Nicholson Baker

"House of Holes" doesn't come close to being a must-read, but it is fun, occasionally inventive smut with a literary slant. It's been said that pornography is nothing but a fantasy of universal consent, and Nicholson leans into the fantasy aspect here, describing a world of semi-enchanted bodily fluids, fantastical sexual technologies, and consequence-free intercourse that doesn't have a lot to do with the world that we actually bump and grind in. Some of these stories -- such as the one that describes how a woman who's tired of being judged for her appearance finds satisfaction with a man whose head has been temporarily removed -- are both pleasingly ingenious and seem to be getting a larger truth about how real people relate to each other. Baker's also smart enough to realize that while most of us, sensibly enough, get off on release, some of us are turned on by restraint: this particular sexual paradise features a subgroup of men who make it a point not to gratify themselves. But those are the better stories in this collection. Some of the others are just, well, porn that's been effectively workshopped.

I'm a dude myself, but I thought that the author wrote sex from the female perspective tolerably well, although "House of Holes" is, in the final analysis, straighter and more forthrightly cis that it necessarily needs to be. Genitals -- both male and female -- sometimes appear in less-than-expected places, but the essential duality of man and women doesn't come in for much questioning. This isn't a book for people who get off on ambiguity, or, for that matter, subtlety. The sort of ridiculous sex talk that's indelibly associated with letters to Penthouse is all over this collection, and it's good fun to see it in a relatively literary environment. There are so many ridiculous, gross, and just plain strange terms for genitalia here that I would lay money on the fact that the author had been saving them up in some notebook or other for years. In true pornographic form, he shows no embarrassment at all about deploying them here. Everything about "House of Holes", in fact, suggests an author on a lark. I, like just about everyone in "House of Holes," am more than willing to indulge him, even if he gets a bit cheesy on occasion. Authors will have thier fun.… (meer)