The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
once heard a story about a woman who visited a sex club in California. She did it out of curiosity, to witness something decadent and intriguing, to have a bad-girl moment. But when she stepped, fully clothed, into the club's "heterosexual area," she realized that she was the only woman in the room. Almost immediately, she was surrounded by a group of pimply, masturbating men lumbering toward her, penises in hand, panting, cloudy-eyed, like a mob of semen-spurting zombies. She fled in horror.
But what if she hadn't? What if she had said to herself, "Oui, this is for me, you marvelous herd of penises. This is a life without barriers! Give to me now incessant and slightly painful hours of use!" And then, what if she had closed her eyes, spread herself out on a table, and let all those creepy guys fuck her and fuck her? Then we would probably be somewhere in the interior world of Catherine Millet, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a brittle, distant memoir of a voracious and oddly passive erotic life filled with orgies, swinging and various other forms of sex al fresco. [A note of context here: Millet is the editor of France's noted Art Press magazine; an American equivalent to her confessional would be Charles McGrath, editor of The New York Times Book Review, admitting that he's secretly into sploshing.]
Millet has screwed thousands of men, but she can only remember the names of about forty-nine. She achieved this by attaching herself to men who would escort her to sex clubs and to various parks in Paris where anonymous gang bangs were organized. She wasn't much interested in the faces of her partners (in describing one series of encounters, she blithely refers to "the relay of faceless bodies behind car doors"), and all preliminaries annoyed her, especially conversation. To hear her tell it, she liked nothing more than to strip off her clothes and get right down to penetration. On one occasion, Millet jumped out of her car and did it against a cinderblock wall while four guys held her up by her armpits and knees. Later, men lined up outside a van and did it with her one at a time. She did it for hours on "rough-hewn tables" at sex clubs: "Always the same configuration," she writes. "Hands running over my body, me grabbing at cocks, turning my head from left to right to suck, while other cocks rammed into me, up toward my belly. Twenty could take turns in an evening."
When she wasn't on her back, Millet worked as an art critic, and in this memoir she turns her critical eye to her own life of "absolute sexual freedom," dissecting it, unpeeling its layers, comparing it to various works-on-paper. She's fond of the color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Yves Klein, who simultaneously "open space up" and then "seal it again" which apparently is a lot like having sex outdoors, if you think about it really, really hard. Millet likes to think about such things really hard, but she tends to pick up ideas and drop them as quickly as sexual partners. Consequently, despite her high tone, she ends up arranging her history according to the standard categories of truth-or-dare virginity lost, numbers of men, places, guys from foreign lands, encounters with women, and so on.
At least Millet seems sincerely intent not to leave anything out. For example, she doesn't hesitate to tell us how, during one lesbian encounter, "I stretched my tongue so far I almost tore its root, the better to dive into the extraordinary softness of her opening." And what could be more fascinating, at least in theory? An articulate libertine bedding thousands of men, including unwashed fat ones, sometimes under trees, or on the floor, or in an empty soccer stadium, and then turning her finely honed critical mind to these endeavors?
But the truth is that this book is painfully boring. I own a manual that illustrates the artificial insemination of dogs that is hotter than this. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is afflicted by all the worst aspects of porn: it's repetitive; it lacks humor, narrative, characters and graceful language. The translation, provided by relative newcomer Adriana Hunter, is deadly; it may be that Millet's original French is convoluted as well. In any case, Millet's analysis of her sexual awakenings has all the spice of a discourse on Vulcan mating practices. The only way to decipher some of these sentences is to recite them in a robotic monotone: "When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude passing from one partner to another."
There's an unsettling disjunction here between the fevered, humid activities being described and Millet's dry, academic prose her writing style has the removed quality of an accident victim's account to police, or at its very best, a well-organized school report: "I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which, for years, I put my anus and, as frequently, if not more so, my vagina." Things get more intriguing when Millet stops thinking and recalls specific orgy scenes this is her oeuvre, after all. But these passages fly by with such scant embellishment that they have the staccato feel of an outline: "I formed a bridge between the two men. After a few minutes they changed places. They both came, one in my cunt, the other in my mouth." Millet tells all in such isolated bursts, periodically swerving into overheated, faux intellectual vagina-speak (" . . . the atmosphere that embraces the vastness of the world adheres to the surface of my skin like myriad tiny suction cups") that even though page after page describes her being plugged in every orifice, coated in ejaculate, writhing, fantasizing, licking unwashed crevices, the effect is that somehow there is just not enough sex. Reading Millet's memoir is not like plunging into one woman's complex erotic mind; it's like listening to someone with Attention Deficit Disorder tell a fairy tale.
It doesn't help that even her steady sex buddies the guys who set up the orgies are frequently named but rarely described. Appearing at irregular intervals are a Claude, an Eric, a Gilbert, a Paul. They have penises that are "well-proportioned," "sturdy," or "the tool of a giant," but the author gives us so little above-the-waist detail that it becomes difficult to match the member to the man. "Ringo's dick was more like Claude's, the shy boy's more like André's, the student's belonged to a category that I would recognize later: those that, although not necessarily larger, are covered in a thicker outer layer, making them feel immediately more substantial in the hand."
Ultimately, it's Millet's weird fuckdoll passivity that drains the last bit of spark from this memoir. There is no desire lighting up the page, zero lust she's almost pathologically disinterested in her sexual partners. "I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man," she writes. "I would take my cue from the relationship one had with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sex were almost two separate activities." Unlike modern sex-positive heroines like Annie Sprinkle, the plucky porn star Nina Hartley or even the cartoonishly voracious Samantha of Sex in the City, Catherine Millet abdicates all responsibility and sexual choice to her male protectors. It's this spineless, childlike portrait that Millet paints of herself, coupled with her odd inability to conceive of other human beings as anything more than a collection of parts, that makes The Sexual Life of Catherine M. feel so remarkably disjointed and flat. It's more a series of sexual fragments than the depiction of a full and true sexual life. Ultimately, Millet proves that she isn't just easy she's lazy. n°
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
