This began with Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow, a novel about a young man who spends a summer having sex and reading Victorian novels, which in turn made me buy Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a Victorian novel in which a young woman never has sex but reads many books.
I was on page 425 waiting for something, anything, physical to happen – Jane Eyre is all foreplay – when Nicholson Baker's new book, House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, which is nothing but sex, arrived in the bookstore. I abandoned Jane and swallowed Holes in a day.
Sex isn't a new subject for Mr. Baker, one of the most original and literary prose stylists writing today. Angling out brazenly from the ranks of his eight other novels The Anthologist The Mezzanineand his four books of non-fiction Human Smoke U and Iare two earlier sex texts: Vox, the bestselling phone-sex novel Monica Lewinsky famously gave to Bill Clinton, and The Fermata, a funny, fetching, filthy book about a guy who can stop time and do whatever you might imagine.
But House of Holes is another order of smut again – a novel of serial flesh-mobs set in a magical sex resort in which ladies and gentlemen do nothing but ride Masturboats, switch genital bits (even with the other gender), visit the Hall of Penises and, in general, indulge every sexual fantasy Mr. Baker had. Customers who enter the pricey House of Holes do so unexpectedly, through the holes in everyday life – in a straw, an earring, an open purse.
This is the surprise, then: In a culture swamped with online porn, the writerly, intelligent, classy Mr. Baker is insisting we need more sex, especially in print. He answered the phone on his farm in Maine, where he and Margaret Brentano, his wife and companion of 30 years, had just survived Hurricane Irene.
Why a book about porn now?
Well, I don't think we need necessarily a book about porn. We need a book that does what porn does, but does it in a more surprising or strange way. House of Holes is a book about people having cheerful sex, where there's not too long a gap between their desire and its fulfilment. It's an interesting topic, sexual desire. The urges that we get, ridiculous, crazy, silly, totally consuming urges. Everybody thinks about it a lot, or most people do. And I really didn't think it'd been done right.
How so?
Well, there's the limitations of the language. There're some great sex books, like Fanny Hill, and –
Terry Southern's Candy?
Candy was funny. And I do think that's the component that's missing a lot of the time. What I love is when something can be completely over the top and sexy and funny at the same time. Parts of Portnoy's Complaint were like that, although it was mostly funny, not sexy. That's the part of the spectrum that I love. The dungeon-and-dragon part of the spectrum I don't understand, the floggings and all that. I was trying to write a book that said sex can be funny and cheerful and doesn't have to involve caning.
Do you find Internet porn dull?
No! The Internet is a vast universe. It's got everything. I'm a normal, American, grown-up teenager who has been looking at this stuff for a ridiculous number of years. But what do you with that? Long ago, things were illegal, and there were adult bookstores, and then there was this great excitement when finally it could be published – Lady Chatterley's Lover and some of the others. Then there was sort of an explosion in the 1960s.
I felt I was part of Porn 2.0 with Vox in 1992, and then The Fermata, whereit was still sort of strange to have a literary book that was 100-per-cent sex.
But now is a different time, and sex is everywhere. It's almost as if there had been a universal prohibition against birthday picnics, and then it became legal to have picnics. The point is, you still want to have picnics. Sex isn't as forbidden as it once was, but it's still very much worth doing [ laughs]partly to understand whatever new developments there may be.
But Holes of Holes is a book, up against the huge free infinitude of Internet porn. Do you really think reading about sex gives you something that watching sex does not?
I find that it does. Maybe this is a partisan thing, but I just feel as if reading sex scenes creates more of a sphere around you, of imagined reality. And that's because the words are inadequate and so the reader supplies some of it. Whereas if you watch a porn clip, obviously your whole visual cortex is just saturated with something designed to be arousing. With words, it's more like a spell.
But the main thing is that, when you look at people having sex – and when I was writing these scenes, I couldn't possibly do that, because the view is very distracting – it just can't be funny. Because it's naked. The nakedness trumps everything. But because the lines on a page are not doing anything visual, you're can kind of laugh along with the whole thing.
I was surprised by some of the things that I found not just funny, but – well, strangely arousing. For instance [ laughing]the buttock expander.
The what?
When Henriette, one of the characters, asks for a larger derriere, and submits to having the Cheek Pump administered to her by two handsome male assistants.
[ Laughing]Oh, I kind of like that one too. I'm so pleased you told me that. Nobody ever tells me what aroused them. And of course the nakedness on my part is that everything in that book, in one way or another, I found sexually arousing. I mean, that's the sad fact of it. I do like it when one of the men says, "Spray on the flesh-bulging oil!" [ Laughs]
The other thing I found funny was the woman who does unmentionable things to herself with the handle of a screwdriver in front of another man, but keeps phoning her husband to ask if it's okay. It was hilarious, and a turn-on. It made me think eros is about something bigger than sex alone.
Who is it, Freud or somebody, said that getting past a barrier, some sort of obstacle – you are the penniless serf and she is the duchess, or there are five moats, or the two families are at war – makes the whole thing more interesting. So she wants to do right by her husband.
One of the first things I thought of when I started was this woman seeing two holes in the wall and knowing she had to put her legs through them to the other side. That was the image that made me think I wanted to write the book. Because she's on two sides of a wall at once. It captures something about the hole that you go through when you are in a state of sexual arousal, when you have the hormonal juices running and the salmon are leaping. It's an altered state.
You obviously enjoyed referring to someone's penis as "his Malcolm Gladwell." Have you spoken to Mr. Gladwell since?
No. You know, I had no idea that this was the one that people were going to fasten on. I was describing this thing called "edging," which I had not known about but which thanks to the Internet I had found out about, and I was talking about "the tipping point." And so the next time he hauls out his penis I just said he held out his Malcolm Gladwell. I certainly didn't want to hurt Malcolm Gladwell's feelings. On the contrary. If a pornographer said that somebody "pulled out his Nicholson Baker," I would be flattered and pleased.
I thought perhaps it was a reference to Charles Dickens, a name rappers sometimes use for the male member. The bestselling author of his day. Hence Malcolm Gladwell, ditto.
I'm not so rational when I'm writing this stuff. I think my mind just grabs things. Certainly I've always thought Dickens has a funny name, in that childish way. And so there's that other dialogue in the book, where one of the characters makes a stupid joke – Charles Dickens, did he have a large penis or not? How do we know? We don't know. And that's frustrating. It's not that important, of course, but if you did know, it would be something that you remembered.
Did you write this book to counter the banality of pornography?
I do find reading a lot of pornography pedestrian in its way. It's still good when it's good, but there's just not enough life.
I like exuberance.
This guy was asking me the other day about this expression, post coitus omnes animales tristes sunt – "after sex, all animals are sad." And that's just not something that I recognize. I don't see that. Basically, there's a lot of talking and laughing. My wife said that maybe if there's unfaithfulness involved … or guilt, then you think, "I struggled and strained to get to this moment, and now I have to deal with the consequences."
But the people in my book don't have any of that. They're just having a good time. They're doing the most adult thing you can do. It's sex, it's for adults. But it's also the one time when you … assume all these crazy postures and climb around and say non-verbal things in a loud voice, and do things that are in some ways so elemental that they're – childish is not the word. But they're part of what happened before we grew up, before we understood what life is all about.
Sex does help us regress to a more primitive state of happiness. And I wanted in some ways to keep the book on that level, and not have a commentary.
But you can't deny that the book is a defence of reading.
Yes, that's true. I don't know why I feel I have to do that. It can be depressing, the sheer porn saturation there is. The fact that it's just there, these crowds of orange bodies trying to climb into your mind – too much, too much, too much. So I'm trying to work with that, and create something pleasurable out of that. But it's also something that is deeply troubling to a lot of people.
That's kind of why I like books. Because you can go into a bookstore and they're all just books. And until you sit down and open the pages and put your glasses on, they're just like all the others – no orange bodies, no people doing things that are embarrassing. It's only when you get home and you're in private, which is the moment when you want to entertain a work of fiction, that they become sexual things.
Your wife's reaction has been good?
Yes. She thought the book was funny and liked it. That's part of why you want to write a book, to seduce your spouse. Seduce in every sense: To have them caught up in what you're doing.
I'm bringing this book to her. I'm saying, "Hello, I've written this book, it's really dirty, and you're the person to read it." And so it's a gift. It's a gift to her. [ Laughs.]That's the part of the writing thing that I like best.
Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
Ian Brown