#Amreading Kureshi, Dermansky,
and Nguyen. Am pondering sex in novels.
I just finished reading
Kureshi’s The Nothing. The
protagonist sits on his wife’s face. Or else, he reams out her arsehole. My
sense of smell would not allow me to participate in either scene, and I would
certainly not get off on it. Maybe the wife didn’t either – Kureshi doesn’t say
if she did. Perhaps she (that is, the woman he imagined) was a masochist and in
need of degradation, and those acts had nothing to do with sexual gratification.
Now I’m reading Dermansky’s The Red Car, and her protagonist provides
blow jobs and does sixty-nine, on the beach, on a couch, in the backseat of a
car, and in some bushes in a park. Maybe that didn’t have anything to do with
sexual gratification either. The author describes it as being an essential
effort, like trying to do well on SATs.
Doesn’t anyone have sex for
pleasure anymore? Or because they are attracted to their partner? No, that
question is incidental.
“Please don’t break up with me,” he said. “I need you.”
And, according to Dermansky, she
obliged and didn’t.
I wonder if Kureshi’s
protagonist would have gotten off his wife’s face if he had asked him nicely.
But really, I think Viet
Thanh Nguyen got it right: Dating in America isn’t about sex. It’s business, he
says in The Sympathizer. “A male and
a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially
profitable business venture.” It’s about investment and gain, whereas old-fashioned
romantics see it as courting loss.
