Books: Make-Believe

Make-Believe Alexander Pope must have been wrong, poor chap. The proper study of mankind is not man, but—in current fiction, at any rate—his phallus. Novelists are exploring ever more intimately, not to say enviously, the wondrous achievements of recognized bedroom supermen. In fact, everyone—heroes, authors, readers—seems to be getting rather exhausted. Perhaps that is why so many novels this season deal with sex in its most mechanized and dehumanized form. The dildo is the feature; everybody, apparently, uses an artificial penis, or else needs one badly.

Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (TIME, Feb. 16) depicts a transvestite who tries to make it both as a man and as a woman, and winds up no woman at all and only half a man. Three other new novels share with Myra her/his/its preoccupation—or experimentation—with artificial sex. But unlike Myra, which is redeemed somewhat by Vidal’s satirical skill, these books have the lifeless neutrality of assignments thought up by publishers’ accountants and carried out by literary conscripts. They not only fail to exalt, amuse, enrage, inform, misinform or anesthetize; they also fall short of truly satisfying grubbiness.

Venus Examined, by Robert Kyle (345 pages; Bernard Geis; $5.95), and The Experiment, by Patrick Skene Catling (317 pages; Trident Press; $5.95), give the reader the astonishingly vivid impression that he is listening to sex manuals being read aloud to the thousand strings of Mantovani. Both start with almost identical premises, suggested no doubt by the success of the Kinseyesque novel The Chapman Report and the Masters-Johnson scientific study Human Sexual Response.

Venus Examined assumes that a small, sleazy charitable foundation attempts to grab status in the world of tax-exempt altruism by sponsoring a sex research project. The researcher is bent on filming the orgasm in its natural habitat, using live volunteers and, among other teaching aids, a camera-equipped mechanical phallus. Experiment places its research project, supplied with similar equipment, in a crummy Ohio college. Faculty wives are among the volunteers. Neither Robert Kyle nor Patrick Catling is a hopelessly bad writer, sentence by sentence, although Catling wins the nomination for the silliest line of the year (so far): “Camilla’s cheeks prettily pinkened.”

The Deal, by G. William Marshall (511 pages; Bartholomew House; $6.95) is notable, by contrast, for its more traditional approach. No new-fangled gadgets here; just the plain, old-fashioned dildo. That is understandable, since the plot is a plain, old-fashioned story about the raunchy movie world. The hero is “the Baron,” Hollywood’s No. 1 superstar. He has a “tremendous problem.” He is forever being “laughed out of bedrooms,” so he asks the boys over an makeup to fashion a substitute artifact for him. He kills a girl with it.

Perhaps the most interesting fact about this limpid novel is that the author is Ginger Rogers’ current husband. “The sordid realism of this book,” he warns leeringly in the foreword, “may generate a feeling of shock.” Promises, promises.