Amateur Sex | NSFW

2. But I thought Nicholson Baker was a serious novelist. What's up? Baker is a serious novelist -- clever, an elegant sentence-turner, quirky, risky in a nerdy, obsessive way. The Mezzanine is a 200-page novel that nano-describes a man's one-hour lunch break as he goes to the mall to buy shoelaces. Checkpoint is the story of two normal guys who get so upset with George W. Bush's Iraq policy that they plot to assassinate him. Vox is a vivid fictional transcription of two people having phone sex.

3. Oh, so he's centered books on sex before. What's the title about? It's not what you might think. "Holes" refers to these magic portals that characters use to get from the regular world to the House of Holes, which turns out to be a sexual fantasy camp.

4. Um, better elaborate. Sure. If you're a guy, when you arrive, you start at the Penis Wash, where nubile women lather you up before you start putting your schlong into the big-breasted and willing women who roam the grounds. You can ride the Masturboats, go to a Groanroom (where you listen to people have sex in the dark) or stop by the Pornodecahedron, where 12 screens show amateur porn. If you're a gal, you can stimulate your gaping snatch hole by riding a Pussyboard over a lake of warm oils. And everybody can enjoy the Garden of the Wholesome Delightful Fuckers, or attend the festivities in the Hall of the Penises.

5. Dude -- wait. Schlong? Gaping snatch hole? Oh yeah, sorry; that's Bakerspeak. For example, for clitoris, he'll say "little thumper bean"; for sperm, "doodle-goo"; for sexual intercourse, "doing the happy humperdinkle." When a guy starts having sex, Baker writes that his "length of badness stuffed her gasping twat full of warm, brown dick muscle." Some reviewers have found this stuff wicked hilarious, and claim Baker's doing a hysterical parody of pornographic cliches.

6. And what do you think? In short doses, it's OK. Over 262 pages, it's grueling. Baker has spent a lot of time thinking up ways to convey what people sound like when they orgasm: "NNNNNgggggggggaaaaaaw!" Or, "Ham, ham, oo, oo ... ham, ham, HAW!" and "Oofy." He's not always that inventive. Sometimes, it's just: "Oh, that's good! Oh, shit, Dave, I'm a porn star! Oh juice it, juice it, I'M COMING!"

7. Is it arousing, at least? Sure, some of it is. But, understand, writing to arouse isn't very hard to do. Porn's a sort of limited genre, if you know what I mean. You get two or more people who aren't having sex yet, and gradually you get them having sex. It's more or less primally interesting, so you don't have to do a lot in terms of literary trickery to get a reader to imagine it. Plus, porn has built-in conclusions: people come.

But arousal isn't exactly a sufficient criterion to judge a book like this. Clearly, Baker's not out simply to get people off. (Though I must note the worrisome fact that most of the chapters are about six pages long -- which sounds like standard masturbation-length material -- and most of them end with somebody coming.) He's fairly subtle about it, but I fear that the book's intentions have to do with Baker striking a blow against the residues of Puritanism that remain among America's white upper middle class. He thinks they're too uptight and need to enjoy sex in a frolicky, less guilt-ridden way. (It's the same justification that the proto-porn film I Am Curious [Yellow] made in 1967.) Which may account for lines like, "Stop hiding, stop disguising, be naked for once." Or "Listen to your clit." Or, in a scene where a woman describes one zebra mounting another (long story): "She wants it. She's switching her tail around. She's a hot stripy-assed zebra bitch in heat, and she wants him now. Mmm, so natural. She's not ashamed."

8. So I'm feeling you're not that big on this book? Afraid so. There's no plot tension, and the characters are almost indistinguishable: They're uniformly nice, innocent, uncomplicated, child-like in their simple desire for pleasure. Baker bleaches the book of exactly the things that makes sex interesting: the subtle power shifts between men and women, the fear, the vulnerabilities, the consequences, the connections between erotic passion and love. As porn. it's not bad, but isn't porn everywhere? Just two mouse clicks away? But it's hard to claim that House of Holes is more than porn. or a comic parody of same. It's a book that'll make certain people giggle into their hands and think naughty thoughts.

House of Holes Nicholson Baker, Simon Schuster, 262 pages