Nicholson Baker's new novel reads like a ridiculous porn-fest
"'I can let you have one of my arms for the night,' said the girl", begins the story "One Arm" by the great Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. Nicholson Baker's new novel gets off to a similar start, with a young woman finding a disembodied arm in a quarry. Both arms are alive, communicative and tenderly disposed toward their new keepers. But whereas Kawabata's beckons us into a tale of delicately nuanced eroticism, Baker's frogmarches us into an arcade of blaring porn fantasies in which the tropes of triple-X sex movies are celebrated in all their cheerfully gushing banality. "Back up towards me, I need to feel those balls when I come, I need a heaping handful of hot hairy balls!" runs a typical line. Kawabata's book is entitled House of the Sleeping Beauties. Baker's is House of Holes. Times have changed.
Having explained that it was forfeited by its original owner in exchange for a bigger penis, the arm (Baker's) does some creditable penis-work of its own on Shandee, its new guardian ? "she pulled him up to her clitty and he circled it. 'Oh that's nice,' she said." It then makes an O with its fingers whereupon Shandee dematerialises, flows through the circle and finds herself outside the eponymous House of Holes; a kind of wet dream Club Med on a lake, complete with Masturboats and a Cock Ness Monster, owned by big-bosomed Lila.
Several other Shandee-like men and women atomise through rabbit-holes of one kind or another in the ordinary world (an earlobe piercing, a golf hole) and find themselves at the House of Holes. There, they avail themselves of an "ass-squeezer's licence", or have their own rear end temporarily enlarged, or video themselves masturbating and then watch other people masturbating to the videos, or call down to room service with demands along the lines of: "I want ball loads of hot manslurp landing on all my soft parts. This is an emergency top-level request for dick."
In keeping with the porno template, there's no story, just a series of set-ups for naughtiness of one kind or another, though "naughtiness" suggests subversions of order, interesting power relations, an abiding tension between desire and anxiety ? all the social complications of traditional erotica, in other words ? whereas House of Holes is purely, uncomplicatedly physical.
There isn't much in the way of the stylistic virtuosity Baker is known for, either, unless you have a taste for the made-up words ? "murfling", "thrummiest", "wuffly" ? that speckle the text like discards from The Hunting of the Snark and also lend it a (to me) peculiarly unsexy nursery flavour.
Vox, Baker's much admired 1992 novella, took the trouble to engage you in the lives of its two strangers talking dirty to each other down the phone. It even seemed to have something prescient to say about the bittersweet gratifications of the coming virtual world we now so thoroughly inhabit.
House of Holes doesn't appear to have any literary ambitions at all. At best, it has some quasi-diverting notions to offer. A man debating whether to break a house rule and risk painless temporary castration (body parts are all fairly easily removable in the cyberish world of House of Holes), describes the ball-less state as follows: "I'd wander around visiting museums and, you know, reading travel magazines and listening to choral music", which sounds about right. For women who "want something where the man's not always judging me and criticising me and disapproving of how I dress" there are the "headless bedrooms" full of headless men, a potentially interesting reversal of R Crumb's notorious headless women. The dialogue aspires to a kind of farcical, dreamlike dottiness, and once or twice I did feel the prudish grimace that had settled on my face cracking with something approaching mild amusement. A man tells a woman he wishes he had to measure her aureoles for a costume. "How would you measure them, with a ruler?" the woman asks. "'Probably with my mouth,' said Pendle, 'and then I'd measure my mouth with the ruler.'" Well, it seemed sort of funny at the time.
But House of Holes is a completely ridiculous book, whether you read it as camp parody or straight smut. The real story here is why the cleverly observant author of works such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature has chosen to publish something at once so daft and so half-hearted. He calls it an "Entertainment" but "Wank Book" would have been more accurate.
James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/11/house-holes-nicholson-baker-review
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