he cries out as if he were dying. . . . This moment includes the past and the future, it is an indivisible lot, take it or leave it.'' But Laurens slowly peels away her narrator's panicky philosophizing to reveal a hidden core: a shrewd close-up of a woman struggling to decode her own disastrous marriage -- a connubial nightmare that has left her sophisticated in the messiest sense.
Each of these novels is less strictly about sex than about grief at its failure to sustain intimacy: the narrators can't let go of the fact that they can't let go. Claire Tristram's first novel, AFTER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20), begins with a similar conceit, and an intriguingly risky premise: the American widow of a famous victim of terrorism embarks on a one-day affair with an older Muslim man. She's chosen this stranger in an act of erotic pique, seeking something unclear even to her: revenge, understanding, certainly rebellion. But what initially seems like a dark comedy of sexual gamesmanship -- an exploration of the ways in which lovers objectify one another, then turn tender in the most confusing circumstances -- transforms midway into a confused pornographic nightmare, featuring a good deal of sadomasochistic anal sex and some really problematic allusions to Daniel Pearl. The central characters are deliberately cipherlike, and at first there is an appealing Mamet-like mystery to their involvement. But by the final chapters, the book is too gloomily heavy-handed about its use of sex as a metaphor, dissolving into a portentous puzzle that never quite earns its creepier subtext.
Davitt Sigerson's first novel, FAITHFUL (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95), is a more prurient alternative, funnier, dirtier and also more ridiculous -- a novel both madly irritating in its gender politics and (perhaps not by coincidence) pretty successful as flat-out erotica. But while its naughtier passages reward a bookstore scan, the book's sophistication is paper-thin. At base, it's a cautionary tale that might be subtitled ''I Married a Succubus.'' Our hero is a London stock trader named Nick, a puppyish mensch in a seemingly happy quickie marriage. But Trish, his new wife, it soon develops, is not what she seems: she's a kind of superhero of betrayal (or put another way, a lying bitch). Not long after she gets pregnant, she snags on a love triangle with her strutting ex, Joe. But whereas Stewart and Laurens are capable of making even the most selfish reversals make emotional sense, Sigerson seems unable to do the same with Trish: she swiftly shrivels from a full character into an object lesson -- along with every other woman in the book. (They can all be slotted into the categories of crazy/beautiful or dully good.)
Sigerson, a former music business executive, is an elegant writer, and many of his sexual descriptions are undeniably vivid, capturing the dreamy intensity of Nick's desire with poetic shorthand: ''She works her filthy ingenuities. Pop pop pop. The stopper bounces inside his soul and the empty ache empties again.'' But pompous analysis undercuts even the best of these descriptions: this is sex as phrenology, less real-world insight than the bragging theories of the cigar-sucking blowhards in the next booth -- as when one of Nick's friends suggests that one can marry a woman who has anal sex, but never one who actually wants it. By the final chapters, the men in Trish's life have begun reeling off increasingly outrageous theories about her: she's ''my little Martian,'' she's ''Superman as a child, nearly deranged by powers he can neither explain nor deny.'' Her ex, Joe, raves in fascinated horror: ''She wants to do all the nasty stuff that men want to do to her. She wants to. Not like other women, surrendering their dignity to prove they love a man.'' Despite its curlicues of cynicism, there's an oddly innocent belief system at the center of this book: female desire is a monstrous marvel, like a two-headed calf.
To the sadder-but-wiser women who narrate ''Making Love'' and ''In His Arms,'' Nick might not seem like the nice guy he clearly imagines himself to be. But then, ''Faithful'' isn't in it for the deep talks: it's glib and pretentious, though it occasionally hits its mark. It's a different breed from the nuanced narratives of Laurens and Stewart and, for some readers, that might be just what the beach bag ordered. Hey, even readers can have double standards.
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Some Like It Hot EMILY NUSSBAUM - NYTimes, May 23, 2004
MAKING LOVE - A Romance By Lucretia Stewart.
IN HIS ARMS - By Camille Laurens.
AFTER - By Claire Tristram.
FAITHFUL By Davitt Sigerson.
FROM an early age, every reader learns how to flip to the good parts, whether one happens to be thumbing through Judy Blume, Philip Roth or Leviticus. But there's a breed of book that provides a better payoff for such dexterity: the highbrow one-handed read. Think of Josephine Hart's ''Damage,'' Anais Nin, the lesser Henry Miller or, more recently, ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,'' a memoir. It's a genre that might be said -- like Sara in Joyce Cary's comic novel ''The Horse's Mouth'' -- to ''commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.''
At their tawdriest, these books are merely porn for the nervous: raw enough to titillate, but decorous enough to read on an airplane or leave lying on a cafe table. Literary sex writing is easy to make fun of when done poorly. Which is most of the time. But when these books succeed -- think of the better Henry Miller, Marguerite Duras or, more recently, Mary Gaitskill -- they are a real gift: agile explorations of a subject that, even in the hands of the most skillful writers, can lead to wildly purple prose. On some level, these novels can be seen as a higher form of eavesdropping -- and as with eavesdropping, some confessions ring truer than others. Humility may be the secret ingredient. Among its signatures: a narrator who is willing to expose his or her own foolishness; sexual descriptions that transcend lacquered acrobatics; and a willingness to cut through -- and undercut -- all the philosophizing. The best of these books are stimulating on more than one level, performing the difficult task of making an obsessive love meaningful to someone standing outside it.
Despite its awful title, Lucretia Stewart's first novel, MAKING LOVE: A Romance (University of Wisconsin/Terrace Books, $21.95), is one of the good ones. A dryly funny account of a bohemian life on the skids, ''Making Love'' is an affecting meditation on the aphrodisiac effects of mutual misery. The narrator has led a life of ''rapture and paranoia,'' her bed populated mainly by pot-smoking rich boys and fey narcissists (plus one cuckolded nice guy). When the book begins, in the aftermath of her father's death, she has entered what she thinks of as a predestined last chance -- only to find herself in the most doomed affair yet. Her lover is an ex from her beautiful youth: an abusive, alcoholic, manic-depressive philanderer who isn't even especially good in bed. Somehow Stewart -- she is also the author of two travel books and the editor of ''Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad'' -- manages to make this dreadful love affair meaningful and understandable. ''The fatal conjunction of sex and neglect'' did it for her every time, she writes with rueful pride. ''It never occurred to me to turn my back on romantic love.''
Sex in ''Making Love'' is rarely a matter of mere pleasure: it's a force that glues people together, mostly in the sense of a bad practical joke. But Stewart's heroine is lovable even at her most self-destructive, in part because of her insight into her own worst impulses. At one point, she recounts an archly pretentious conversation with her lover to her closest friend, and her friend replies in astonishment, ''You don't actually talk to each other like that, do you?'' (They did, she admits.) When Stewart writes about sex, it's with an eye for its sadder contradictions: ''I hardly felt a thing but Louis showered appreciative kisses on my face.'' Stewart's gift for self-examination lets no one off the hook, elevating her protagonist's erotic calamities into something darkly moving.
Like Stewart's heroine, the narrator of IN HIS ARMS (Random House, $22.95), Camille Laurens's first book to be translated into English (by Ian Monk), is the hyperobservant survivor of a series of catastrophic love affairs. Each of them seems to have left her slightly dented, and more than a bit addled about men. In fact, she's obsessed: she stalks a therapist, aiming to unfold her fetishistic admiration for masculinity session by session (and chapter by chapter), examining each man in her life for clues to the whole gender. In one chapter, she compiles a madcap personal ad that rolls all single men into one (this everyman seeks a woman ''remarkable sincere with pierced vagina''); in another, she condenses an affair into a darkly witty list of phrases, from ''I adore your mouth'' to ''I never promised you a thing.'' It's all extremely French (the book was a best seller in Laurens's native country) and at first glance may resemble the quasi-decadent, semi-erotic pseudo-wisdom of Nin. ''When he comes,'' Laurens writes, ''long after her, he shrieks like a wild beast (luckily the party is in full swing), he cries out as if he were dying. . . . This moment includes the past and the future, it is an indivisible lot, take it or leave it.'' But Laurens slowly peels away her narrator's panicky philosophizing to reveal a hidden core: a shrewd close-up of a woman struggling to decode her own disastrous marriage -- a connubial nightmare that has left her sophisticated in the messiest sense.
Each of these novels is less strictly about sex than about grief at its failure to sustain intimacy: the narrators can't let go of the fact that they can't let go. Claire Tristram's first novel, AFTER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20), begins with a similar conceit, and an intriguingly risky premise: the American widow of a famous victim of terrorism embarks on a one-day affair with an older Muslim man. She's chosen this stranger in an act of erotic pique, seeking something unclear even to her: revenge, understanding, certainly rebellion. But what initially seems like a dark comedy of sexual gamesmanship -- an exploration of the ways in which lovers objectify one another, then turn tender in the most confusing circumstances -- transforms midway into a confused pornographic nightmare, featuring a good deal of sadomasochistic anal sex and some really problematic allusions to Daniel Pearl. The central characters are deliberately cipherlike, and at first there is an appealing Mamet-like mystery to their involvement. But by the final chapters, the book is too gloomily heavy-handed about its use of sex as a metaphor, dissolving into a portentous puzzle that never quite earns its creepier subtext.
Davitt Sigerson's first novel, FAITHFUL (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95), is a more prurient alternative, funnier, dirtier and also more ridiculous -- a novel both madly irritating in its gender politics and (perhaps not by coincidence) pretty successful as flat-out erotica. But while its naughtier passages reward a bookstore scan, the book's sophistication is paper-thin. At base, it's a cautionary tale that might be subtitled ''I Married a Succubus.'' Our hero is a London stock trader named Nick, a puppyish mensch in a seemingly happy quickie marriage. But Trish, his new wife, it soon develops, is not what she seems: she's a kind of superhero of betrayal (or put another way, a lying bitch). Not long after she gets pregnant, she snags on a love triangle with her strutting ex, Joe. But whereas Stewart and Laurens are capable of making even the most selfish reversals make emotional sense, Sigerson seems unable to do the same with Trish: she swiftly shrivels from a full character into an object lesson -- along with every other woman in the book. (They can all be slotted into the categories of crazy/beautiful or dully good.)
Sigerson, a former music business executive, is an elegant writer, and many of his sexual descriptions are undeniably vivid, capturing the dreamy intensity of Nick's desire with poetic shorthand: ''She works her filthy ingenuities. Pop pop pop. The stopper bounces inside his soul and the empty ache empties again.'' But pompous analysis undercuts even the best of these descriptions: this is sex as phrenology, less real-world insight than the bragging theories of the cigar-sucking blowhards in the next booth -- as when one of Nick's friends suggests that one can marry a woman who has anal sex, but never one who actually wants it. By the final chapters, the men in Trish's life have begun reeling off increasingly outrageous theories about her: she's ''my little Martian,'' she's ''Superman as a child, nearly deranged by powers he can neither explain nor deny.'' Her ex, Joe, raves in fascinated horror: ''She wants to do all the nasty stuff that men want to do to her. She wants to. Not like other women, surrendering their dignity to prove they love a man.'' Despite its curlicues of cynicism, there's an oddly innocent belief system at the center of this book: female desire is a monstrous marvel, like a two-headed calf.
To the sadder-but-wiser women who narrate ''Making Love'' and ''In His Arms,'' Nick might not seem like the nice guy he clearly imagines himself to be. But then, ''Faithful'' isn't in it for the deep talks: it's glib and pretentious, though it occasionally hits its mark. It's a different breed from the nuanced narratives of Laurens and Stewart and, for some readers, that might be just what the beach bag ordered. Hey, even readers can have double standards.
