Review of The Mouth Seducers

The Mouth Seducers is no advertisement for the libertine life. These terrible people are stealing things and robbing people, fighting among themselves, lying, they are unintelligent and uneducated, ungrounded, useless. There is constantly conflict and suspicion among them. Even when there is a character you like, you wouldn't want to actually know them in real life. Your daughter would not be safe, nor your silverware.There is no suggestion in this little novel that the reader should walk away from work and family and hit the road with their pants around their ankles.

Instead, the impression after a few hours' reading is that life is already like this, behind the curtains of awareness. The Mouth Seducers does not describe an alternative way to live, it describes a hidden layer of the way we live already. The mundane present is interpenetrated with so much mischief and passion, so much adventure in every ordinary moment, flowing below the visible display of the world, and we well-behaved citizens miss it in our naive decency and goodness.

I do want to comment on the final rape in the book. It is gratuitous, pointless, not fun; this is just a criminal act, as we think of it in our daily life here in the real world. In this story the event serves to jolt the reader back to reality, it makes you start looking around for an exit sign. If you thought it would be fun to wander around in an erotic fog, melting into inconsequential sexual encounters, this makes you think again. The innocent victim is clearly traumatized, and her trauma is clearly justifiable; this is not fun any more. Because of it the central characters have to leave town quick. They do not dwell on the fast, knockdown rape or talk about it, but it ruins the fantasy for the reader, in what I believe is a well-considered literary device. The ugliness prepares you to proceed a few more pages through a final chapter and put the book down with a sense of relief and of gratitude that real life isn't like that.

Now the obvious question is why I have devoted so much thought to a throwaway porn novel from half a century ago. Primarily, I was simply surprised by the novel and its implications. I was looking for some mindless diversion for my commute and ended up pondering how our social and personal lives are woven into libidinous fields and alternative cultural myths, prompted by this surprising little piece of nonsense.

There is a notion of seeing the universe in a speck of dust, and the analogous but unrelated notion of finding a diamond in a pile of shit. We expect to see glory, say, in the stained-glassed bars of sun rays filtering through the atmospheric contaminants in a grand old church, or in the interwoven themes of a majestic and time-tested symphony. And we may expect diamonds at a gala reception. But the pile of shit can contain something spiritually uplifting, too.

Most pornography has nothing to offer the existentially starved cosmic pilgrim soul. Most of it is there for escapism and wish-fulfillment, and to offer utility so the imagination does not have to work so hard when one desires to reduce the pressure of one's reproductive load. Similarly, most piles of shit do not have diamonds in them.

But any one of them might. The Mouth Seducers for instance offers a lot of mental stimulation and a kind of gift of wonderment as you encounter one surprise after another. It is totally unexpected.

In sum, I do not recommend this book. I have spoiled the surprise and do not want you to download and read it, as I did. You already know it's there, you don't need to see for yourself. If you read it you will either shiver with gratitude to me or you will find that it falls so far below your now-inflated expectations that you will call me a liar or a fraud, and I don't want that.

Here's what would be better. Go download your own trash and read it. Allow yourself to wallow in the absolutely pointless accounts of physical acts that you would never attempt, or be capable of, motorcycle club gangbangs or farmboy twins with huge cocks, cheerleaders on the fifty-yard-line. Read a dozen or a hundred of these dead-eyed, banal things, just for the fun of it. Learn to love the cheapness and the desolation of it. Maybe you too will find a diamond. You probably will not, but it could happen.