{"id":21388,"date":"2011-09-28T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=21388"},"modified":"2011-09-28T11:50:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T15:50:26","slug":"reading-house-of-holes-in-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/28\/reading-house-of-holes-in-public\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading ‘House of Holes’ in Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent a recent morning at a brightly painted, high-ceilinged coffee shop that serves a modest variety of salads and panini, nursing a pot of white tea and reading a book by the founder of the American Newspaper Repository which featured, in its opening chapters, a severed arm stimulating a college student\u2019s vagina to the point of orgasm, a large Filipino masseuse squeezing fruit juice into an art critic\u2019s anus, an amiable topless woman aggressively sniffing a golfer\u2019s scrotum, and the Russian composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin ejaculating onto the feet of a soup-kitchen volunteer. At the table to my left, a man and a woman were holding a conversation in broken French about deep-sea fishing. Most of the people in the coffee shop had MacBooks. \u201cHe wanted them all to be on their knees on couches and chairs with their asses up and ready,\u201d I read, \u201cand their slippy sloppy fuckfountains on display. He\u2019d walk in front of them holding his generous kindly forgiving dick, saying, \u2018Do you want this ham steak of a Dr. Dick that\u2019s so stuffed with spunk that I\u2019m ready to blow this swollen sackload all over you?\u2019 And they\u2019d all say, \u2018Yes Mr. Fuckwizard, we want that fully spunkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a dick.\u2019\u201d I was hoping to meet a girl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nicholson Baker\u2019s first two novels made you want to pay attention to everything in your life you normally paid no attention to, and to be gentle and kind and laugh with the people you loved or at least to yourself. Then he wrote a book-length love letter to John Updike, two very sexually explicit novels, and a novel in the voice of a nine-year-old girl. When he wrote his National Book Critic Circle Award\u2013winning expos\u00e9 of American libraries\u2019 systemic destruction of rare newspapers, magazines, and books, his beard was still brown. But by the time his pacifist history of the buildup to World War II came out, his beard was as snow-white and full as Santa Claus\u2019s.\u00a0The seven years those books bracket, in fact, might be considered Baker\u2019s saintly period, marked by a less mischievous spirit and a less ambiguous morality (though they do also include the publication of a novel in which two men discuss the assassination of George W. Bush, a \u201cscummy little book\u201d according to one of the many wrong critics).\u00a0It was during those years that I lent Vox, <\/em>Baker\u2019s phone-sex novel, to a woman I liked, and a week or so later felt her hand moving up the inside of my thigh as I read aloud from Keats\u2019s \u201cLamia\u201d on the loveseat of my first apartment. I date the onset of my erotic reading-aloud fantasies to that night, but their true origin may lie many years earlier, some evening when my mother read me Are You My Mother?<\/em>, for example, in which a baby bird falls out of his nest and goes around asking nonbird animals and objects if they\u2019re his mother. Because I knew the bird would find his mother in the end, and because my mother was right there next to me, I was only scared in a safe and pleasurable way.<\/p>\n

Reading House of Holes<\/a><\/em>, Nicholson Baker\u2019s new \u201cbook of raunch,\u201d <\/em>in a coffee shop is not so different from reading a book of short stories by Mavis Gallant in a coffee shop: most other people there probably don\u2019t know or care what it is\u2014plus a book of raunch <\/em>is printed in very small font that\u2019s illegible at a distance of more than ten or so feet. And, anyway, we all move through the world harboring thoughts and desires and urges that no stranger could discern by looking at us. House of Holes <\/em>imagines a world in which strangers trade the wildest of these freely, and act on them whenever they please. \u201cI don\u2019t want to come alone,\u201d I read. \u201cI want a forest of cocks around me. I want to see them up close\u2014I want to wear my sunglasses and have dick juice splurt all over them. I want ball loads of hot cockslurp landing on all my soft parts.\u201d Jay-Z\u2019s \u201c99 Problems\u201d was playing softly through the coffee shop\u2019s speakers, and I thought of the woman with whom I\u2019d recently agreed not to speak for six weeks\u2014my girlfriend, maybe, or ex-girlfriend, maybe, we could never decide what to call ourselves. We listened to that song together soon after we met last winter, and then we returned to our respective cities and spent the spring and summer writing emails and letters and talking on the phone, and the first two times we met up we existed easily together and knew more or less what to say and read Proust to each other, but the third time we didn\u2019t and decided we were done, for a while at least.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m into animals,\u201d I read, \u201cespecially horses, beautiful strong brown stallions with very glossy coats and six-pack abs, I think about washing the ends of their long penises with a soft cloth and watching them sniff at a mare and nip her neck, and I think about getting them ready to mount the breeding mount.\u201d A tall, tall woman wearing a low-cut flowy black blouse tucked into very short jean shorts stood in line near my table, absentmindedly braiding strands of full-bodied curly blond hair over one shoulder and gyrating her torso in the manner of a restless five-year-old girl. She took her iced coffee, sat down two tables away from me, propped a big law textbook against her brightly woven purse and began reading. A prematurely-old-looking man wearing a dirty white T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans limped between her table and an adjacent one, and she smiled sweetly at him. Her ankles were encircled by thin leather sandal straps that I imagined were made of my middle fingers and thumbs.<\/p>\n

As I made my way through House of Holes <\/em>I decided it was a little too long\u2014or maybe it should be read over a longer span of time\u2014and also came to some conclusions about its virtues. It finds ecstasy in sex\u2019s silliness. It rescues sex from its traditional literary function as a source and expression of pain and tension, a preassembled piece of narrative machinery whose purpose is to ironically demonstrate the impossibility of truly meaningful communication between two human beings. It points us toward the infinite number of alternatives to canned sexual fantasies involving classrooms or maids or friends\u2019 mothers or leather. It legitimizes and exalts our most personal and private sources of delight. It says everyone\u2019s different and basically the same. \u201cHow much nakedness do you want?\u201d it asks. \u201cBe honest. So few people are able to tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time I reached its final chapters, three days had passed and I was in a different coffee shop, and the tall girl with the sandals wasn\u2019t there. I\u2019d seen her again on the second day, and though we twice made fleeting eye contact we never spoke. Now I was sitting on a stool next to a woman wearing thick dark eye makeup, overstrong perfume, and big ugly heart-shaped hoop earrings. Earlier in the summer, in my girlfriend\u2019s friend\u2019s chocolate-brown ski-resort condo full of chocolate-brown furniture, I\u2019d asked my girlfriend (if that was the word for her) if she\u2019d marry me if she didn\u2019t already have a husband, and she said she would. \u201cSweet boy,\u201d she said. Her marriage was open; her husband liked that she liked me. I wanted to call her now but couldn\u2019t, because we\u2019d agreed on six weeks and it had only been a few days. \u201cIn general I come hardest when I put something in my ass,\u201d I read. \u201cMy husband is away a lot, and I read one of my erotic romance books about bad assfucking vampires, and I start to get a little wild, and I put a screwdriver in a latex glove and put the handle in my ass.\u201d A stout middle-aged man with a goatee and a yarmulke approached the woman next to me, leaned toward her and said, \u201cI just wanted to tell you your earrings are fantastic.\u201d Filled with Nicholson Baker\u2019s magnanimity, I forgave the man his taste and partook of the moment\u2019s small joy.<\/p>\n

I have a fantasy involving a naked woman\u2014the woman I read Keats to, or the tall sandaled woman, or the woman I still can\u2019t call, or an amalgam of all of the women I\u2019ve ever wanted, or a woman I haven\u2019t met yet\u2014lying on her tummy on top of the sheets of a bed in a boutique hotel. I\u2019m lying on my back next to her, also naked. The hotel has themed rooms; she and I are in the English Poetry Room and there\u2019s a Donne quote painted on the wall: \u201cAnd now good-morrow to our waking souls, \/ Which watch not one another out of fear; \/ For love, all love of other sights controls, \/ And makes one little room an everywhere.\u201d There\u2019s dim indirect yellow light, and electric red candles hanging from the ceiling, and a smell of something like peat, and the woman is reading to me from House of Holes. <\/em>\u201cShe wanted him everywhere, in all holes at once,\u201d she reads, and\u2014I can feel it so vividly it seems like a memory\u2014I put my hand on her bare back and move it slowly down her spine, and she keeps reading as I move my body on top of hers but stops before the chapter\u2019s over.<\/p>\n

Andrew Palmer\u2019s writing has been published in <\/em>The Times Literary Supplement, <\/em>The San Francisco Chronicle, and <\/em>McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency.
<\/em><\/p>\n

To read our Art of Fiction interview with Nicholson Baker<\/a>, purchase the Fall Issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a recent morning at a brightly painted, high-ceilinged coffee shop that serves a modest variety of salads and panini, nursing a pot of white tea and reading a book by the founder of the American Newspaper Repository which featured, in its opening chapters, a severed arm stimulating a college student\u2019s vagina to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[4095,4096,4085,4091,4093,4089,4084,4094,615,4088,3344,4092,2660,4087,1593,4090],"class_list":["post-21388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-99-problems","tag-alexander-borodin","tag-american-newspaper-reporsitory","tag-are-you-my-mother","tag-book-of-raunch","tag-coffee-shop","tag-house-of-holes","tag-jay-z","tag-john-updike","tag-macbook","tag-mavis-gallant","tag-national-book-critic-circle-award","tag-nicholson-baker","tag-nikolai-rimsky-korsakov","tag-santa-claus","tag-vox"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading 'House of Holes' in Public by Andrew Palmer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 28, 2011 \u2013 I spent a recent morning at a brightly painted, high-ceilinged coffee shop that 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