Erotomania by Francis Levy
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio, Price: $14 (U.S.) paperback, ISBN: 0976389576, Page count: 160 pp., Released Aug. 200
I am fascinated by the secondary materials that accrue around a published book like so much light-scattering dust around a black hole. In a sense, it is this excess material that makes a text visible to the consumer audience. To the observer, a text itself is a closed system, a world secreted between two covers which only signifies itself, at first, through its marketing materials. As a book reviewer, I never simply receive a text, for the plain fact is that I am a hard sell. I’ve got tons to read, little time to do it in, and my reading is never simply about the indulgences of fiction. My reading creates its own secondary cloud of disjecta: reviews. Therefore, a publishing company has got to give me a little more than simple back-cover blurbs. No, if they want to make my words become another mass of molecules revolving around this phenom of a published text, they’ve got to market to me. So I don’t just get a book; I get a book complete with a press release.
As one might imagine, the relationship between a text and its marketing materials is a tense one, fraught with discrepancy and inequity. In the case of Francis Levy’s Erotomania: A Romance, this relationship had done much to inform my reading of the text itself. What originally drew me to the book was the following passage, penned by Levy himself, from the press release:
“My main characters basically are not people at the start of the book. I start with a couple who scent each other out without the delight or restrictions of consciousness and end with a pair of humans who deal with relationship problems. Using writer’s license, I have created animals that turn into people.”
The enticements of the passage were many for this reader. First of all, I was fascinated by the idea of characters that begin as beasts. How would an author attempt to convey the consciousness of an animal? I expected some pretty wildly experimental linguistic pyrotechnics here, for certainly an animal would not think in sentences, right? To back up such a bold claim there’d have to be more than story elements. This kind of project would necessitate a whole new approach to language, I thought, something akin to Burroughs’ cut-ups or the Oulipo S+7 technique. The fact that Levy went on in the marketing material to claim a certain kinship with the work of Dali and Bruñuel [sic] only reinforced this expectation.
And it was this expectation that led to the first of my disappointments with this piece. There is no way in which this is anything like an experimental novel. Its discourse is, throughout, that of any bourgeois realist text, centered on a typical male subjectivity that seems to lead a life of relative leisure. And he seems anything but bestial in the novel’s opening passages. Despite passages of consciousness obliterating sex with the novel’s ingénue, James does a great deal of thinking about the relationship – in addition to meditating on Levi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked, Foucault, film and gourmet food (not to mention inviting a homeless man to crash in his apartment). These all seem like very human occupations to this reader, and while it might be argued that these meditations spring from the protagonist’s already burgeoning humanity, I’d have to ask when, exactly, it was that James was a “mere” beast.
Which leads me to the second of my annoyances with this text: the fact that it revolves around a stereotypical and sex-negative dualism in which sexuality is “bestial” and “relationships” are “human.” Despite James’ recurrent meditations on the transcendent meditative potential of his sexual experiences with Monica, the novel’s overall depiction of sexuality is powerfully negative. Granted, the two are supposedly indulging in an overly obsessive sexuality, but as the only sexually active characters in the novel (excepting a gay chef whose own sexual relationships seem equally obsessive and maladjusted), the portrayal of their carnality as actually physically destructive is somewhat disturbing. (In one admittedly memorable moment, the couple demolishes their apartment building during one typically incendiary fuck session.) In and of itself this sex-catalyzed downward spiral wouldn’t have bothered me too much – indeed, I often think that it is one of the great flaws of literary criticism that it tends to extrapolate singular narrative situations into allegorical representations of authorial opinion – but when combined with the novel’s marketing materials, the Manichaeism of the novel becomes glaringly obvious.
In the marketing, we are essentially told that this is a story of two people learning to truly love each other: “James, the narrator, discovers what it means to commit to, and love a partner. Not too shabby a message.” Considering that the two protagonists eventually undergo psychic and physical changes so drastic as to make their relationship entirely asexual, it seems that Levy is trying to tell us, in the grandest of religious conservative traditions, that sex is bad and love is good – that the two are, in essence, incompatible. That love is, definitively, that emotion felt toward a one-time sexual object when all attraction has been sublimated, or simply eroded by time. All too often in our culture it seems that the idealized love is that shared by individuals who have been rendered by time and/or circumstance completely asexual, and it is this novel’s apparent confirmation of that claim that makes it so disappointing.
Despite the above, I do have one shining hope for this novel: that it truly was Levy’s intention to debunk that claim – that he is consciously attempting to undermine this demonization of sexuality. After all, in the novel’s closing pages, Levy describes James’ and Monica’s new habits – exercise and eating, respectively – in the same negative terms that he described their sexuality. Both individuals’ habits are called “compulsive” and “obsessive,” and are both metaphysically and actually alienating. These descriptors seem enough to indicate that Levy is saying – consciously or not – that the couple’s newfound, supposedly transcendently loving, relationship is indeed as dysfunctional and wrong as their sex life was; that, for whatever reason, these individuals are doomed to a codependent relationship regardless of the nature of its foundation. The fact that both characters were subject to incestuous molestation as children might be an explanation for this woeful fate, but it’s hard to say since Levy spends so little time on either character’s past – indeed, their histories of incest are only alluded to in passing.
But each time I return to the marketing materials, I am forced to contemplate one of two depressing realities. In one, the marketing is a faithful reflection of the book, and Levy really is trotting out another trite cliché about the evils of sex. And in the second, equally depressing reality, Levy is attempting to deny said cliché, but the novel’s marketing scheme lacks the courage of its source’s convictions, and would prefer instead to wrap a revolutionary theme in a nice, pretty, culturally-conformist package for ease of mass consumption. This book comes in a sugar-coated package, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.
