Monday, August 8, 2011

From the 'Books I'll Never Read' Department

Methinks I'll forego this one:
[Nicholson] Baker’s new novel, “House of Holes,” which comes out this month, has the apt subtitle “A Book of Raunch” and is dirtier than “Vox” and “The Fermata” combined. It’s a series of loosely linked vignettes set in a sexual theme park where the attractions include Masturboats; the Porndecahedron, a 12-screen planetarium showing nonstop blue movies; and the Velvet Room, where the Russian composers Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov use their genitals to give foot massages. One visitor to the House of Holes temporarily surrenders his right arm in exchange for a larger penis, while the arm enjoys a happy sex life of its own. Another voluntarily submits to head detachment and becomes a walking pair of gonads. The book coins dozens of new terms for the male member, like “thundertube,” “seedstick” and the “Malcolm Gladwell,” and near the end there is a sort of Joycean explosion, an “Atlas-shrug shudderation of arrival” that makes a young woman named Shandee “shiver her way through the seven, eight, nine, twelve seconds of worldwide interplanetary flux of orgasmic strobing happy unmatched tired coughing ebbing thrilled spent ecstasy.
Er, if you say so, Nick.

Update: In days gone by, the acclaimed pornographer imagined offing an unpopular president.

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