Nic Kelman's girls feels like a drug-fueled sex party's bleak days-long hangover.
Maybe so, but it also created The Swimming-Pool Library, an immensely sexy gay novel every straight man owes it to himself to read. It's been said that repressing homosexuals created Proust, whereas liberating them created Cabaret.
When one of William's lovers gets undressed, Hollinghurst takes the time to notice "the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband." Hollinghurst is a tender and lyrically fussy writer, which means his sex scenes can be astonishingly sad and mournful. They meet while seeking out anonymous sex at a public restroom in London, during which Charles has heart trouble and William saves him. William and Charles need each other emotionally and intellectually but not sexually. Hollinghurst's story is primarily concerned with two men: William, who is pretty and young and brilliant, and Charles, who is old and rich and desperate. The Swimming-Pool Library is like a gelateria of erotic variability: interracial, intergenerational, rough, soft, quickies, hardies, scaries, get-the-fuck-off-me's-The Swimming-Pool Library goes everywhere, sexually speaking, provided no women dwell there. If anything, I find it conceptually overwhelming. As a non-gay man, I don't find the level of homosexual sex contained in the book disgusting. James has managed in 1,600 pages.Īlan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library was once described by none other than Nicholson Baker as containing an "initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex" yet Baker also ranked it high among the finest first novels he'd ever read. The best passage in the book describes the difference between male and female urine discharge, the latter falling from between a woman's legs "confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan." There is more loving, observant detail in this passage than E. It helps that Baker is among our greatest living prose stylists, able to describe a time-frozen woman's breast as a "hot heavy ostrich egg" and the female anus as "discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge." Baker is particularly good on ejaculation, coming up with so many ways to describe the grand event ("I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm" "I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood") that he might well be the Picasso of come. (A fermata is, technically speaking, a pause in a piece of music.) In another writer's hands, this planet-stilling conceit might make for some nifty hunk of Inception-like sci-fi, but Baker uses it to explore the inner terrain of imagination, male desire, and loneliness, for what Arno likes to do while in the Fold is take women's clothes off, touch them a little, and masturbate.
Its narrator, Arno Strine, has been blessed with the ability to freeze time, producing what he calls "the Fold," through which he alone is free to move and loiter. Nicholson Baker's The Fermata is probably the most good-natured sexy novel of our time, despite its having one of the most potentially sinister and disturbing setups imaginable. The best way to encourage reading, especially in these digital times, is to remind young people how sexually diabolical good writing can be. Crotches can have acne? Good to know! If I ever have children of my own, I'll be planting the dirtiest Updike novels I can find in all my home's high-traffic areas. Soon after I finished Couples, I read another Updike novel, Rabbit Is Rich (1981):"To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No one, I realized with a thrill,has any idea what's actually in this thing. So I'd sit there before class, in Catholic school, reading Couples, which is filled with scenes involving "fumbly dripping genitals," astonished that my teacher wasn't rushing over to pull the book from my hands and douse me with a fire extinguisher. For them, "John Updike" wasn't a name so much as a signifier of literary urbanity. A few adults in my orbit-teachers, parents, friends of parents-took note. When I was in the sixth grade, I got my hands on a hardcover copy of John Updike's Couples.