A Surfeit of Sex
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing A SURFEIT OF SEX BY PEARL K. BELL t n ancient Freudian days—say, 15 years ago, before the acid-rock blare of the emancipated '60s drowned out the reticent cautions of the...
...But when Rachel succumbed, with lusty abandon, the incurably literary and oddly innocent romantic that lies beneath Charles' contemptuous Mick Jagger sneer was repelled by her "grubby" physical reality...
...Lois Gould is a slick, facile, tough-mouthed writer, and she can turn a sharp and funny wisecrack with nimble ease...
...Though he is much more than ordinarily selfish, inconsiderate, demanding, sloppy, absent-minded, disorganized, and stupid—it's a wonder this loutish doctor ever got through high school—No Name finds him infinitely desirable...
...Charles is a cunning master of obscene hyperbole and poisonous invective, who aims his murderous verbal darts with indiscriminate exuberance at "a world less nice and less intelligent than me," one filled with idiotic parents, faggoty teachers, ugly and decrepit (i.e., over 25) females, nose-picking little brothers, teasing beauties just out of reach...
...What persona would I wear...
...An old Russian proverb asks...
...S. Conrad Foxx, boy psychoanalyst, the unnamed, faceless, albeit never bodiless heroine finds herself both uncured and insolvent...
...Before their dates, he prepared brilliantly "impromptu" remarks on William Blake, and fretted over "What clothes would I wear...
...No experience is real for him until he's written it down...
...caught colds...
...In Bruce Jay Friedman's About Harry Towns (Knopf, 192 pp., $5.95), what passes for humor is little more than a coyly sniggering giggle, and it is hard to believe that Friedman's listless retreading of dumb dirty jokes comes from the author of the novel Stern and the play Scuba Duba, those gloriously funny and fiercely moving black comedies of paranoia and outrage...
...After blowing "270 hours, 9,450 dollars and possibly an even thousand Kleenex" on Dr...
...Writers & Writing A SURFEIT OF SEX BY PEARL K. BELL t n ancient Freudian days—say, 15 years ago, before the acid-rock blare of the emancipated '60s drowned out the reticent cautions of the past—novelists prided themselves on exposing the carnal secrets hidden beneath the decorous padding of social convention...
...Instead, he persuades her to spend the winter alone, writing in his freezing dump of a summer house on Long Island...
...her right dumps "emancipation" in favor of yet another fairy tale about life, love and the pursuit of a middle-class husband—the author's decidedly muddled version of a happy ending...
...although novelists, unlike professors, sometimes perish by publishing...
...Following an escape to Texas and a steamy interlude with a gorgeous Connecticut-finishing-school blonde, Harry returns to New York, only to contract a strange, undiagnosable disease that renders him, by turns, comatose and magically energetic...
...Since all girls are good, where do wicked wives come from...
...The Rachel Papers is quite short...
...its flaccid, boneless prose is a dead giveaway of Friedman's desperate lack of belief in this limp enterprise...
...Martin Amis is a 24-year-old Oxford graduate whose first novel...
...Pinocchio, briefly seduced by corruption, is a good boy after all...
...Unfortunately, The Rachel Papers, though it has some wildly funny lines, is less a work of fiction than a collage of brightly malicious cinematic takes about that hoary first-novel chestnut, young love and early sorrows...
...Lois Gould's third novel, Final Analysis (Random House, 194 pp., $5.95), has a certain coarse and bitchy vitality, but it runs Friedman's blob a close second in the sex-with-everything sweepstakes...
...o ne can gain a modicum of cynical relief from the soap-opera conversions and zonked optimism that Friedman and Gould are dishing up this spring by turning to a very young, monstrously bright, arrogantly articulate Englishman...
...If this is the best Friedman can do with his portrait of American male infantilism in the hedonistic present, it was not worth trying...
...I suspect the only reason for the book's existence is the fact that novelists no less than professors are hounded by the draconian imperative "Publish or perish...
...While Mrs...
...About Harry Towns is as feeble as its makeshift title...
...Like himself, Charles was dismayed to learn, Snow White had dirty underwear and pimples...
...Harry Towns is a vaguely successful screenwriter in his 40s who lives in permanent Temporary Separation from his wife and 12-year-old son...
...As he watches the clock tick away the minutes toward midnight and the start of his 20th birthday ("the real turning-point . . . it's the end of youth"), Charles survives the horny rite of passage by reading through his reminiscences of the recent past...
...After using up a truckload of Ajax on his slimy apartment and spilling a Niagara of tears on his cold shoulder, she still can't get him to say he loves her...
...Once installed, she starts working on a novel, and before you can say "fellatio," love conquers all—to the accompaniment of royalties, paperback rights and movie options...
...Two years later Dr...
...Charles Highway, is no slouch at telling us exactly what-he-did-and-then-she-did...
...chattered...
...In the novel no less than in life, an unvaried diet of sexual activity is like the toil of Sisyphus, a futile, interminable expense of energy that never reaches the top...
...In other words, Friedman has written a fairy tale, complete with the obligatory gratuitous and meretricious happy ending...
...These include a folder marked "Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis," bulging manila envelopes, tattered carbons, and the epic "Rachel Papers," which tell of an episode that occurred a few months earlier, while Charles was living in London, cramming for his Oxford entrance exams...
...Three recent books—two by experienced hands, one by a novice—all exhibit an obsession with the erotic that obliterates every other aspect of human experience...
...Nonetheless, it soon seems long-winged, a one-note tirade of teenage angst and absurdity that is basically more narcissistic than mocking...
...Amis' hero...
...At that time, he met a terrifyingly cool, self-assured, fetching Snow White named Rachel, and plotted an endearingly pompous campaign to get her into bed...
...invented melodramatic lies about her family...
...When his mother and father die in appallingly quick succession, Harry is momentarily thrown off his swinger's treadmill and makes another try at living with his wife and child, but it works no better the second time around...
...Foxx calls her, not professionally, and her galloping masochism lands her in bed as well as in love with this male-chauvinist dream-boat...
...But no amount of sexual acrobatics and fervently feminist one-liners about supermarkets and make-up can camouflage the gooey girl-gets-boy caramel inside the arsenic coating...
...Start writing...
...But now that the novel (along with movies, TV commercials and college dormitories) has been giddily liberated from the old repressive constraints, something curious has been happening in the world of fiction...
...He is passionately fond of his antiseptically "modernistic" apartment—a lonely aerie near the top of "a tower of steel and glass high above Manhattan"—where he indulges his expensive addictions to cocaine and women, the starlets, stewardesses, hookers, and ex-Byrn Mawr bluestockings who parade through his life in an endless string of one-night stands...
...Without a word of explanation, Friedman reports a recovery and —eureka!—Harry is a new man, mature, quietly confident, self-contained, no longer the slave of his frenetic addictions and hangups...
...If Lois Gould knows, she's certainly not telling...
...The Rachel Papers (Knopf, 228 pp., $5.95), offers a candid, groin-level view of teenage sex, circa 1970, in Swinging Britain...
...Gould's left hand feeds us hefty doses of Women's-Lib dogma (Stop cleaning...
...Moreover, its predictable variations on the hot-bed theme cannot conceal a sentimental confusion of purpose...
...Like Gwendolen Fairfax in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Charles never travels without his diary, to make sure he always has something sensational to read...
...But since he is also a precocious and totally self-absorbed intellectual, this indefatigable swordsman is more interested in what he thought, pretended, felt, and above all what he wrote in his journal about his sexual happenings, than he is in the act itself...
...said silly things...
...Whereas once writers were beguiled by symbolic substitutes for sex, today they use sex itself as a substitute for such formerly indispensable novelistic attributes as thought, feeling, character, form, style, and wit...
...Caught in a libidinous limbo, our rudderless and joyless playboy shuttlecocks from coast to coast, taking his son for a disastrous holiday to Las Vegas, and growing faintly alarmed by a hectic lifestyle that involves him with a dangerous and alien subculture of criminal violence...
...Amis' very with-it bites and snarls occasionally capture his generation's uninhibited idiom, but too many of the book's jokes are labored and unfunny...
...And it is not worth reading...
Vol. 57 • May 1974 • No. 10
