The Naked and the Conflicted (New York Times)
A few weeks back, I posted about writing sex and violence. Sex is a topic I've been chewing on a lot lately. I find New York American publishing quite prudish these days.
Recently in the New York Times book section, Katie Roiphe drew a line in the sand between how a previous generation of male writers (Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller) and the male writers of more recent vintage (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen) write sex. The upshot of the argument seems to be that contemporary male writers have lost the drive and the spark, wallowing in a post-feminist anxiety rather than confronting rage and desire:
The younger writers are so self- conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus”).
I, like Roiphe, am interesting in finding more sex -- more raw, masterfully written sex -- in mainstream and literary American books. I do wonder, however, why a writer like Steve Almond isn't mentioned in the article. He strikes me as part of this generation denounced as "boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of 'I was warm and wanted her to be warm,' or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world." His work would upset the thesis. And similar other straight male writers can be found, I'm sure.
I also worry about the quotes chosen for Roiphe's article. They are the one liners that capture our attention with blatant sexual mechanics, rather than the dramatic scenes that force us to confront something possibly eerie or forceful or contradictory within the characters or within ourselves about desire and the acts of sex. The quotes, in other words, don't do much for me, and without good examples, it's hard for me to nod along with Roiphe. I'm betting that this flaw has much to do with the limitations imposed upon the article by the New York Times. How often do such articles include lengthy quotations? Rarely. The reader's attention, you see, might be lost. Or the jaunty voice might be compromised. My point is that even here, in an article about sex in male fiction, sex is pretty flaccid. This makes me ask why the writer attacks only today's writers, rather than including an attack on the business of writing itself, such as the constraints put upon writers by news sources or by New York publishers afraid of pissing off their public with something too lewd and scary.
Update: Jump over to Conversational Reading to get Scott Esposito's take on Roiphe's essay.
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