A short review of mine can be found in this week’s The Big Issue. An edited version of the review is below.
The book? House of Holes, by Nicholson Baker. This book has received a flurry of press recently, primarily because it’s lewder than a room full of 16-year-olds hand-picked by Larry Clark, and unashamedly so.
My verdict? It’s completely unsexy, occasionally funny, and if nothing else, it’s unconventional and new.
A note: all the wordplay and puns and clichés in the review are intentional, even the ones I didn’t write on purpose.
REVIEW STARTS NOW:
Do not for one second be mistaken: this cockamamie, slapstick, oddball book is about one thing, and one thing only: bonking. Bonking, in all its mutations (heterosexual only however, which should be and is a big sticking point) is the sole focus here. Sex sex sex. Screwy, slurpy, lickerish sex. Yes, the occasional literary line limply pokes through, but for the most part poetics have been swapped for penises meeting pussies.
Although it seems that Nichsolson may fancy himself a present-day Bataille or de Sade, aiming at your gooey erotic centre, for the most part the relentless onslaught of nooky in House of Holes is less titillating, and more just a case of an agile wordsmith dickering around with smutty — albeit inventive — vernacular. In saying this, if downright surreal and silly sex gives you the tingles, then this book is for you. If you prefer sex to be a joke rather than an act of either carnality and/or sentiment, then there are plenty of suckers in this book to wet your whistle. It’s sopping wet: slathered on every page are blow-by-blow descriptions. If this sort of explicit specificity ticks your box, then you will get lots of bang for your buck.
In the style of a dog, Baker’s erotica grabs on and refuses to stop. So at least it’s relentless. Also, it is sometimes pretty funny in an unflinchingly risqué and slightly discomfiting way. At the end of the day, whether you love or loathe this book, it’s going to leave you in the same state as one of his characters: “bouncing up and down like a horse thief”.
