This month’s cast of Nerve’s Best Literary Sex Scenes really suck, but this scene, from Julia Slavin’s Carnivore Diet, made me chuckle. It’s been a long day; I needed the laugh.

I led him into the bathroom. I pulled back the curtain. He knelt in the shower. I placed one foot on the side of the tub and stood over him. He looked up at me in the dearest worship. I put my fingers in his hair. Here goes. We resumed our position, though now I was stooped from a stabbing sensation in my gut.

But alas, I couldn’t. I adjusted my stance. He rearranged himself to take the pressure off his ankles. Go. Go, go, go, go. But still, I couldn’t. I pictured the first runoff from a mountain, a melting ice cap, water escaping, a pool in a hollowed rock, rings and ripples, rain dripping from roof tiles, spattering the wet, wet ground.

“Do it, Wendy. Please.”

“Yes, I want to.” The storm was coming. I lowered my hips over him. He rose to meet me. “Could you wait here for one moment?”

“Certainly.”

I got out and turned on the sink. Just a trickle, rain bouncing on a leaf. That always helped when I was at a party and there were people just outside the door. I stepped back into the shower. Nothing happened.

“I’m so excited, Wendy.” Water running off soil, soil so dry it can’t accept the gift of rain.

“Me too, Ben.” Runoff. Water. Irrigation. Get water to the desert and anything will grow. But you’ve got to have water. The crop report. Calling for rain. Birds fluttering their wings in grandma’s birdbath, don’t bring Grandma into this, worms unearthed, washed out from the ground and into the streets.

“Wendy, darling.” Again, he rose up on his knees.

I looked down at my stomach, puffed out from my engorged bladder.

“It’s not working, is it?” Ben leaned back on his heels. “You’re grimacing.”

“I have to go so badly,” I said.

“Do it. On me.”

“I can’t.”

He stood next to me in the shower, stroking my hair.

“This is good for you, Wendy. Dominating me like this. Feeling your power.”

I’d lose him if I couldn’t give him what he wanted.

“Maybe if I tried something other than water or juice,” I said.

“I’ll call room service immediately.” I leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom, my hand on my stomach, panting.

I have a hard time pissing on cue, too. The last time I took a drug test, the nurse actually knocked on the door and asked me if everything was okay. “Yeah, yeah.” Then I stared down at the empty cup and cursed my inability to just get this overwith.

I have a feeling I’d make a bad sperm donor.

Science fiction: too nerdy for its own good?

You see, when it comes to the genre wars, science fiction is at a very curious disadvantage. As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else. It’s a bit like the way members of the Ireland cricket team become English once they reach a certain level.

To see what I mean, try drawing up a list of the best sci-fi authors. If it’s anything like mine when I started thinking about this subject, it will be topped off by names like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick. There’s nothing wrong with any of those writers, of course, no matter what Philip K. Dick himself may say to the contrary. Often they are profoundly interesting. However—and here’s the catch—they’re not half as impressive as the authors on the second list I drew up: Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon.

The thing here is that it took a real shift in thinking to include the latter four writers as sci-fi. Their books all include strong elements of science fiction. There are parallel universes, time shifts, robots, people with names like Zog, Zoyd, Brock Vond, and Dr. Hoffman. There are strange machines and philosophical musings on the nature of reality.

Even so, my first instinct would be to give them some other label, as if their beautiful prose alone has made them transcend the genre.

I think a lot of serious readers often struggle with “overcoming” genre hurdles—I happen to be one of them. For years, I’d dismissed science fiction as “geek lit,” sneering at any novel depicting a planet, alien, or spaceship on the cover. But over the last year or so, my respect for the genre has grown considerably: I loved Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (it’s one of the funniest and oddest books I’ve ever read) and, in rediscovering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the fiction of H. G. Wells, I’ve realized that science fiction, far from being a haven for Star Wars nerds, can actually be more fun and thought-provoking than literary fiction. And why shouldn’t it be? Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction is in a prime position to make us think while inspiring awe and wonder in its nearly-limitless scope.

With this month marking fifty years since Ayn Rand finished writing Atlas Shrugged (a book I’ve yet to read), Mark Skousen examines the author’s philosophy and finds that while the book’s “object … is wholesome,” its ethical basis—which is to say, Rand’s unmitigated disdain for Judeo-Christian values—undermines its teachings.

Rand articulates like no other writer the evils of totalitarianism, interventionism, corporate welfarism, and the socialist mindset. Atlas Shrugged describes in wretched detail how collective “we” thinking and middle-of-the-road interventionism leads a nation down a road to serfdom. No one has written more persuasively about property rights, honest money (a gold-backed dollar), and the right of an individual to safeguard his wealth and property from the agents of coercion (“taxation is theft”). And long before Gordon Gekko, icon of the movie Wall Street, she made greed seem good.

I applaud her effort to counter the negative image of big business as robber barons. Her entrepreneurs are high-minded, principled achievers who relish the competitive edge and have the creative genius to invent exciting new products, manage businesses efficiently, and produce great symphonies without cutting corners. Such actions are often highly risky and financially dangerous and are often met with derision at first. Rand rightly points out that these enterprising leaders are a major cause of economic progress. History is full of examples of “men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.” In the novel, protagonist Hank Reardon defends his philosophy before a court: “I refuse to apologize for my ability—I refuse to apologize for my success—I refuse to apologize for my money.”

But there’s a dark side to Rand’s teachings. Her defense of greed and selfishness, her diatribes against religion and charitable sacrificing for others who are less fortunate, and her criticism of the Judeo-Christian virtues under the guise of rational Objectivism have tarnished her advocacy of unfettered capitalism. Still, Rand’s extreme canard is a brilliant invention that serves as an essential counterpoint in the battle of ideas.

This couldn’t have come at a better time: Susan Sontag’s final essay, written just before her death in 2004, makes a quietly powerful case for the “moral superiority” of the novel.

A great writer of fiction both creates—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms—a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.

But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days …) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge—albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

[...]

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention—a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched. But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding—which is also the understanding of the novelist—to take this in.

About a month ago, one of the books making the rounds was Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?, which reportedly tells readers how discuss books they’ve never read. (In an effort to play along, I wrote a post on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a book I’ve never read.) The London Review of Books now has a short, interesting review of the book in question.

Bayard is not exactly against reading, even though he tells us that he has more or less given it up for himself—a risky admission for a literary academic to make. But since this is no less than the ninth title he’s contributed to the series of which it’s a part—a series appearing under the rubric of Paradoxe, it’s no surprise to learn—reading has perhaps given way to paradox-mongering for a hobby. His point is simply that we care overmuch about dividing the too-many books we live among into the two bald classes of the read and the unread, as if they were the only two classes there are. He can do better. He divides the books he, at any rate, used to live among into four, more nuanced and more realistic categories. There are the books he doesn’t know at all; the books he’s speed-read; the books he’s heard tell of one way or another; and finally the books he’s read but forgotten, as one more victim of what he nicely calls “an irrepressible movement of oblivion.”

If Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves gave the horror genre a postmodern facelift, then Only Revolutions reinvents the road novel while further pushing the limits of experimentation. At first glance, it would seem to be a veritable pastiche of random words strung together and arranged at the author’s leisure, but a closer look reveals a book that’s more controlled than its predecessor: the book is exactly 360 pages long, with every page containing ninety words. Even the title wasn’t pulled from a hat: in keeping with the “revolution” theme of the book, the publisher suggests alternating between narratives, reading eight pages of one story, then turning the book upside-down (or right-side up, depending on how you look at it) and reading eight pages of the other story.

And it’s a story that quite literally comes full circle. Where House of Leaves seemed to pay more attention to form than story, Only Revolutions juggles form, story, and language with aplomb. Sam and Hailey, both “allmighty sixteen and freeeeee,” are essentially telling the same story, but it’s the little things that separate the two narratives. Sam is described as having “green eyes flecked with gold,” so every O in Sam’s story is green; flip over to Hailey’s story and you’re given a girl who has ”gold eyes flecked with green,” so every O in her story is gold. (And when it comes to the human body, is there another organ that’s as perfectly round as the eye?)

To be sure, Only Revolutions is an ambitious novel that takes postmodernism to new heights, but it’s also more subtle than House of Leaves. Here, Danielewski pays careful—some might even say obsessive—attention to language; Only Revolutions isn’t a novel so much as an epic poem, replete with stanzas, alliteration, rhymes, and a head-spinning array of invented and mishmashed words, much like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Eventually a chill. Patrons dwindle.
Seatings for lunches, dinners, slim.
—What did you do? snorts
VIARORONACCI. Yeah you.
—Leave her allone, Cabrón,
exiting BILL BEEZALI rasps.
I shy back but that’s a bust.
Slicking his hair over, VIARIRONACCI
advances through The St. Louis Cafe,
wending around scattered idlers. Impossible
to duck. All strut & front, slaying
no one with his props, but still
cocky enough to tug on his crotch with
that VIARARONACCI grin: —Want some?
—Tough luck.
Whereupon among these trife peeps,
he slaps me hard across the cheek,
turning me around.
VIAPOPONACCI even more riled
up by my shock and tears:
—You’ve pretty much zip to hold onto here.
All nappy & thin lipped. Purge bag on
stilts. Act now Miss. Cause I’m the shit.
Shack you, stack you, slosh your slit.

Only Revolutions is a exhilarating roadtrip through American history and a beautiful love story that literally makes you forget the outside world—I found myself reading slowly, whispering as I read, savoring the language and wordplay. It’s a book that begs to be read aloud, that leaves you breathless and finally ends with one of the most moving declarations of love in recent memory. Sam and Hailey are hard to keep up with, but if you happen to see them, don’t let them pass you by.

First, the attention-grabber: Jane Austen.

It seems we just can’t get enough of Austen. On Friday, a film about her life—Becoming Jane—opens nationwide. Four adaptations of her novels are due on ITV this year alone and the man who gave us “that” Darcy moment—writer Andrew Davies—is adapting Sense and Sensibility for the BBC.

Last week, Pride and Prejudice topped a poll of the books “we cannot live without” and Penguin is preparing to re-issue all of Austen’s novels to meet the predicted rush for copies after Becoming Jane’s release.

But not everyone is a fully conscripted member of her fan club. Indeed, Austen has a habit of dividing opinion, often down gender-specific lines. So what is it about Austen?

Then the raves.

It’s her creation of characters, the clever dialogue, and the irony with which she writes that makes her stand out from other writers, say experts.

“They are easy to read and have a simplicity that is hard to get as a writer, which Austen worked hard to achieve,” says Professor Janet Todd, the general editor of the nine-volume Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen.

“But it’s a surface simplicity; there is a lot more going on. It combines wish fulfillment with a sense of the unlikelihood of it happening. There is always a modification to the romantic ending which points us back to real life.”

Then the inspiration.

“Those films have made Jane Austen into a brand,” says Brayfield. “I hate them with a passion but you have to admit they do a great job of selling ninteenth-century literature.

“Often my students are only inspired to grapple with Austen after seeing a film of one of her novels with Keira Knightley in it, but at least it’s a way in for them.”

Knightley might also draw in another audience that has issues with Austen—men. It’s by no means a rule, but they don’t usually find period drama an appealing combination of words. While Austen’s wit and irony might appeal, the romance usually does not.

Then the detractors.

“There is no poverty in her novels, no corruption, ambition, wickedness, or war. Yes, her wit is enchanting and her human observations enduringly accurate, but the world she writes about is so tiny. I find it claustrophobic.”

It’s all too graceful and lacks guts, says writer Zoe Williams, who prefers those other ninteenth-century romantic writers—the Brontë sisters.

“I’m not crazy for Austen. The Brontës’ novels are so overheated, so female, you have to look them in the eye when you read them.”

Then the paragraph that makes me laugh (courtesy of Gill Hornby, author of Jane Austen: The Girl with the Magic Pen).

“Her novels are only about romantic love and family life and they are two of the few things that haven’t changed in the world since she was alive. Both things still absorb us and annoy us in equal measure. If she’d written about the Napoleonic Wars, no one would have read her books.”

The Napoleonic Wars indeed.

Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa carried on one the longest and most complicated literary feuds in the history of letters. So what really happened between them?

… Indeed, it is true that García Márquez—whose most renowned works are No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the most commercially successful novel in Spanish since [Miguel de Cervantes'] Don Quixote, the ten million-selling One Hundred Years of Solitude—is an unreconstructed left-winger. His very erstwhile friend, Vargas Llosa, apostatised from his youthful love of Fidel Castro many years back and has since stood as a right-wing candidate in an unsuccessful attempt to become president of Peru. But, while their political views diverged widely, that was not thought to be the cause of the row.

Others have speculated that professional jealousy lay beneath the blow that sparked the feud. Vargas Llosa is the author of The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. But, though he is credited with being—along with García Márquez—one of the pioneers of magic realism, his works are not in the same league as his rival’s. One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely regarded as a defining classic of twentieth-century literature, and García Márquez is believed by many to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

Yet it was not authorial rivalry that began the thirty-one-year-long icy feud. No; according to a new biography of García Márquez, The Journey to the Seed by Dasso Saldivar, the two were fighting over a woman. And though García Márquez is eighty this month, and Vargas Llosa is now seventy, the animosity has not diminished.

They were fighting over a woman? A woman? Actually, the story is more complex than that, one fraught with sex, violence, and politics. It’s too good to pass up.

(Update: Hilarious.)

Joel Whitney interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of the new book Infidel.

Q: In your book, you write: “When people say that the values of Islam are compassion and tolerance and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so. People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist. It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so.”

A: Okay, I can support this assertion with facts. And it’s not only me—for four years now the Arab Human Development Report was being published year in and year out. And the Arab Human Development Report does not take into account research on non-Arab countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia. They only look at the twenty-two so-called Arab countries.

And the three deficits they point to in all of these states—including Iran—there is the lack of freedom, lack of knowledge, and the subjugation of women. And all of the [deficits], all are being supported in the name of Islam. Even an atheist like Saddam Hussein, who in the first decade of his reign was anti-religion, later on when the Americans came in, he put [Islamic phrases] on the flag, and he started to just continue oppressing his own people, but this time in the name of Islam.

I tried to explain in the book that I used to be a member of the [Muslim] Brotherhood movement. And listening to bin Laden, and listening to al-Qaeda, listening to all these [extremists], the only reason these people win from the moderates is because what they are saying is in the Quran and what the prophet wanted and how they are acting is all consistent.

So the only way to preserve Islam on the one hand and counter them as moderate Muslims is to say, “Well you guys are right. All this stuff is in the Quran. The Quran is written by human beings. And as human beings, endowed with reason, we can change this because we don’t think that it’s beneficial. Or even if we are not going to change it, we are going to believe that in its context, because the Quran was written in a different time, in a different context, in a different age. We’re going to move on; we’re going to take from the Quran those things that we think are compatible with human hearts.” But the minute you start doing that, that’s when hell comes in, and the radicals will say, “Oh, but then you are not a believer because you are refuting what God says.”

So that’s why I say in the book, “Okay, in that case, let’s review the individual relationship between God or the concept of God and the individual.” … If we only see God as an entity that we submit to, but like other religions—and I think Jews have done this, Christians have done this; certainly Protestants have done this—instead, see God as an entity that you can argue with, and that means propagating the idea that if you argue with God he won’t send you to hell.

[...]

Q: True or false: there’s anger in your movement away from Islam?

A: Of course there is an anger. If people’s hands are cut off … this jihadi bullshit is like, “Let’s all go back to the seventh century.” Now I don’t want to go back to the seventh century. And I know that many others like me in Islam don’t want to go back. But all these people are blackmailed into the dogma that you don’t argue with God. So you have to take the Quran literally as the word of God forever, it never moves. You follow the example of the prophet as a moral guide, always.

Now the prophet has done a number of wonderful things and he has said a number of good things. But measured by the standards of today, the prophet has also done a number of very immoral things: violence, his attitude towards women, gays, and also not leaving some sort of organization to form and reform. The sexual morality, the tribal … Islam was founded in the Arab deserts in a tribal setting. In such a tribal setting the most important asset that you have are men [and] boys, because they defend the tribe. The larger you are the more important you are. The whole notion of polygamy and getting as many children as you can and women as you needed … you have to know that the child in your tribe is your child and not someone else’s child. So the notion of women being kept: that’s what the prophet kind of institutionalized in Islam.

Does it make me angry? Yes, it makes me angry, because we Muslims on 9/11—(that’s how I thought of it: we Muslims)—are now flying planes full of people into tall buildings and we are blaming outsiders for all our miseries. And maybe a lot of our miseries have been caused by outsiders. But, please, let’s take a pause and look at what we are doing wrong. And if I see all these fathers and mothers teaching their children to seek knowledge, but don’t go beyond what’s written in the Quran, then wondering why their children are ignorant; they fill their children with all sorts of notions of hell and how they are going to be punished, then saying my child is not creative enough in school—of course this is enraging.

And the way women are treated. What is enraging is not only the treatment but the way it’s so justified in the religion. I translated for women who in the Dutch liberal context are rescued from these situations of abuse who then go back to the argument, I can’t leave him. I have to bear with him because of the hereafter. It says in the Quran: he can beat me when I’m disobedient and I’ve been disobedient. And I’m going to behave myself now. It’s like, “How long are you going to behave yourself?” And she says, “Well, it’s God’s command.” I don’t know if you are not enraged about it. I am enraged about the evangelicals or the Christians here wanting to introduce creationism in the science classes.

Scott Smith’s The Ruins isn’t one of those books that’s supposed to be funny—and, on the surface, it most certainly is not—but it’s so shocking, so horrifying, so painful that I couldn’t help myself: I laughed hysterically. Chalk it up to a defense mechanism, but this is a book that’s so unrelenting that even I, jaded ex-horror fan that I am, found myself gasping, slack-jawed, at the horror scenes. And what’s worse, there are no chapter breaks, so I raced through the book, alternately dreading and looking forward to what Smith had in store.

It’s a simple story that serves no purpose other than shock value: four college graduates—Eric, Jeff, Amy, and Stacy—and two strangers—Mathias and Pablo—all on vacation in Cancún, decide to search for Mathias’s brother, who’s followed a woman to a remote archeological dig around some fabled Mayan ruins. At its core, The Ruins is a survival story, with everything—time, the elements, even the plants—working against them, but Smith’s themes of friendship and trust force you to ask yourself how far you would go to survive. Giving up is easy, but what’s your breaking point? When does giving up become preferrable to survival?

Sure, the plot is pure pulp fiction garbage, but make no mistake: this book is great fun. Smith seems to be taking a masochistic joy in seeing how much pain, both physical and psychological, he can put his characters through. Unlike most horror novelists, however, Smith doesn’t spend much time describing what characters are feeling; he describes what they’re doing, so the novel plays like a movie, with Smith forcing you to watch as they try to extricate themselves from a situation that steadily goes from bad to worse. The Ruins is the perfect summer novel, neither complicated nor particularly original, and the Smith’s simple, unadorned writing style doesn’t draw attention to itself; it merely serves to tell the story in all its painful, horrifying glory.