Baker must compete for attention with other highbrow sex books out in time for Valentine’s Day. But compared to “The Fermata”–the title refers to the musical symbol for an indefinite pause they’re a tame lot. Robert Olen Butler, who won a Pulitzer last year for his understated short stories of Vietnamese emigres, has unleashed They Whisper (333 pages. Holt. $22.50), a novel overstuffed with rhapsodic sex scenes-and sentences that run on and on to show how jeeped up the characters are. (Hey, it worked with Molly Bloom.) John Updike’s Brazil (260 pages. Knopf $23) begins with a dark-skinned boy deflowering a light-skinned virgin to the tune of Hemingway-style sweet-talk-in-translation: “It will not be easy, the first time. It will hurt.” British sex columnist Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s bland compendium The Literary Companion to Sex (419 pages. Random House. $25) ranges from the ancients to Erica Jong; it’s tough to render the Marquis de Sade inoffensive, but never underestimate a determined editor.
“Most literary sex scenes are so inadequate,” says Baker. “There’s more energy in the pornographic vocabulary than in the literary vocabulary.” In Pitt-Kethley’s anthology, even such famously naughty writers as Anais Nin and Henry Miller sometimes refer to a woman’s “sex mouth” or “rosebush.” Updike juxtaposes the clinical and poetical-a “glans” resting on a “mons veneris” looks like “a violet heart ripped from a creature the size of a rabbit.” Butler cuts straight to the poetical: for his hero, the old in-and-out is “swimming in the viscous river of her.” Are we turned on yet?
If such conventional fancyings-up ever tempted Baker, he’s gotten over it. At 37, he writes like no one in America, elevating self-indulgence into an esthetic principle. His first novel, “The Mezzanine” (1988), a digressive, footnoted 135-page “microhistory” of a lunch-hour trip to buy shoelaces, seemed suicidally “experimental.” Baker got away with it on intellect, an all-seeing eye, a willingness to say anything and unpretentious good humor. It was “Vex,” hyped as “the most sexually provocative novel of our time,” that made a cult writer into a media personage. “The Fermata” could stretch his 15 minutes into the half hour granted the Michael Crichtons of the world. Baker’s new readers may be too aroused (or outraged) to note the continuity between this and “The Mezzanine,” in which an inner life also bustles on between slow seconds of elapsed time.
The premise of “The Fermata” may be infantile-its genesis was a fantasy Baker had cherished since fourth grade -but he’s worked it out with spellbinding ingenuity. Rain doesn’t soak you; the drops just hang there. The air is close (“as long as you wave your arms around every so often there is no real risk of asphyxiation”) and its motionless molecules create an “acoustical coziness.” Driving is tough because all those other cars are frozen in place. Once Arno calls the universe to a halt at 60 miles per hour on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He has to push his door with his shoulder “to displace the jellied wind-flow”; then he walks across the “foggy and indeterminate” road surface and gets into an attractive woman’s car, “sweating with the almost horrified excitement of my wrongdoing.” You could read a year’s worth of drugstore thrillers and not find a scene this tense.
But nobody’s going to be talking about scenes like that. They’re going to be talking about the one where Arno shoots his “burning bechamel” onto a time-frozen woman’s face -knowing he’ll be sorry later when he has to “get it all off her eyelashes and eyebrows.” Or the one where Arno goes to an Anne Rice book-signing and briefly slips “nipple-nooses” on her. Baker hasn’t heard from Rice; he hopes she takes it as “a friendly salute” to a fellow amateur of erotica. (Rice has published novels of “tenderness and cruelty” under the name A. N. Roquelaure.) Many women, though, are unlikely to see the fun. As journalist Lynn Darling writes in her profile of Baker in the current Esquire, the book “explores a fantasy that puts women right where women have always thought men wanted them in the first place-passive, unaware, and not in control of what is happening to them.”
“I don’t know that I want to get involved in the so-called gender wars and all,” says Baker. “I wasn’t throwing down the gauntlet and trying to provoke outrage. The book is supposed to be funny and it’s supposed to capture some possibly unsettling but nonetheless inescapable truths about the way men look at women and think about women.” But after showing the book to his wife and friends, Baker found women were troubled not by what Arno thinks, but by what he does without asking. “My wife did not mind at all that there was a lot of sex in the book,” says Baker. “She is perfectly happy with all that. What she didn’t like is that Arno was going around taking women’s clothes off and doing strange things to them and she felt that was wrong.” She’s bound to have company.
“Vox’s” subtext of anxiety overboth AIDS and personal commitment made it timely and troublesome; “The Fermata” pushes even hotter buttons. Those disposed to envy Baker will say he’s cashing in on the cultural uproar over porn and sexual abuse. But this assumes Baker is able to whip up obsessions to order. It’s fairer to say he’s blessed with kinks that dovetail with headline issues and blessed, too, with the compulsion to exhibit them. “I guess I could be charged with selling out,” says Baker. “But this seems like such an anti-sellout book to me, because I’ve always wanted to be liked and understood, and I think a lot of people are going to be mystified. In a way it’s a selfdestructive book. And yet I stand behind it. I’m happy to have written it. I was frightened of writing it, and it’s a huge relief to think that Arno’s obsessions and interests are not floating around anymore but have been caught and are over with.” He pauses, and adds, wryly, “Just a form of self-improvement.” Well, so long as he’s happy. But let’s hope he’s got a kink or two left.
