When the sixties ceased swinging, the sexual revolution diversified and penetrated new markets, like real estate. Adults-only apartment complexes sprang up in answer to the needs of the lost and lonely, the childless and horny, offering experiences both socially stimulating and aquatically immersive. Such is the promise of Villa Dionysus, a club for swingles ages twenty-five to forty, and the setting of Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan’s debut from 1972, her first—and so far only—novel, both deb ball and swan song.

Originally published by William Morrow, the book was well reviewed, and the film rights promptly sold; there were rumblings of a Robert Altman movie, a Lily Tomlin vehicle. For years, the writer and director Jane Wagner aimed to adapt it, but a television special called “Wooden Nickels” never escaped production purgatory. Now the novel returns to us courtesy of Hagfish, a reissue press named after the bottom-dwelling, goo-producing creature, and whose brief is deep-sea dredging for forgotten work. But Maiden is far from goo, and is, in fact, very, very good. It is the tale of Fortune Dundy, a thirty-year-old virgin who has landed in Los Angeles looking for love and success. Lured by a brochure, she joins the Villa Dionysus party, where the membrane between paradise and perdition is thin. 

Fortune is a soft-boiled detective on the hunt for someone special. “She was looking for a man,” Buchanan writes of the virgin’s quest. “She sure was looking for some man.” The sleuths of noirs self-narrativize, but instead of a tape recorder or voiceover, Fortune favors an unusual device: an imaginary emcee. For this role, she casts Bert Parks, the longtime and real-life host of the Miss America telecast, who made a career of moderating game shows with names ranging from the titillating (Masquerade Party) to the pragmatic (Balance Your Budget). “There she is,” Bert used to sing to Miss America. In Maiden, he’s Fortune’s crooning interlocutor and chief confidant. In her mind she talks to Bert and Bert talks back. “You know, you look like a million dollars in mauve!” the imaginary Bert says at one point. At another, Fortune responds, “If you are lying to me, Bert, I will kill you.”

“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world,” wrote E. B. White in 1938, one that would inaugurate either “a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky.” Maiden is a novel about the promises and corruptions of that test, a peace disturbed as Fortune waits with bated breath for her savior—no angel or god, but a man who would step from the game-show stage, throw a leg through the little screen, and enter her living room: the lover ex machina.

Maiden features sex and success, as well as the lack thereof. The sexless Fortune finds a roommate in Beverly “Biscuit” Besqueth, a baby-talking divorcée who seems intent on reclaiming her own maidenhood by behaving as a child (she calls her mutton-chopped boyfriend “daddy” and demands that he ravage her lips till they bleed). Biscuit’s ex-husband, the dentist Skip Fritchey, rents an office in the Villa Dionysus complex and looms large for Biscuit and Fortune: the former despises him; the latter longs for the eligible DDS.

But Fortune doesn’t really want to have sex—not physically. Sexual mishaps at the hands of cartoony, brutish men occur in the novel’s antic mode of comedy. Fortune starts dating Phil, an oaf best described as “unsummoned.” His head is a funny shape, his breath is rancid, and when he dry humps Fortune on the beach, he reaches a unilateral climax: “I just made a mess in my—oh, Gawd, I love you!” he cries out. Male bodies are particularly repellent. When the dentist pulls up his shirt to show off his barbecue-fork scar, she notes his “soft, invertebrate” flesh. She entertains a brief, Cronenbergian fear of the wound reopening, which doubles as a terror at her own sex. “Throbbing meat!” she thinks. When a gust lifts the leg of Skip’s swim trunks, her passion wilts at the sight of his exposed white thigh. 

A send-up of dating, the novel also satirizes another American ritual of humiliation: the job hunt. Around the complex, the strapping bachelors who were once stuntmen now work for the Highway Department. Fortune, who scoffs at the prospect of becoming a salesperson, becomes a salesperson. The job market is a place where one can be violated and despoiled. Views of the working world are highly sexualized but distinctly unsexy. Campbell, Biscuit’s boyfriend, an ad man working on the “Pudding Tain” campaign, produces a Roman-themed commercial at the VD, shouting at his models “to admire the pudding, ogle it, for the camera.” When Fortune gets a job demonstrating cake decoration, she squirts frosting with aplomb: “You just slip your nozzle onto your cloth frosting gun here, squeeze like this here, gentle, gentle with the palm of the hand…”

A lurid world of innuendo and mishap reflects and echoes Fortune’s discomfort with physical intimacy. Of her many suffered indignities, the most excruciating might be when Fortune, who learns to love her demo cake job, quits in protest of the hairnet mandate. (“I happen to be an individual,” she quips, “whose hair is her glory.”) But missing the work, she cuts her locks and tries to return—only to find that the demo-deco outfit has moved south for the season. Jobless and shorn, she moves on to the next degrading gig.

*

Like pizza, goes an inane saying, even bad sex is pretty good. Not true of comic prose, though it helps when the satirist writes as well as Buchanan. At the May Day Beach Bash, for example, Fortune runs into Skip by the restrooms. Rattled by the encounter and awed by the bathroom sign denoting his domain, her mind roams to male regions she’s never had the privilege of exploring—the john, for one, but the body too:

MEN said the sign. Through these portals pass MEN. MEN for you, and MEN for me. MEN for today and MEN for tomorrow. Right up that street, around that corner, through that door marked MEN. MEN with penises like cartoons, jutting out like frankfurters, drooping and confusing genitalia that looked like newly hatched squabs. MEN with penises, MEN with promises.

Fizzy and jagged, tart and parodic, Buchanan can be many writers at once. “Language, like sex, reminds us we’re alive,” she once wrote. “Language haunted her,” she writes of Fortune, but it’s Buchanan who seems possessed. She can be slapstick and flashy, grim and austere, earnest and melancholy. She lights up prosaic chapters with formal flair, detonating text with white space and words in shapes. Maiden’s plot is overly patient, nearly dormant, until it bursts like a punctured artery.

At the beginning of the book, Fortune seems semi-fastened to sanity, though the reader is alerted to her quirks and blossoming madness: she is an anxious daydreamer, an extravagant dresser, a bit of a voyeur. She stalks Skip, who is puzzled and amused by her weirdness. By book’s end, the pins in her hinges are long gone. There’s something of Travis Bickle to her—the chaotic sexual naïveté, the siloed life of a wanderer without a past, the dream of salvation—and like Bickle’s story, the final minute of Fortune’s gets blitzed in the broiler of happening. If sex can’t be had, then violence is the available consummation. 

On a weekend trip up the coast, Skip and Fortune share a bed; she wakes early, slips outside, and from the cover of the garden watches him sleep. Reflected in the window, Fortune can watch herself watch the dentist. In The Culture of Narcissism, the historian Christopher Lasch wrote that to the narcissist, everything is a mirror; to Fortune, her consciousness mediated by television, everything is a screen. Buchanan drills into a second depth of narcissism beyond the pleasure of reflection: the thrill of watching the watcher, who is oneself. Fortune watches Skip sleep with all the rapture of tuning into her favorite show. Rather than live her dream, she’d rather see it play out on the tube. 

Maiden captures the lengths and anguish of self-presentation: “She made a fetish of herself,” Buchanan writes of Fortune. Fortune stuffs her bra with tissue, wears a corn-colored hairpiece “brighter than doll’s hair,” decorates herself in feathers, Frenchifies her name with an extra letter and diacritic (“Fortunée, rhymes with have-your-say.”) In her invented tête-à-têtes with Bert, her promoter and prosecutor, Fortune is contestant and defendant—but she is also Bert, the imaginary man who sprinkles his approval upon the try-hard young ladies. She is such an artificial creature, the reader begins to suspect her ruses are real. 

Fortune “had no idea how false she was,” Buchanan writes of her first protagonist. In the writer’s hands, the contrivances are not reasons for ridicule but proof of a person—the inner and outer architecture of a self. In a bizarre and charming op-ed for the New York Times published the same year as Maiden’s release, Buchanan delivers a cryptic salvo in defense of artifice, a précis for her novel. “To marry our true selves, we must forgive our false ones,” she writes, “even praise our folly. For nothing is more earnest, more real than falseness, nothing more human.”