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The writer of any literary book about sex has a problem right off the bat. He — in the case of the following books, all writers are male — has immediately set the reader up to expect dirty parts, with which the linguistic feats in between must wimpily compete. Should the author simply wish to comment on sexual mores without stirring anyone's loins, he faces an uphill battle; he has produced a cookbook without any recipes.

It seems churlish, then, to announce that Robert Olen Butler's latest book, Intercourse, is anything but sexy. Its title and cover — entwined limbs, a hand aimed straight at a buttock — are enough to prevent anyone from thumbing through it on the bus, so you'd figure on some kind of upside. There isn't one. Intercourse opens a speculative window on the thoughts of 50 famous couples in the middle of sex, and, while that's a fairly nifty idea, the brief encounters never get much hotter than the one between George and Laura Bush. (Laura thinks about decorating, George about the tar on his boots. It may not be true, but it's the best PR they've had in years.)

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Right now, Olen Butler may be best known as the author of a weird, widely circulated e-mail in which he complained about being dumped by his girlfriend in favour of Ted Turner. The man is no hack, however; he also has a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, though he doesn't exactly seem to be angling for another. I mean, a rooster getting his freak on with a chicken? Santa Claus and an elf?

Some of the historical couplings are mildly funny, in a ghastly way. Olen Butler makes no real attempt to get inside people's heads, but still, a little verisimilitude couldn't have hurt. I know, for example, that Richard Nixon was probably not much of a player, but can one really imagine him erotically torpedoed by Pat "in her Republican cloth coat," holding poor Checkers aloft? And did Joe McCarthy really obsess about reds under the bed all the time?

A voyeuristic dog also appears in Napoleon's boudoir as he goes at it with Josephine. Quoth the hound: "Another itchy begins down in my snozzle and I wonder if I need to do some licking there." I think you have the idea, but trust me, it gets worse. Good taste prevents me from recounting the supposed musings of Adolf Hitler, or an American slave named Hannah; these are particularly incongruous in a book as ridiculously flossy as this one. Better to stick with the boffage between Mary Todd Lincoln (whose craziness in bed, it is hinted, may have made up for her craziness while clothed) and her husband, Abe, a game and stolid woodsman: "she rail-split my log a long time ago," he groans.

Twenty-one years ago, anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin wrote quite a different book called Intercourse. One is reminded of this by the surprising mention of Ms. D in Chuck Palahniuk's new, um, novel, the provocatively titled Snuff. Now, this is the first time I have ever dipped into Palahniuk's tender and heartwarming oeuvre. His reputation precedes; suffice to say that if he were a creative-writing student today, his teacher would notify the dean, and not in a good way. He's best known for Fight Club, later made into a movie starring the pre-humanitarian Brad Pitt, in which men regularly gather to beat each other senseless. He's also known for Guts, a story about "masturbation accidents," which has so far caused scores of listeners to faint at public readings.

His new novel sees 600 men lining up for the chance to have on-camera sex with Cassie Wright, an aging and suicidal porn star, in a giant gang-bang which everyone is sure will kill her (the aim is, no kidding, a vaginal embolism). We listen in on several of these men as they wait their turn, throwing back Viagra as they would Jelly Tots. There is "Mr. 600," a silverback porn vet himself; "Mr. 72," who thinks he's Cassie's son; and "Mr. 137," a former television detective fallen on hard times.

I guess you could credit Palahniuk with a certain talent for mise en scène, since gang-bang movies have in fact been made (though 600 men is, if you'll pardon the pun, stretching it), and the poor saps probably line up for duty in just this way, slathering bronzer on themselves, bragging about their failures and chasing their "wood pills" with powdered doughnuts. Still, after reading this book you may well — to quote David Foster Wallace, after he watched a dozen porn flicks in a doughty act of service journalism — want nothing to do with human sexuality ever again. Or feel the need to read any more books. Because let me tell you: Once you've seen the name "Elisabeth Kübler-Ross" used as a verb, or digested the phrase "you know, nobody does a better split-reed standing anal with an on-demand hands-free pop-shot release," or imagined the genitalia of two porn actors charred, nay, soldered together by errant medical equipment … well folks, then you can pretty much say you've read everything.

But has it really come to this? In this month's Vanity Fair, writer Michael Wolff makes an interesting point. All around us, male American politicians are foundering in sexual scandal, and there is little real public analysis of why. Forty years ago, the likes of Mailer and Updike and Roth turned out profound tomes about men and sex; now, Wolff says, "men neither much read nor much write novels any more."

Which is why Willing, Scott Spencer's new comic novel, comes as such a welcome surprise. You might be tempted to dismiss the ribald tale of a 37-year-old man who embarks on a sex tour of Scandinavia as a comedown from Spencer's previous and serious excavations of the human heart (Endless Love; A Ship Made of Paper). But this airy dessert packs a lot of calories, and its timing couldn't be better.

Recently poleaxed by the discovery of his girlfriend's infidelity, New York writer Avery Jankowsky accepts his rich uncle's offer of a six-figure sexual odyssey across three Nordic countries. He is primed for it, having sought solace in Internet pornography, prostitution ads and simple sidewalk yearning. "More than once," he says of the women walking by him, "I thought about just bumping into one of them, just to have the feel of human flesh."

His fellow tourists are loud and motley, the kind of brutes women dread getting caught beside on an airplane: They include a disgraced software tycoon, a maimed soldier, a pro basketball player and some resource traders. As the story progresses, however, we come to see the caverns of loss carved into each of their souls — souls to which Avery doesn't, initially, relate. He considers sex tourism the final frontier of male loneliness, and tells himself he's only doing research for a book. That lasts for half a night or so: "What power does the idea we hold of ourselves, the pious wish, the urgent, magical lie, have against the brute reality of our animal nature?"

And so he succumbs to the hookers, to the poignant, painful collision between dashed love (his) and fallen career hopes (theirs). The encounters are either surprisingly warm or hilariously awful; they don't cure Avery for longer than half an hour, but that, at least, is something.

It is true that women comprise the vast majority of fiction readers today — and in the end, most of the johns in Willing are ultimately so endearing, and Avery so likable, you suspect Scott Spencer of planting the male libido in a cheery Potemkin village, where it remains hidden from feminine view.

I don't, however, think that's true. There are far too many cynical, strutting views of sex in our culture today (Sex and the City for women, Maxim etc. for men), few of which do anything to explain one gender's foibles to the other. That is why we need more Scott Spencers, writers who tackle the strange business of modern desire with grace, sensitivity and humour. Willing doesn't have that many dirty parts, it's true. But then, you hardly even notice.

Cynthia Macdonald writes about social issues in Toronto. The one-word title of her own novel is Alms.