{"id":175798,"date":"2026-10-27T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175798"},"modified":"2026-10-26T17:34:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T21:34:51","slug":"second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/","title":{"rendered":"Sexless in the City: The Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan\u2019s Maiden<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Maiden<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>Maiden<\/span><\/i>, Cynthia Buchanan\u2019s debut from 1972, her first\u2014and so far only\u2014novel, both deb ball and swan song. <\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cWooden Nickels\u201d 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 <\/span>Maiden<\/span><\/i> 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortune is a soft-boiled detective on the hunt for someone special. \u201cShe was looking for a man,\u201d Buchanan writes of the virgin\u2019s quest. \u201cShe sure was looking for some man.\u201d 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 (<\/span>Masquerade Party<\/span><\/i>) to the pragmatic (<\/span>Balance Your Budget<\/span><\/i>). \u201cThere she is,\u201d Bert used to sing to Miss America. In <\/span>Maiden,<\/span><\/i> he\u2019s Fortune\u2019s crooning interlocutor and chief confidant. In her mind she talks to Bert and Bert talks back. \u201cYou know, you look like a million dollars in mauve!\u201d the imaginary Bert says at one point.<\/span> At another, Fortune responds, \u201cIf you are lying to me, Bert, I will kill you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI believe television is going to be the test of the modern world,\u201d wrote E. B. White in 1938, one that would inaugurate either \u201ca new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky.\u201d <\/span>Maiden<\/span><\/i> is a novel about the promises and corruptions of that test, a peace disturbed as Fortune waits with bated breath for her savior\u2014no 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maiden<\/span><\/i> features sex and success, as well as the lack thereof. The sexless Fortune finds a roommate in Beverly \u201cBiscuit\u201d Besqueth, a baby-talking divorc\u00e9e who seems intent on reclaiming her own maidenhood by behaving as a child (she calls her mutton-chopped boyfriend \u201cdaddy\u201d and demands that he ravage her lips till they bleed). Biscuit\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Fortune doesn\u2019t really want to have sex\u2014not <\/span>physically<\/span><\/i>. Sexual mishaps at the hands of cartoony, brutish men occur in the novel\u2019s antic mode of comedy. Fortune starts dating Phil, an oaf best described as \u201cunsummoned.\u201d His head is a funny shape, his breath is rancid, and when he dry humps Fortune on the beach, he reaches a unilateral climax: \u201cI just made a mess in my\u2014oh, Gawd, I love you!\u201d 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 \u201csoft, invertebrate\u201d flesh. She entertains a brief, Cronenbergian fear of the wound reopening, which doubles as a terror at her own sex. \u201cThrobbing meat!\u201d she thinks. When a gust lifts the leg of Skip\u2019s swim trunks, her passion wilts at the sight of his exposed white thigh.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s boyfriend, an ad man working on the \u201cPudding Tain\u201d campaign, produces a Roman-themed commercial at the VD, shouting at his models \u201cto admire the pudding, ogle it, for the camera.\u201d When Fortune gets a job demonstrating cake decoration, she squirts frosting with aplomb: \u201cYou just slip your nozzle onto your cloth frosting gun here, squeeze like this here, gentle, gentle with the palm of the hand\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A lurid world of innuendo and mishap reflects and echoes Fortune\u2019s 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. (\u201cI happen to be an individual,\u201d she quips, \u201cwhose hair is her glory.\u201d) But missing the work, she cuts her locks and tries to return\u2014only to find that the demo-deco outfit has moved south for the season. Jobless and shorn, she moves on to the next degrading gig.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s never had the privilege of exploring\u2014the john, for one, but the body too:<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fizzy and jagged, tart and parodic, Buchanan can be many writers at once. \u201cLanguage, like sex, reminds us we\u2019re alive,\u201d she once wrote. \u201cLanguage haunted her,\u201d she writes of Fortune, but it\u2019s 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. <\/span>Maiden<\/span><\/i>\u2019s plot is overly patient, nearly dormant, until it bursts like a punctured artery.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s end, the pins in her hinges are long gone. There\u2019s something of Travis Bickle to her\u2014the chaotic sexual na\u00efvet\u00e9, the siloed life of a wanderer without a past, the dream of salvation\u2014and like Bickle\u2019s story, the final minute of Fortune\u2019s gets blitzed in the broiler of happening. If sex can\u2019t be had, then violence is the available consummation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>The Culture of Narcissism<\/span><\/i>, 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\u2019d rather see it play out on the tube.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maiden<\/span><\/i> captures the lengths and anguish of self-presentation: \u201cShe made a fetish of herself,\u201d Buchanan writes of Fortune. Fortune stuffs her bra with tissue, wears a corn-colored hairpiece \u201cbrighter than doll\u2019s hair,\u201d decorates herself in feathers, Frenchifies her name with an extra letter and diacritic (\u201cFortun\u00e9e, rhymes with have-your-say.\u201d) In her invented t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates with Bert, her promoter and prosecutor, Fortune is contestant and defendant\u2014but 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortune \u201chad no idea how false she was,\u201d Buchanan writes of her first protagonist. In the writer\u2019s hands, the contrivances are not reasons for ridicule but proof of a person\u2014the inner and outer architecture of a self. In a bizarre and charming op-ed for the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i>\u00a0published the same year as <\/span>Maiden<\/span><\/i>\u2019s release, Buchanan delivers a cryptic salvo in defense of artifice, a pr\u00e9cis for her novel. \u201cTo marry our true selves, we must forgive our false ones,\u201d she writes, \u201ceven praise our folly. For nothing is more earnest, more real than falseness, nothing more human.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and the acquiring editor of Dalkey Archive Press. His work has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0Triple Canopy,<\/em> The Nation, and<\/em> The Baffler. His debut play, <\/em>The Town, was staged at Vino Theater in May 2026 and at Spectacle Theater in July 2026.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cShe was looking for a man,\u201d Cynthia Buchanan writes of the virgin\u2019s quest. \u201cShe sure was looking for some man.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2725,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31215],"tags":[4224,68964,453,67827,68966,68967,68965,50682],"class_list":["post-175798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-books","tag-christopher-lasch","tag-cynthia-buchanan","tag-e-b-white","tag-featured","tag-hagfish","tag-lily-tomlin","tag-maiden","tag-william-morrow"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan\u2019s Maiden<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 27, 2026 \u2013 \u201cShe was looking for a man,\u201d Cynthia Buchanan writes of the virgin\u2019s quest. \u201cShe sure was looking for some man.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sexless in the City: The Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan\u2019s Maiden by Walker Rutter-Bowman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 27, 2026 \u2013 \u201cShe was looking for a man,\u201d Cynthia Buchanan writes of the virgin\u2019s quest. \u201cShe sure was looking for some man.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-10-27T12:00:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/maiden-e1793030574679.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2100\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1487\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Walker Rutter-Bowman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Walker Rutter-Bowman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Walker Rutter-Bowman\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4fa8e467249e8e12a4cbb14320f6c94a\"},\"headline\":\"Sexless in the City: The Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan\u2019s Maiden\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-10-27T12:00:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/\"},\"wordCount\":1636,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/27\/second-life-of-cynthia-buchanans-maiden\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/maiden-e1793030574679-1024x725.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"\\\"Christopher Lasch\\\"\",\"Cynthia Buchanan\",\"E. 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