Explicit novel manages to side-step porn while teasing intellect

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What is it about sex that makes even the best writers fall prey to silly euphemisms for genitalia or describe the sensual in overly-clinical terms? Or causes them to make likable characters suddenly seem creepy when we see how they behave in bed? Is it possible that sex can only be depicted artistically in the very abstract and in pornography as the hyper-realistic?

 

These questions now seem passé in the wake of trouble-making writer Francis Levy’s debut novel, Erotomania. In it, Francis Levy manages to do what seemed previously impossible: create a focused, concise—and believe it or not, literary-- novel concerned specifically and precisely with detailing the act of physical love. With page after page of ramming and orifices and bodily fluids, Erotomania is not a story for the easily offended. But neither is it a wack-off tool for horny bibliophiles. Rather, Levy has created here a masterful fable about obsession, consumption, and the inability of the human animal to be sated. Led by its throbbing, marauding dick, Erotomania follows with its heart. Levy’s story of an anonymous encounter that becomes an obsession, then a relationship, then a co-dependent downward spiral,is in turns funny, tragic, insightful, and warm.

 

When we meet our hero, James Moran, he’s hot off the coitus. He doesn’t know his partner’s name and he can’t even remember what her face looks like. Whenever they meet in the neighborhood they head straight to her apartment to bang like maniacs before her boyfriend gets home. They are but physical tools to each other; nothing beyond sex is desired, nothing else is offered. But James’ obsession begets a realization: Their mutual physical need for each other is a relationship in and of itself and they might as well partner up for real. Now that his other animal half has a name—Monica—the two jettison the boyfriend and set up a lifestyle that consists of ordering in Chinese food and screwing with such abandon that their overflowing waterbed nearly destroys the foundation of their apartment building. So they move to a house in an industrial part of town that was built as a bunker. And they find a Chinese food deliveryman who is happy to travel out of his way for the privilege of masturbating at their window as he waits for them to finally disengage and answer the door. And the only restaurant Monica and James go to is a hilarious gay hangout called “The Golden Cock” where the dining room is refined haute cuisine and the restroom is something out of “Caligula”.

 

Just as the reader believes this relationship will never evolve, Monica and James undertake couples’ counseling with a therapist who suggests sublimating some of that erotic energy into something else; say, art appreciation. This leads to a period where Monica consumes modernist art exhibits with the same lusty fervor and the two of them are coupling on the floor of museums. Eventually, the obsession changes to food and television and the two of them become obese and sedentary with the same drive that they once put toward feeding their sexual appetites.

 

Erotomania would have been noteworthy for the brilliant and outrageous way it usurps explicit sex writing away from pornography and into the realm of art where it can be deconstructed and pondered over. But Levy goes beyond merely executing that clever trick when he moves the narrative into other forms of obsession. The questions he raises about the ways humans feed their bodies and their souls stay with the reader long after the ringing of the bang-bang bell has faded.

 

For more information, visit Levy's publisher, Two Dollar Radio:www.twodollarradio.com/virtualcatalog2.htm