This is one of those odd books that is difficult to read on its own terms because of how much of its whole history is tied up with its notoriety. Of course, it’s entirely similar to that of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, and all three of which are now kinds of artifacts of censorship and “decency” more than novels that fully exist on their own.
I am not the biggest fan of frank discussions of sex in books because I think that there’s a kind of liminal space that exists within intimacy and sex (or sex without intimacy) that often books render silly or absurd, without capturing the fun parts of the silliness and absurdity of sex. I also generally think that movies tend to be better at this than novels, and in having the conceal a lot about sex because of censorship and decency laws, tend to show more interesting elements about it. In having to work around those limits, artists often are able to say something more meaningful from my experience.
So: here’s a novel that takes the kinds of Victorian limits of literature and tries to put forth post-Edwardian values into that context. And while it’s an interesting book in those ways, and not entirely boring as a novel just being a novel, it’s hard to separate the two in the reading here.
(Photo: Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.)