Oh what an edgy, edgy fellow he is to be sure
John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel.
Yawn?
Mr Mybug has risen from the dead yet again, and zombie-Mybug has written a novel. There was a time when the great American male novelists took delight in writing about sex. Rebelling against a literary tradition that perhaps underestimated how much space animal urges take up in the male brain, many big hitters of the 20th century, like Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, dived into the muck with the zeal of Rabelais or Cleland.
Have they read Cleland? or indeed Rabelais?
We note that the work doesn't even have the courage of its own alleged taboo-smashing, by making sure that a female character is technically of age when she actually has sex (so that's okay then...), and the article concludes by implying that there's something curiously prissy, as well as prurient, about it: 'Sounding like someone who still wants to show his face in polite society'. Henry Miller he is not, right?
Maybe it's not that 41 publishers are running too scared of the dreaded Political Correctness etc, but that it's just Not That Great A Novel? I don't really think that implying that there is a Dread Feminisation of the Literary Marketplace works as an argument.
Surely 'What else have I to stir me to song' except 'lust and rage' is something of an admission of a rather narrow range? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2429670.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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