In Praise of Messy Lives (8 page)

After reading a sex scene in Philip Roth’s latest novel,
The Humbling
, someone I know threw the book into the trash on a subway platform. It was not exactly feminist rage that motivated her. 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.” Instead, my acquaintance threw the book away on the grounds that the scene was disgusting, dated, redundant. But why, I kept wondering, did she have to throw it out? Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its author might have hoped for? Dovetailing with this private and admittedly limited anecdote, there is a punitive, vituperative quality in the published reviews that is always revealing
of something larger in the culture, something beyond one aging writer’s failure to produce fine enough sentences. All of which is to say: How is it possible that Philip Roth’s sex scenes are still enraging us?

In the early novels of Roth and his cohort, there was in their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news, of breaking out. Throughout the sixties, with books like
An American Dream
,
Herzog
,
Couples
,
Portnoy’s Complaint
, and
Rabbit, Run
, there was a feeling that their authors were reporting from a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes—all of it had the thrill of the new, or at least of the newly discussed. When
Couples
, John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust set in a small New England town called Tarbox, came out in 1968, a
Time
cover article declared that “the sexual scenes, and the language that accompanies them, are remarkably explicit, even for this new age of total freedom of expression.”

These novelists were writing about the bedrooms of middle-class life with the thrill of the censors at their backs, with the 1960 obscenity trial over
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
fresh in their minds. They would bring their talent, their analytic insights, their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy was in the prose. These young writers—Mailer, Roth, Updike—were taking up the X-rated subject matter of John O’Hara and Henry Miller, but with a dash of modern journalism splashed in.

In Philip Roth’s phenomenally successful 1969 novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
, the Jewish hero sleeps his way into mainstream America through the narrow loins of a series of crazy harridans and accommodating lovelies. But are the sex scenes meant to be taken seriously? In
The Counterlife
, Roth’s alter ego, the writer Nathan
Zuckerman, calls himself a “sexual satirist,” and in that book and others Roth’s sex scenes do manage to be both comic and dirty at the same time: “The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.”

Roth’s explicit passages walk a fine, difficult line between darkness, humor, and lust, and somehow the male hero emerges from all the comic clauses breathless, glorified. There is in these scenes rage, revenge, and some garden-variety sexism, but they are—in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence—charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful, eloquent, and repugnant all at once. One does not have to like Roth, or Zuckerman, or Portnoy, to admire the intensely narrated spectacle of their sexual adventures. Part of the suspense of a Roth passage, the tautness, the brilliance, the bravado, in the sentences themselves, the high-wire performance of his prose, is how infuriating and ugly and vain he can be without losing his readers (and then every now and then he actually goes ahead and loses them).

In 1960, the twenty-eight-year-old Updike solidified his emerging reputation as the author of eerily beautiful stories with his novel
Rabbit, Run
, about a lanky former basketball player turned kitchen utensil salesman, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, who runs off from his family, has sex with a plump and promiscuous mistress, and comes home to a wife who has drunkenly drowned their newborn baby. A few years later, Norman Mailer told Updike he should get back to the whorehouse and stop worrying
about his prose style. But that was Updike’s unnerving gift: to be frank and aestheticizing all at once, to do poetry
and
whorehouse. In
Couples
, a graphic description of oral sex includes “the floral surfaces of her mouth.” In
Rabbit, Run
, we read of “lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between. Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva.” The hallmark of Updike’s sex scenes is the mingling of his usual brutal realism with a stepped-up rapture, a harsh scrutiny combined with prettiness. Everything is rose, milky, lilac, and then suddenly it is not.

For Rabbit, as for many Updike characters, sex offers an escape, an alternate life—a reprieve, even, in its finest moments, from mortality. In the
Time
cover story, Updike describes adultery as an “imaginative quest.” In
Marry Me
, among other books, he expands on the theme that leaving one marriage for another doesn’t resolve our deeper malaise, but he is interested in the motion, in the fantasy, in the impulse toward renewal: it is Rabbit running that he loves. As one of the characters in
Couples
puts it, adultery “is a way of giving yourself adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.”

Saul Bellow shared Updike’s interest in sexual adventuring, in a great, splashy, colorful comic-book war between men and women. Moses Herzog, he writes, “will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.” Bellow’s novels are populated with dark, voluptuous, generous, maybe foreign Renatas and Ramonas, who are mistresses; and then there are the wives, shrewish, smart, treacherous, angular. While his sex scenes are generally more gentlemanly than those of Roth et al., he manages to get across something of his tussle with these big, fleshy, larger-than-life ladies: “Ramona had not learned those erotic monkey-shines in a
manual, but in adventure, in confusion, and at times probably with a sinking heart, in brutal and often alien embraces.”

In his disordered, sprawling novels, Mailer takes a hopped-up, quasi-religious view of sex, with flights of D. H. Lawrence–inspired mysticism and a special interest in sodomy. In
An American Dream
, he describes a woman’s genitals: “It was no graveyard now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.”

Mailer’s most controversial obsession is the violence in sex, the urge toward domination in its extreme. A sampling: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” “He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her.” It is part of Mailer’s existentialism, his singular, loopy philosophy, that violence is good, natural, and healthy, and it is this in his sex scenes that provokes. As in many of Mailer’s ventures, like his famous campaign for mayor of New York, it’s not entirely clear how much he means it and how much is for fun, for the virile show.

It would be too simple to call the explicit interludes of this new literature pornographic, as pornography has one purpose: to arouse. These passages are after several things at once—sadness, titillation, beauty, fear, comedy, disappointment, aspiration. The writers were interested in showing not just the triumphs of sexual conquest, but also its loneliness, its failures of connection. In his unruly defense of sexually explicit male literature in
The Prisoner of Sex
, Mailer wrote: “He has spent his literary life exploring the watershed of sex from that uncharted side which goes by the name of lust and it is an epic work for any man.… Lust exhibits all the attributes of junk. It dominates the mind and other habits,
it appropriates loyalties, generalizes character, leaches character out, rides on the fuel of almost any emotional gas—whether hatred, affection, curiosity, even the pressures of boredom—yet it is never definable because it can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love.”

In the intervening decades, the feminists objected; the public consumed; the novelists themselves were much decorated. And then somewhat to their surprise, the old guard got old. In books like Roth’s
Exit Ghost
and Updike’s
Toward the End of Time
, they began to take up the subject of impotence in various forms. Was it possible that the no-longer-young literary gods had fallen? Roth wrote in
Zuckerman Unbound:
“Life has its own flippant ideas about how to handle serious fellows like Zuckerman. All you have to do is wait and it teaches you all there is to know about the art of mockery.”

And so we come back to the copy of
The Humbling
in the garbage can on the subway platform. The problem with the sex scenes in Philip Roth’s late work is not that they are pornographic, but that they fail as pornography. One feels that the author’s heart is not in it, that he is just going through the motions; one feels the impatient old master mapping out scenes (dildo, threesome), not writing them. The threesome in
The Humbling
has none of the quirkiness, the energy, the electric specificity, of the threesomes in
Portnoy’s Complaint
, either the one where “the Monkey” eats a banana and gets her name, or the one where they pick up an Italian prostitute who later brings her son, all dressed up in his Sunday best, to see them. In the stripped-down later novels (
Everyman
,
Exit Ghost
,
Indignation
), Roth seems to have dispensed with the detail and idiosyncratic richness of his earlier work. As he writes about old men failing at sex, and raging about
failing at sex, we see the old writer failing at writing about sex, which is, of course, a spectacle much more heartbreaking.

At this point, one might be thinking: Enter the young men, stage right. But our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s road-trip novel,
You Shall Know Our Velocity
, where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s
Indecision:
“We were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex.”

Characters in the fiction of the heirs apparent are often repelled or uncomfortable when faced with a sexual situation. In
Infinite Jest
, David Foster Wallace writes: “He had never once had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her.” With another love interest, “his shame at what she might on the other hand perceive as his slimy phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him to avoid her, as well.” Gone the familiar swagger, the straightforward artistic reveling in the sexual act itself. In Kunkel’s version: “Maybe I was going to get lucky, something which, I reminded myself, following her up the stairs to our room and giving her ass a good review, wasn’t always a piece of unmixed luck, and shouldn’t automatically be hoped for any more than feared.”

Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. Compare Kunkel’s tentative and guilt-ridden masturbation scene in
Indecision
with Roth’s famous onanistic exuberance with apple cores, liver, and candy wrappers in
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Kunkel: “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.” Roth also writes about guilt, of course, but a guilt overridden and swept away, joyously subsumed in the sheer energy of taboo smashing: “How insane whipping out my joint like that! Imagine what would have been had I been caught red-handed! Imagine if I had gone ahead.” In other words, one rarely gets the sense in Roth that he would throw away his penis if he could.

The literary possibilities of their own ambivalence are what beguile this new generation, rather than anything that takes place in the bedroom. In Michael Chabon’s
Mysteries of Pittsburgh
, a woman in a green leather miniskirt and no underwear reads aloud from
Story of O
, and the protagonist says primly, “I refuse to flog you.” In Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel
The Marriage Plot
, his protagonist revises and corrects his own fantasy to make it less exploitative: “Mitchell felt guilty for fantasizing about his friend’s girlfriend but not guilty enough to stop fantasizing. He didn’t like what this fantasy of Claire on her knees in front of him said about him, so next he imagined himself generously going down on her.”

For another exploration of guilt and ambivalence, take the following descriptions from Jonathan Franzen’s novel
The Corrections:
“As a seducer, he was hampered by ambivalence.” “He had, of course, been a lousy, anxious lover.” “He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and
pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using.” And then the entire plot of Franzen’s next novel,
Freedom
, is propelled by the extreme sensitivity of Patty’s husband, Walter, whose relevant flaw is that he is too nice and decent and progressive to be compelling in bed. When Patty met him in college he called himself a feminist, and denounced misogynistic professors and said to her before they slept together, “I know essentially nothing about sex.” In adult life, he blushes when embarrassed, and entertains thoughts like this: “Gender equality, as expressed in the pressure of Lalitha’s neat foot on the gas pedal, made him glad to be alive in the twenty-first century.” Patty marries him even though she is not sexually enthralled by him, and the events of the novel unfold from there. (And then, of course, there are writers like Jonathan Safran Foer who avoid the corruptions of adult sexuality by choosing children and virgins as their protagonists.)