Books
by Fernanda Moore
Kitchen Kama Sutra: 50 Ways to Seduce Each Other Outside the Bedroom By Alex Williams (Three Rivers Press, 128 pp., $12.95)
In October 2004, The New York Times launched a popular new column called “Modern Love.” This year, just in time for Valentine’s Day, the anthology Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit and Devotion ensures that the literary Romeo or Juliet has a perfect volume to bestow. Daniel Jones, editor both of the column and the anthology, attempts to sell this non-gimmicky book in a very gimmicky way, pulling out all the stops in the first paragraph of his introduction: “Online dating. Gay marriage. No-Fault Divorce. Viagra. Sperm banks. Text-messaging. Internet adoption. Blogging. MySpace. YouTube. Psychopharmacology. Cyberpornography. Trophy husbands. Breadwinner wives. Microchipped children. Cellular linked lives.” Happily for those less interested in Modern and more interested in Love, this excellent collection could hold its own in any decade—indeed, in any library devoted to devotion.
The book is divided into six parts: Seeking, Finding, Breeding, Staying, Leaving and the mildly mystifying “Bound: Family Ties”—a miscellany of essays too eclectic for any single category yet too poignant and well-written to be excluded. In this final section is Brendan Halpin’s extraordinary “Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive,” an elegy about his wife, who died of breast cancer, and love letter to his girlfriend, whom, an addendum to the original article explains, he recently married. (The book’s occasional postscripts—updates on how things played out post-Times—will delight readers who remember the original features.) Halpin’s essay is a masterpiece—the article a weary editor, faced with hundreds of submissions about online dating every week, must dream of receiving. But it’s not the only gem.
Consider the opening piece, Steve Friedman’s “No? No? No? Let Me Read Between the Lines”: “She dumped me,” Friedman begins. “But there is no villain here. My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. THERE IS NO VILLAIN HERE. There is no green-eyed, wasp-waisted, pillow-breasted, sneering-queen-of-the-damned villain who dumped me so swiftly and with such imperious, frigid beauty that I experienced chest pains and shortness of breath, leading to something called a Cardiolyte stress test, which I’ve just discovered my insurance company may not pay for and which has left me not only miserable and lonely and occasionally sobbing in public bathrooms but also about six thousand dollars in debt.”
Friedman’s hilarious ode to rejection kicks off a string of homages to love in practically every permutation. Jones has managed the extraordinary: not only has he rounded up a mind-boggling array of writers, from the famous (sex columnist Dan Savage) to the unknown (including Frank Paiva, 18 when his essay was published), but the sheer variety of amorous experience described in his column’s two-year history is astonishing.
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The essays cover everything from adoption to Alzheimer’s to abandonment, describing love affairs that range from platonic to passionate, polyamorous to parental. There’s Ayelet Waldman’s succès de scandale, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” in which she confesses that her love for her husband trumps her affection for her kids. Jean Hanff Korelitz’s “Sleeping with the Guitar Player” brilliantly charts her appalled amusement at her husband’s midlife transformation from Princeton professor to amateur guitar virtuoso. Nashvillian Katie Allison Granju’s nightmarish “Losing Custody of My Hope” describes her husband’s vicious attempt to gain custody of their three children by declaring Granju—who not only raised their kids as an at-home mom, but also writes books on parenting for a living—an unfit mother. And Renee Watabe, in “A Leap of Faith,” gracefully explains a situation few people can imagine: her marriage to a stranger chosen by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Not every piece is a stunner, and any collection of similarly themed and formatted articles risks seeming a bit canned. The lesser essays follow nearly identical narrative arcs, invariably ending on a note of bittersweet ambivalence. “In many ways, it used to be my life. I miss it still. And I don’t”—the actual conclusion to Helaine Olen’s “The New Nanny Diaries Are Online”—could be a template for several other pieces whose writers seemed uncertain, in the end, just what their interesting forays into Modern Love really meant. No matter. In this heart-shaped box of literary chocolates, the delicious morsels far outnumber the unsatisfying ones.
Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion Edited by Daniel Jones (Three Rivers Press, 373 pp., $ 14.95)
Any reader who’s dipped into, say, the 1883 Sir Richard Burton translation of Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra might instinctively recoil from Alex Williams’ Kitchen Kama Sutra: 50 Ways to Seduce Each Other Outside the Bedroom. Which is too bad, because despite its off-putting cover (a smarmy nude couple entwined behind—yuck—a half-tossed salad) the book itself is pretty hot.
Williams, touted on the back cover as a “tantric sexpert,” gets the tone exactly right. If Sir Richard’s version of Vatsayana veers from the disturbing (Congresses of Deer, Mares, Herds of Cows) to the alarming (Splitting of Bamboo, Blow of a Boar, The Pair of Tongs), Williams strikes just the proper note between hippie and hipster. Sure, she buys into the whole yoni and lingam thing. But her nudges toward the perverse are always palatable, and they’re leavened with plenty of humor and common sense.
Here’s her take on a pre-dinner party quickie, for instance: “Invite your friends around, and, just before they are due to arrive, take your partner on the table, by the stove, against the refrigerator. But don’t bring him to climax.” OK, fine, who couldn’t think of that. But a salacious quote from Vatsayana follows—not the Sir Richard translation, by the way—and the instructions that come next perfectly split the difference between saccharine and de trop: “Rage, but, however passionate you are, remain in control. Hold him inside you and watch him carefully. Focus: take him to the brink. Do not let him come.”
Each of the book’s scenarios is presented in pithy, no-nonsense fashion. While some situations will no doubt appeal more than others (some might balk at being intercepted while walking upstairs; on the other hand, Williams’ suggestions for sex in the shower are absolutely appropriate), taken as a whole, Kitchen Kama Sutra makes a fabulous valentine. It’s probably best sampled rather than read cover to cover. Under pressure of a deadline, this reviewer noticed a few things the casual reader might miss. For example, the book’s unusually stiff binding makes it uncomfortable to hold up with one hand. Which, come to think of it, may be exactly the point.