Already blazed through Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Lolita, and maybe even Justine? Looking for something a little less SparkNote, but deeper than what Heather Graham or Johanna Lindsey can provide? Don't fret: four unsung books of passion await you. All of the novels below seek to explore humanity by confronting sexual angst and inhibitions head-on and without protection, rather than leaving them frustratingly untouched — something that I greatly appreciated at the age of sensual frustration, cataclysmic relationship detonations, and simple despondent longing for a connection more deeply seeded in our souls than… well, you get the picture.

Each of these authors provides a distinctly individual, communicative style, ranging from the hilariously amusing to the psychedelically surrealistic to the emaciatingly cathartic. The novels employ storytelling methods that illuminate the sexual struggles of their characters and the societal struggles that often induced said tension in the first place, and draw on a broad range of experience ranging from the wistful to the comical: the nigh-manic sex-infused diatribe of a New Jersey Jew, for one, or a mother’s quiet reflection of the emotional disjunction between her and her myriad former lovers. These are the texts you can flip through when you get bored with [insert ethnic, cultural, and social bonding group of your choice] meetings, sexually ungratifying hook-ups, or being one of the 70 percent of Harvard students that only had 1-4 drinks the last time they partied.


Portnoy’s Complaint
By Philip Roth

This one is laugh-out-loud funny, unless you are a feminist. The hero, Alex Portnoy, has arrived on his much-needed psychiatrist’s couch in 1966; the subsequent flood of emotions fuels a three-hundred-page diatribe. Alex’s frighteningly overbearing parents hailed him as their One True Hope, yet criticized him on everything down to the angle at which he holds his toothbrush when brushing his teeth; subsequently, they have ruined his life by engendering a series of neurotic social quirks and underlying psychological blocks that have made his dating life a nightmare. Now, I am sure that none of those reading this had over-protective, minutiae-managing parents. For the uninitiated, they seem to have a tendency to raise their children with a range of sociopathic defects and inabilities, perfect for maintaining the type of social life that will allow their children to get into a fine, selective institution like this one. (This is likely under the pretext that their child will “contribute to the academic community” with this antisocial flair, setting themselves apart as an individual who is different from the rest of his or her distinctly well-adjusted classmates.)

At any rate, the novel deals with the trials and tribulations of growing up in a “normal” Jewish family in (slightly) suburban New Jersey in the ’40s and ’50s, complete with its own post-Victorian repressions (and sexual perversions, to boot). The now-historical setting and profuse Yiddish vocabulary do not detract from the author’s acerbic wit; his honest but vulgar humor charts the life of the human male from puberty to professionalism. This chart comes complete with an Oedipal complex, sexual frustration, and at one point, a desire to attempt intercourse with any inanimate object that could possibly feel like a vagina.

True to its historical setting, the book is anything but PC. Portnoy comments on his often perverse and uncomfortably weird sexual encounters with his girlfriends while referring to them only by nicknames such as “the Pilgrim” and “Monkey.” The distinct objectification of Portnoy’s female companions is apparent throughout the novel, but this faithfulness to the setting is woven in such a way as to add to the complexity of the narrative (rather than becoming glaringly out of place.)

Bottom Line:
You will probably like this book if you are:
- Male
You may want to reconsider if you:
- Wear a button that says “I don’t go to final clubs”
- Are squeamish (no detail of any masturbation method is spared)

The Secret of Hurricanes
By Theresa Williams

Frustrated you can’t find a deeper connection with your lovers? Feel like there is a spiritual block between your relationships and true intimacy? Yeah, me too. Theresa Williams, a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, is triumphant in her first novel, combining the supreme wordplay of a poet with her own personal heartaches to infuse a spirit of truth into a novel that’s as much about disjointed souls as unified bodies.

Pearl is the pariah of Waterville, North Carolina, hiding from the scorn of her neighbors in the secluded trailer where she bides her time until her baby will be born. As if being a forty-five-year-old, unmarried pregnant woman in the South were not enough, Pearl has also had a lifetime of pain and rejection as her daily routine, stemming from a father who was highly vocal about his regret over ever having a daughter and a long string of unsuccessful relationships, all of which begged for something more. As Pearl recounts the story of her love life to her as yet unborn daughter (she is convinced it is a girl), one acquires a sense of how familial neglect, social ostracism, and Pentecostal religious tension have influenced both her personal and her sexual life, which in this case have a high degree of separation.

Likewise, one cannot overstate the importance of Theresa Williams’s narrative voice over the course of the story. By the end of the novel, you feel as though through flipping the pages you have opened a window to the author’s soul, illuminating in feelings rather than words what it is like to experience that depressing emotional wall between oneself and one’s lover. Although she deals with much of the same angst and sexual aggravation as Roth, Williams takes a dramatically different approach to resolution. While Portnoy is perfect for musing about your messed-up life, Hurricanes will serve to remind you just how miserable the search for a soul mate can be.

Bottom Line:
You will probably like this book if you are:
- Recently broken up from a dysfunctional relationship
- Habitually wistful
You may want to reconsider if you are:
- A guy who actually goes to final clubs

Child of Fortune
By Norman Spinrad

Haven’t done LSD in a while? Here’s an alternative: Child of Fortune is a surrealistic ride through a girl’s coming of age in a dystopian future. It is beautiful in every regard. It's difficult to keep my personal preference for this book over the others from showing, so I just won’t fight it. To prove that I am not the only one who enjoyed it, I offer one of the few opinions of the Associated Press with which I cannot disagree: “The book can be succinctly described as “Alice in Wonderland meets Timothy Leary as they explore the Kama Sutra at Finnegan’s Wake.” That just about says it.

Stream-of-consciousness writing style in a practically psychedelic future world during the time of “Humanity’s Second Spacefaring Age” would seem to inherently distance the plot from the reader, but in a beautiful bit of Vonnegutian storytelling and characterization, it doesn’t. Of the three works here, Child is the only one in which the characters truly drive the outside action, oddly giving it the most traditional (if it can be given that name) story arc while maintaining the most otherworldly setting.

Though the book is nearly five hundred pages, you'll fly through it if you have any love for science fiction. The story is at once sober epic of exploration and coming-of-age, and a comedic tale of youth and interstellar travel. The sexual aspect is prominent, but rather than defining the work, it is incorporated smoothly into an expression of society as a whole (what a concept!). The work combines mind-bending locales (such as a planet with only a local reality or another whose flora develops a symbiotic relationship with its human inhabitants) with equally foreign conceptions of social graces, human interactions, and the meaning of life. Compared in scope to A Clockwork Orange, the story plays like a hallucination that lasts just long enough to leave you reeling from a redefinition of sex, love, and society.

Bottom Line:
If you liked Brave New World even a little bit, you should get this book. And if you haven’t read Brave New World? Well, you should probably get on that.

Bonus Pick: The Real Animal House
By Chris Miller

A member of the Alpha Delta Phi at Dartmouth in the mid ’60s, Chris Miller has composed a series of generally true stories about the fraternity that inspired the movie Animal House. Definitely not for the faint of heart, but definitely worth a look if you want to know just how depraved the Big Green was during the time of peace, love, and flower power. Happy reading!


Jeffrey Blair ’09 (jblair@fas) is as much about disjointed souls as unified bodies.



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