60 The New York Review
porn videos, described with alliterative
flourishes that hilariously emphasize
their unreality: “Primarily pinkly per-
sonnelled pornography... protractedly
pursuing previously private perspec-
tives of perfectly pumped penii practi-
cally pummelling professionally pruned
pudenda.” Afterward, she passes out.
All the woman’s actions are described
with minute physicality, but in an ana-
lytical language that tamps down even
the possibility of feeling, as if she is
directly restricting access to emotion.
“It’s harder to let the words into her
body now or, maybe, out,” she thinks at
one point. Something has happened—
for now, it is only hinted at—that has
set her brain at war with herself and her
impulses to remember what she wants
to forget:
Is it possible you have somehow
not heard myself speak?
To be clear then, enough of this.
Uncooperative though, it contin-
ues to maraud and assert its vague
right to be heard. Think of. Think
of. No I will not.Though the encounters in Strange
Hotel occur at intervals of years, many
of the scenes unfold in something like
real time: it takes about as long to read
the protagonist’s thoughts as it does for
the action to take place. (At one point
an entire paragraph is devoted to her
effort to compose her facial expres-
sion.) The novel’s “action” is radically
limited, confined to the space of her
hotel room or the room of the stranger
she picks up. The sex she has with
those strangers is at once central and
incidental, the encounters designed to
foreclose the possibility of attachment:The paths of people uninterested
in mess occasionally, anony-
mously, intersect, then frequently
painlessly, re- separate with neither
party suffered to lick up any scraps
or tend another’s wounds.We rarely see her during the act itself;
the focus is on the torturous aftermath,
when she berates herself for any lapse
into emotion.
It’s a striking contrast to The Lesser
Bohemians, in which sex is capable of
reducing the participants to the depths
of depravity but also of lifting them up
into the sublime. It is through sex that
the narrator and her lover create an
intimacy that journeys into love: “The
mouth on my breasts then—tickle and
strange delight of being seen—sur-
prises me, if not to everything, to some-
thing. Like first foot inveigle toward
what this could be.” The narrator’s
joy in her new experience suffuses her
language. She exclaims “haAh” in sur-
prised pleasure during oral sex. There
is comedy, as when the man (who is
also an actor), at her request, recites
the “Now is the winter of our discon-
tent” speech from Richard III while she
goes down on him. When she cheats on
him, in a miserable threesome, the act
transforms her into “a form of thing,”
no longer human. But having sex with
him awakens her to herself as well as to
him, the person she loves:I, holding on as it rises, the high
tide. Him and. live words I can’tmake out. Cracking with the. Slam.
other. Let each other. Out. Just
being together. Being so fucking
close. And I feel so much love for
him in this moment I can’t imagine
ever feeling anything else.The only orgasm in Strange Hotel is
the one the narrator gives herself (“my
hand does the strange familiar until my
eyes have grown tired of the screen”).
It is perhaps the least climactic climax
in all of literary sex—she doesn’t even
bother to set down her wine glass:
“Even buckling forward into its end,
I do not spill my wine. Have. Have it.
Lose it a little. Lose it entirely. Gone.”
Observant readers will already have
noticed the most striking thing about
the scene: it slips into the first person.
For a moment, the narrator takes pos-
session of her experience. But when she
awakens—the orgasm having served its
soporific purpose—she is comfortably
outside herself again.In her Guardian essay, McBride elabo-
rated her position on the difference be-
tween pornography and art, perhaps in
a preemptive strike against readers who
might tag her work as the former rather
than the latter. In addition to being cre-
ated intentionally to evoke arousal, she
wrote, pornography situates sex outside
of normal life, presenting it instead as
“a hermetically sealed experience bear-
ing no relation to the pasts or inner lives
of the performers/ characters, nor will
it have any consequences for their fu-
ture.” But in reality—and, she argues,
as it ought to be in literature—sex is
of the most profound significance in
the lives of human beings, a force that
determines many of our choices and
on which depends a great deal of our
happiness and our peace of mind, not
to mention (for many of us) our ability
to procreate. “The impulse towards and
away from” sex, she writes,sits at the root of enough of the cat-
aclysms that shake and shape our
lives as to warrant a far deeper de-
gree of attention than the titillating/
slightly embarrassed/deeply em-
barrassed/hygienically challenged
digression from the main event that
it’s frequently consigned to.This is plainly true. So it’s hard to
understand why sex in fiction has been
largely consigned to writers of romance
novels and erotica. Part of the reason,
of course, is the social mores that dom-
inated the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries: in Flaubert’s time, the
rocking of the carriage in which Emma
Bovary and Rodolphe consummated
their affair was a daring foray into the
risqué. But even post- sexual- revolution
writers have largely treated sex as a
byproduct of existence rather than a
mainstay of it, and the ones who have
dared to place it centrally have writ-
ten almost exclusively from a hetero-
sexual male perspective: Philip Roth,
John Updike, Nicholson Baker. More
recently, novels about homosexual
desire have delved into both the de-
praved and the redemptive aspects of
sexual obsession: André Aciman’s Call
Me by Your Name, Garth Greenwell’s
What Belongs to You and Cleanness.
But works by and about women lag be-
hind. In the decades since Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying gave us the phrase “zip-
less fuck,” only a few female writershave picked up the baton, among them
A. L. Kennedy, Mary Gaitskill, and
Jeanette Winterson.
I wonder if that’s in part because
women have been conditioned out of it.
Those of us who came of age after the
second wave of feminism—millennials
especially—likely had it drilled into us
by both our mothers and our fathers
that our worth as human beings doesn’t
depend on our physical attractiveness
or our ability to find a romantic partner.
We see sexual obsession as a neurosis
to be ashamed of and to overcome, not
a state in which to linger joyously or—
necessarily—a transit to love. “From
September last year, I did nothing else
but wait for a man,” the French nov-
elist Annie Ernaux writes in Simple
Passion, her fictionalized memoir of
an all- consuming affair with a married
lover. The statement draws its power
from the way it upends our expecta-
tions: How could a sophisticated, ma-
ture, accomplished woman like Ernaux
allow herself to be reduced to such
monomaniacal longing? In The Lesser
Bohemians, too, all other aspects of the
narrator’s life—her friends, her family,
the plays she studies and performs—
are of secondary importance to her re-
lationship. It’s easy to sympathize with
the roommate who tells her, when she’s
moping over one of many lovers’ quar-
rels, to forget about him.
But a person who is deep in the thick
of a love affair cannot see beyond it.
More than that, the affair becomes the
engine that gives life meaning. The nar-
rator of The Lesser Bohemians and her
lover metaphorically restore each other
to life: the novel does not use their
names until they declare their love, as
if love itself were naming them. The
situation in Strange Hotel is the heart-
breaking reverse: a woman who has put
sex into a box and shut the lid, open-
ing it only in accordance with carefully
set rules, because she exists—it cannot
be called “living”—in fear of its power
to devastate her. It’s a pathology for
which she earns the reader’s pity. The
mounting tension of the novel consists
in whether she will get past it and allow
herself again to enter a state of vulner-
ability, “having life peeled of its skin.”
In Ulysses, Bloom says that love—
“the opposite of hatred”—is “really
life.” McBride riffs on this in The
Lesser Bohemians during one of those
lovers’ quarrels: “The other side of love
we’ve arrived at. Not hate. I see it now,
and so clearly tonight, that the opposite
of love is despair.” In Strange Hotel,
in which writing about sex becomes a
way of expressing both intimacy and
its absence, the opposite of love might
be grief, despair’s close cousin, and the
novel’s true story is the journey from
the bottom of that grief back to love.
Recalling the “shattering” impact
of her first encounter with heterosex-
ual sex, Ernaux writes, “It occurred
to me that writing should also aim for
that—the impression conveyed by sex-
ual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety
and stupefaction, a suspension of moral
judgment.” McBride’s characters use
sex as a weapon, as a form of power, as
an instrument to bring about intimacy,
as an avoidance technique. If the reader
might sometimes wonder at its central-
ity in their lives—what about the value
of autonomy, after all?—that primacy
is precisely McBride’s point. For her
characters and for her, sex is always a
thing to grapple with and to submit to,
to marvel at and to honor. Qnew in paperback
BOB DYLAN:
HOW THE SONGS WORK
by Timothy Hampton“This is an essential Dylan book
and unlike any other. Hampton
left me with a deeper appreci-
ation of Dylan’s uniqueness...
his lyrical and poetic brilliance,
his many voices.”
— DEAN WAREHAM, AUTHOR OF
BLACK POSTCARDSDISSIMILAR SIMILITUDES:
DEVOTIONAL OBJECTS
IN LATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE
by Caroline Walker Bynum“Dissimilar Similitudes glides
through history and iconog-
raphy...Its probing essays
are original, revisionist inter-
pretations that illuminate
avenues for further study.”
— RACHEL JAGARESKI,
FOREWORD REVIEWSDISTRIBUTED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS / ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORGFA L L 2020