too many Daves

Consider averting your glance. For reasons that are strictly legitimate, I’m about to quote a passage from a novel that includes blunt sexual terminology. There will be crass synonyms. A synonym, for example, for the body part that starts with a P and ends with an ENIS. So if you’d rather avoid that, please stop reading.

Meaghan O’Connell’s blogged denunciation of a piece in the New York Times Book Review prompted me to read the piece itself. It’s called “The Naked and the Conflicted.” Someone named Katie Roiphe wrote it. She teaches at NYU.

Roiphe lost me almost immediately, lost me in one of the more alienating ways that a writer can lose a reader: by invoking a “We” to which a decent percentage of readers will not belong. To quote from Roiphe’s second paragraph …

We have internalized the feminist critique pioneered by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics” so completely that, as one of my students put it, “we can do the math ourselves.”

Huh?

No, I should write more than that. “Huh?” is dismissive. What’s more, “Huh?” could mean so many things. So let me specify. I was permitted to depart Berkeley with a B.A. without ever hearing the name Kate Millett. So I have not “internalized” Millett’s critique “so completely” that I can do the math myself. Perhaps this just makes me ignorant. If so, there are gracious ways to lift a reader out of ignorance. I wish Roiphe had lifted.

Despite my ignorance of Kate Millett, I managed to understand Roiphe’s essay. I think so, at least. The piece comes with a handy visual aid for the benefit of dullards. The chart contrasts the sex scenes of four old male writers (not all of whom are still alive) with four from the new generation of male writers (not all of whom are still alive). The old guys — Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow — apparently gave us sex scenes that triggered the words “explicitly” and “titillation” and “satirical” and “guilt” and “fear” and “quasi religious” and “rage” and “disgusting” and “comedy” and “disappointment.” The new guys — Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers — apparently have given us sex scenes that trigger the words “cool” and “innocence” and “self-conscious” and “ambivalence” and “refusal” and “childlike” and “trepidation.”

Roiphe’s harvest from the new generation involves, among other things, quoting from Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh — a novel whose newness can best be assessed by noting that it was published in 1988. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is old enough to vote. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is old enough to buy liquor in all 50 states. So The Mysteries of Pittsburgh seems problematic as a specimen of the work of what Roiphe calls the “new batch of young or youngish male novelists.”

I won’t pursue this point further. It would be impolite to ask Michael Chabon his age. Same with Franzen and Eggers. And Wallace, well, yes, let’s get off this topic.

For me, the most natural questions provoked by Roiphe’s compare-and-contrast are: Might Roiphe have missed someone? Might there be “young or youngish male novelists” who are writing sex scenes that evoke the explicitness, titillation, guilt, comedy, and disappointment that supposedly is characteristic of the old guys? Might it be a silly proposition these days to write titillating sex scenes for the consumption of a readership that has 24/7 access to Internet porn?

It’s late at night and I’m not going to try to answer those questions. Let’s just pretend they’re all rhetorical and move on purposefully toward a quote. This is the quote I warned you about. It’s still not too late to look away. The quote is a passage from Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and I’m quoting it because it hammered me when I first came across it — hammered me with its bluntness, with its simultaneous vulgarity and restraint, with the way it conveyed a sad, personal truth of life which is hard to talk about and too easy to fall into experiencing. Here’s what O’Neill wrote in his far-from-obscure 2008 novel:

Over the following weeks, our last as a family in New York, we had sex with a frequency that brought back our first year together, in London. This time round, however, we went about it with strangeness and no kissing, handling and licking and sucking and fucking with dispassion the series of cunts, dicks, assholes, and tits that assembled itself out of our successive yet miserably several encounters. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

Whatever those sentences amount to, whether or not they hit you or Katie Roiphe or Kate Millett with the same force that they hit me, I hope we can all agree that they have very little in common with a Dave Eggers sex sentence in which, as Roiphe complains, ”the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there.”

I feel as if Roiphe and the Times have wasted my time with “successive yet miserably several” ideas that, in the end, climb on top of me and just lie there.