Review of The Mouth Seducers

It is impossible to know if the author felt he or she (almost certainly a he but I would love to find out otherwise) was just churning out a pot-boiler, or if they were intentionally cultivating an aesthetic ulterior message. Even though the book was marketed as a pulp porn novel I tend to favor the artistic interpretation. Why? For one thing, the characters are distinct and consistent in strangely realistic ways that go far beyond the requirements of a masturbation prop. An irrelevant physical feature will be mentioned after many pages, or an unanticipated backstory reference that turns up in some dialogue brings the personality into focus.

There are things like this:

"I need a car," Pete said.

Biggsy said "You got a car, I seen it outside."

"I mean a car with honest plates."

Jumbo shuffled in a side table and came up with a pad and a pencil. He wrote an address quickly, shoved it toward Pete. "Here, you go see Manny Greb, he's a pal o' mine. Lives over a couple blocks..." He looked at Biggsy.

"Seven blocks," Biggsy said.

"Yeh, seven blocks. The motherfucker'll show you how to make a couple bucks, get you a car ... howzat?"

"Thanks, Jumbo, you're a pal."

In this scene it is completely irrelevant that Jumbo doesn't know how many blocks away Manny lives, and that Biggsy does. Yet a device like that brings two otherwise scurrilous and forgettable characters to life as people. This happens throughout the narrative, little details illuminate the characters from within. (It is also funny when Pete learns that both Jumbo and Biggsy, who run a sort of prostitution service and spend all their time in bed with the women, have unusually small penises.)

These unexpected and unnecessary details give you the feeling that the author is telling you about something that really happened. The plot has surprisingly realistic quirks as well, as foreshadowed twists and turns simply fail to occur, without any acknowledgement that the reader had expected closure as a common narrative device; it is only that the story didn't go that way -- the questionably disloyal acquaintance really did wait with the getaway car, just as he had promised. Chekhov's gun just hangs there, like most real guns do. The male character who is frequently commented to be bisexual never hits on the protagonist or any other man in the story. The stories that make up real life do not resolve all foreshadowing, either.

Unexpected characters and situations pop up without apology or explanation. Conversations run out of steam or are interrupted, colorful characters pass through the novel without becoming the center of attention. Life is actually like that, to create the day-to-day narrative of our mundane autobiographies we have to fit together a lot of barely-related facts and often ignore monstrously inconsistent ones. We readers know how the game is supposed to be played, and it is a brave author who tries to lead us to water by ignoring our expectations. I will point out that the technique itself is seductive, it is a kind of meta-tease that works very well with the tone of the story. Think of a lace bra-strap slipping over a bare shoulder and then pushed back and tucked away thoughtlessly, never to reappear but forever brightening an otherwise unremarkable conversation.

With all these lifelike touches though, these tales have not come out of a diary. To be clear, this is a pornographic fantasy, no one really lives like this, and that is a good thing.

It is fascinating to think of the great virtuoso whose best solos are performed in a neighborhood bar to a bunch of drunks, Itzhak Perlman raised on a farm in some little shithole town, poor, fiddling in the honky-tonks; the master painter without money for paints or training, or hope, whose greatest painting is an angry symbol on a city wall. An artist's little accomplishment is in creating art -- anybody can do that. The artist's big accomplishment is in hooking up with the corporate Invisible Hand that puts his or her work on the center of the stage, reaching a public. A guy can scratch pencil lines on paper, but it takes real talent to get anyone to look at it.

Think of Faulkner or any great writer without a publisher, their introductory letters and first chapters dropping on desks unnoticed. This kind of disconnection happens, surely, more often than the lucky pairing of talent and business. And so here we have someone using the name "Fred Tracy," who lucks into a contract to write some trash to pay his rent. We have a stereotypical picture of him hiding out in his little apartment with a forty-watt light bulb and a bottle of booze, banging on a rattly typewriter with the o's smudging, gummed up with ink. He has his marching orders, there is lots of sordid sex in it, they'll pay him for it. In a quiet act of rebellion against commercial tawdriness, the author takes a tale of dirty, promiscuous sex and peels the skin off it to reveal the sinews and arteries and bones and nerves of the human libido; he paints a portrait of the Id. He uses the medium of cheap and mindless immorality to represent a deeper level of the spirit, tricking his self-gratificatory readers into seeing the world as they never imagined it, or more likely putting it in front of their eyes where they will never see it because they're looking for something else.

And just like the barroom virtuoso's audience that slobbered drunk through his great performances, you can be sure contemporary readers flipped these pages with one hand, watching for the good parts, perhaps enjoying a few adjectives that sharpened their fantasies and a four-letter action verb here and there. Their eyes will have glazed over at the plateau stage, and by climax the book might have fallen to the floor.

The story is either carefully crafted or accidentally cohesive to an unusual degree. At no point is the reader jolted out of the fog-world by awkward language or self-conscious construction. Though the narrative is surreal, the web of dream-reality is comprehensive and convincing. I do not believe this happened by accident.

Let's talk about the difficult sexual dynamics of The Mouth Seducers, in particular the violations. The story includes several instances of outright rape and several instances where characters (male as well as female) engage in sex acts that they really don't want, which we would classify as rape these days. A case could be made that the book should be rejected outright for its failure to judge, and in fact the author bends over backwards to tolerate rapists and other criminals. I am willing to accept that the author, an artist and underground sage, understood the implications of his writing, and used the narrative to make a point. Specifically, I imagine the author setting out to answer a question which will take some words to set up.

I don't think I am going too far from the mainstream in saying that as a norm our society treats women as objects. Sex is defined as something designed for male gratification, and the glorious chastity of the vagina is something that is protected like treasure, to be dealt out in exchange for love, ideally, or at least in a barter where it is traded for kindness and protection. A man should not have sexual intercourse with a woman without properly earning it. It is not an actual crime in our country for a woman to have sex for her own pleasure, without making the man pass through rituals of dating and flattery and so on, but we make sure her reputation is battered if she is foolish enough to get caught trying it. Men are thought to crave sex but are bound by custom to earn it by offering promises and so on, besides literally spending money on the woman. Women are thought to put up with sex, out of a sense of duty or obeisance. Oversimplification, yes, but this explains a lot of variance.

So here is the question: what would it be like if the vagina lost its holy glow? If the concept of chastity were melted away, the barter aspect of sex would largely melt away with it. Chastity makes sense in terms of ensuring paternity, though of course women of every culture know how to fake virginity and no man is ever certain that he is the father of any child. Chastity also makes sense where women are property. You don't want another farmer planting his crops in your field, do you? Other than that, the concept does not seem to survive much interrogation. Making the pussy a sanctuary mainly just means that women will feel guilty if they enjoy sex for itself, for the pleasure of orgasms and the give-and-take of engagement with another person. This attitude is "not right."

The problem of rape in our real-world society will never be solved because no one wants to understand why a rapist does what he does. No one wants to follow his thinking. Imagine the Rogerian therapist leaning forward in unconditional empathy, echoing, "Yes, I see, the bitch was asking for it." Nobody wants to be that therapist, and without that we will never know why the rapist does what he does. Because the topic itself is a minefield it is impossible to express thoughts or opinions about it, but The Mouth Seducers features several instances of rape, including violent and coerced rape, none of which elicits judgment or indignation from the narrator or other characters. Rapes are the on-ramp and the off-ramp to the story.

Our protagonist rapes two women, he shares a cigarette with the first one afterwards and contemplates having sex with her, this time with her consent, and the second is simply a random victim of violence. A man can overpower a woman, and so if what he wants is inconsistent with what she wants, on the uncivilized level of The Mouth Seducers, he gets his way. In the later rape scene, where Pete sees an attractive woman and knocks her down and rapes her while she cries and pleads with him to stop, the reader realizes that all the fun that went before can never be. We cannot live like that, it wouldn't work, it would not be a paradise but a hell.This is our narrative doorway back to reality.

On a brighter note, there are a lot of female orgasms in The Mouth Seducers, lots of ladies getting what they want, and not always with the partner's enthusiastic consent.

There is also a scene where Lilli and Edna are kidnapped and forced to have sex with some creeps, to be rescued ... I won't spoil it. There are also scenes where various women are offered as sexual favors, to barter, and in these situations the women rarely complain or seem to see any special harm in it. In this novel the vulva is there for pleasure and by the way, men in The Mouth Seducers know where the clitoris is. Sex is just sex. People want it, and sometimes you can get your way by trading it, even if there is no great pleasure in it for you.

There are also plenty of scenes where the women initiate the action, and Pete or one of the other male characters tries to make sure they are satisfied. Pete as protagonist enjoys their orgasms and is happy to be able to offer them pleasure -- some of the other men are less well equipped in terms of either meat or motion, but generally the woman's pleasure is their objective. I emphasize the rapes because they are a raw point. The author appears to be saying, here is what happens if you drop the barter system; there will be some consequences and one of them, at least in this writer's view, will be the normalization of a kind of crime-of-passion rape.

I have long been intrigued by the fact that it is so hard to write a good song about sex, even a good rock and roll song. It is even harder to write good erotic literature. You can describe body parts and their sexual stimulation in only so many ways. The paradox is that the experience is incredibly rich, with dynamics of doubt and anxiety, pride and affection and all the feelings that come with driving your partner wild and fears of disappointing them, besides the in-the-moment physical pleasure, and consequently any direct articulation about sex in mere words comes out sounding cartoonish or impoverished. Pornography festers with cliches and the more cerebral forms of erotica tend to ornament sex in lofty terms that have little to do with the actual sweaty physical business that really makes sex worth doing.

I found the narrative in The Mouth Seducers to be a sympathetic evocation of the sexuality being described. The narrative mostly follows Pete's thoughts, and he is no intellectual, you might say. But his slang-bound inner monologues express the character's sexual subjectivity as well as any I have read. There is an emotional jolt when a beautiful woman appears, there is an increase in arousal when your partner gets aroused, there is concern about ejaculating before your partner is sated, and a sense of macho pride when she has had the experience of a lifetime. While Pete is more confident than most guys, he is vulnerable and curious. It would not be effective to describe his experiences in terms of the physiological processes that support them, nor in a description of how individuals appear or how they behave. But the hard-rocking fictive sexual slang of The Mouth Seducers is optimized to evoke the experiences of the protagonist and other characters.

Our professional and socially obligated lives are like magnets fixed rigidly to a track and moved through regular orbits, with powerful attractive forces licking out like lightning from one magnet to another as we pass near one another. We are locked into our habits and if we are decent people we give no evidence in our faces or our words that we are being thunderstruck and electrocuted by lightning at random but frequent intervals. If we are really extra-decent and civilized we will not even be aware that any energy has been agitated, our minds will remain entirely preoccupied with the simple calm surface of the visible world. The actions of The Mouth Seducers occur in that thunder-and-lightning world with the veneer of social desirability scalded off.

Of course the world of The Mouth Seducers is literally a nightmare. These characters rob a hotel, roll drunks, steal cars, dodge the fuzz. Nobody has a real job or contributes anything to society, there is no future, no plan, no hope. You can't live like that, this is not a Utopian novel, it is only a message from the Id, reminding you that it's still warping all of humanity and all living things inevitably out of their smug rational pathways, toward orgasmic convergences, whether the tastemakers, trendsetters, and do-gooders approve or not.

I think of humor as a sort of secret communication between infinite souls isolated by the constraints of mortal frustration. A funny person makes you aware that they, like you, would rather play in a more interesting layer of the onion. They would sound stupid saying it directly, but it is not hard to find agreement with the proposition that the world of socially acceptable thought and action is, secretly, a big bore. You know it and I know it, and so our diaphragms pump spastically and we emit the croaking exhalations of laughter together. The lightning fog of The Mouth Seducers laps at the underside of our consciousness in a similar way. All of this is strangely familiar, like that dream of going to work without your pants, which you have never done in reality.

Where humor is a kind of out-in-the-open conspiratorial message between strangers or acquaintances, a shared acknowledgement that this thing has more than one layer to it, sexual communication, often tacit, dives even deeper. I don't know if there are life-changing orgasms, but there are certainly earth-shaking ones, as well as a broad range from popping one off to eye-crossing OMG-what-was-that. And the beauty is that one can penetrate through the darker layers of the onion, through levels of shame and fear and the unfamiliarity of physical sensation in your own body, to a place where the shared experience is that inner sun known as "love."

We are not clear about what love is. Even reasonable, scientifically-minded thinkers entertain - in their private lives -- the opinion that something like fate can bring two soul-mates together, as if mysterious ethereal forces are guiding the entire system into a unique and beautiful structure of paired network nodes. This is how deep the myth of romantic love goes, you would be worse than an atheist if you denied it.

The myth says that you can only experience real love -- the sexual kind of love -- with one other, particular, cosmically-designated partner. While it may be that trust is required, it does not seem part of the myth to believe that the other person has to meet some threshold as far as looks, money, a cool car and suntan, and so on, which are the kinds of criteria we use for filtering the candidate population in search of our predestined soul-mate.

While there is a special connection between Pete and Lilli, it seems evident that love is abundant throughout The Mouth Seducers. Pete loves the women and they love him, and the women love one another and occasionally their feelings for one of the more transitive male characters spill over into the domain we would call loving. But the social connection and the sexual one are not the same. There is a rather hilarious scene where Pete and Lilli are going to leave Edna behind, and Pete takes time to have sex with Edna in the car before they pull away. But once the old Chevy is in gear he does not give her another thought. And we are pretty sure she will find somebody.

Nobody in the novel cares about consent as an expression of respect, but the story is littered with occasions where one character asks the other what they would like, how they would like it, and while there might be a thrill or some fun in pushing someone past their limits, the "good" characters care what their partners like, because they want them to experience pleasure and be happy. In several nonconsensual situations, curiously, the victims, usually but not always women, do not tend to feel they have been harmed or wronged in an especially grievous way. They just don't enjoy the experience very much.

The narrative is delivered in the same folksy dialect as the dialogue, people "lay down" for instance, and the point of view leaps un-self-consciously from character to character in a way that is effective and not distracting, because the narration is interwoven with the plot to produce a unified illusion that the story is being told within the same universe where its actions take place. Also, I should mention that the OCR copy found online is full of wrong letters and tangled paragraphs. These errors actually make it better, it is like smelling the dust rising up in the description of a dirt road. Sometimes you literally can't tell what it says, and the fact that some letters and words don't matter enhances the dreamlike quality of the writing.

There is actually a charming love story here, too. Pete and Lilli have sex with everyone they want yet the connection between them evolves visibly through the story in a subtle and powerful way, given their lizard-brain moral sensibilities. There are no emotional soliloquies here, but you can sense Pete's love for Lilli grow, as he watches out for her and prioritizes her well-being. And her devotion to him comes from a center of love.

The belief that sex is an expression of romantic love has great utilitarian value, it supports a framework upon which we can model marriage and family, and with stable households we can build a robust and prosperous economy. We are not supposed to question the belief, and it is easy to see why. But as the reader floats along with this rootless cast of characters, all of them blurrily oblivious to the theory that sex is supposed to mean you love someone, you watch the sentiment between Pete and Lilli deepen even as they take on other suitors with joy and passion, and the narrative unravels the presumptive woven tapestry of sex and love. "You are mine," the devoted lover declares -- is that really the best we can do? Pete and Lilli do not own one another, each is free and overflowing.