Sexuality

While Howard Jacobson’s prose works are renowned for their wit, energy, and self-deprecating, priapic jokes, his latest book, Zoo Time, is perhaps his most light-hearted to date. The protagonist is a struggling novelist, Guy Ableman: a red-blooded male with a penchant for the filth-merchants of English literature. Ableman has two predicaments: the first is his inability to sell any books. The second is his wish to sleep with Poppy, his alluring and sophisticated mother-in-law. Although the book is meant to be read with the smarmy, tongue and cheek tone that Jacobson has become famous for, the novel also passes judgment on a more serious matter: the crisis that has befallen the world of literary fiction.

Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been bought for another purpose.   The Guardian dedicated their usually reliably highbrow Review section to the phenomenon, persuading some hilariously unexpected writers (Will Self! Jeanette Winterson! Lol!) to have a go at their own sex scenes. I couldn’t face reading them, but you can here. And if you’re really into masochism, here’s an angry blogpost Alastair Campbell wrote about how ‘crap Guardian editing’ ruined his own effort.

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic. Irving published his debut novel Setting Free the Bears in 1968.

Sam Leith explores H. G. Wells’s addiction to free love, as revealed in David Lodge’s latest biographical novel In the history of seduction, there can have been few scenes quite like this one: ‘Am I dreaming?’, she said when she opened her eyes. ‘No,’ he said, and kissed her again. ‘But what about Jane?’ she said. ‘You love Jane.’ ‘Yes, I love Jane, and Jane loves me, but there are many kinds of love, Amber. You’ve read A Modern Utopia, you’ve read In the Days of the Comet, you know my views on free, healthy, life-enhancing sexual relationships. Jane shares them.’ They embraced and lay in eachother’s arms, exploring and gently stroking eachother’s bodies like blind people.