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(Yes, Virgina. There is a sexblog.)
About

June 03,

A Whole Lotta Words About Sex
added: 2003-06-03 14:49:10 | link | discuss this entry

Part One
The Literary Beast With Two Backs

Finally. Thanks to Dean Kuipers, people who love books will be talking about sex. As a writer of smart smut, I've been waiting a long time for the dialogue to begin, but as I read Kuipers' article, it became obvious that he wants sex to deliver literary fiction from its current state of stagnation and carry it back to its former heights. So when he asked, "In a world where trash is king, will readers accept the real deal?" I had to chuckled.

Because, in a word, the answer's no. They won't.

I don't say that because my erotic storytelling is routinely ignored by the mainstream publishing industry or because I haven't yet written that cross-over work that'll deliver me from the sex writer's ghetto. I say that as a dedicated reader of all kinds of sex fiction and as an observer of consumer book habits.

However celebrated literary fiction is within the ranks of critics, bibliophiles, and the publishing industry, it has little value to today's American reader. Why? Because personal dysfunction, the foundation of literary fiction's drama, no longer reflects a deep American secret. Decades ago, when one's personal drama was an isolating experience, when people didn't talk about "those things," literary fiction had the power to reveal to us a shared sphere of misery. It could deliver us because it could whisper that it knew our secrets and that we weren't alone. It lifted the veil of secrecy.

Then mass marketing came along and shredded the veil.

Thanks to forty years of soap operas and a near-decade Jerry Springer, literary fiction can no longer reveal our secrets to us because everything has become public knowledge. Your average John Cheever story lacks impact because it must compete with the daily, mass consumption of real human drama. It can't compete with the failures of British royals and the paternity tests among American trailer trash.

The shift has been seismic, I've found. The last time I went to a literary conference, a collective groan went up in class when one of the instructors informed us that literary fiction was all about exploring human dysfunction. Frankly, if fledging writers don't want to hear this, it is any wonder that the reading public -- what little of it remains, given our vast entertainment choices -- don't as well?

At that same conference, people (mostly women) grilled me for advice when I admitted I wrote sexually explicit fiction. They knew their works lacked a certain authenticity because fictionalized sex on the page was more difficult for them to achieve than real life sex between the sheets. If there isn't enough literary sex out there to suit Mr. Kuipers, it's because the courage to write it has yet to completely emerge.

Despite my experiences, I am not about to claim that literary fiction is dying. I buy it and I read it more faithfully than I consume genre fiction. Steve Almond's on my bookshelf (hardcover, signed). So's all of Amy Bloom's and Mary Gaitskill's works. And I'll gladly tell the literary world it needs to notice Tim Parrish. My summer reading will include Coover's Adventures of Lucky Pierre : Raw Footage, Monique Truong's Book of Salt, and Vicente Munoz Puelles' The Arch of Desire -- the very breadth of work Mr. Kuipers discussed. But when I savored Rikki Ducornet's The Fan-Maker's Inquisition under a shady tree at our public pool the same summer Bridget Jones's Diary came out in paperback, let me tell you: I didn't spot any kindred spirits clutching Ducornet books while our kids swam. And we all know what climbed the bestseller's list than year.

Literary fiction isn't dying. It still transcends genre fiction in its intelligence and it will always have a remarkable place among books. However, it no longer commands the public force of attention that it once did and it has increasingly become a niche entity. Increasingly, it is the midlist.

No, the public won't consume literary fiction and sex won't deliver literary fiction from its falling stature, no matter how profound and powerful it strives to be. The masses simply aren't interested. Reading is a leisure time activity and leisure means pleasure.

And pleasure reading takes on a meaning all its own with erotic fiction. And that's Part Two, tomorrow.