Readin' DirtyWetlands is the "2 Girls 1 Cup" of novels.
Posted Friday, April 3, 2009, at 5:49 PM ET
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StumbleUponIn order for Wetlands to succeed as a novel, it must make readers align their discomfort with Helen's sexual morality with their revulsion at the literal dirtiness of her dirty bits. She supposes that there's a close relationship between the two, while reality indicates that it's wholly possible to accept the omnivorous appetites of a liberated woman while asking her please not to wipe her hoo-ha on the toilet seat. Only a relative Puritan—only the type of person who would never pick up a book featuring an avocado pit as a marital device—would swallow that jive. (Never mind that there's always room for a controversy around a book like The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's porny Nazi epic; the low-stakes literary controversies of today are cuter than hamsters.) And in an age where the word empowering has modified every sexual activity short of crack-whoring, the novel's debased spume of third-wave feminism ain't worth much.
Of course, there is no need for Wetlands to succeed as a novel, only as a succès de scandale. Roche, whose résumé includes a stint in a band that neither rehearsed nor played out and a tenure as a music-channel VJ, is not really a novelist or a pornographer but a performance artist. One of her kind comes skanking our way once a year or so, most by way of the fine firm of Grove/Atlantic, which dared to publish the Marquis de Sade, The Story of O, and Tropic of Cancer in the days of Grove publisher Barney Rosset and has now developed a subspecialty in highbrow smut by European women.
Looking in the most obscure corner of the Grove/Atlantic library, you might notice that the publishing house has imported such hits as 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, an "erotic coming-of-age novel" crafted by a Sicilian authoress of jailbait age; The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a French art critic's Foucauldian analysis of having many trains pulled upon her; and Baise-Moi, a revenge thriller that is somewhat an odd duck in this subgenre as it boasts an actual plot. While studies have shown that every boat on the sea will be floated by something, even Helen's grill tools, these books don't rate as erotica; seldom does anything like an Anaïs Nin fever shiver through them, except perhaps Catherine M., which is kind of hot. On the whole, these books do not intend to arouse but to titillate, and, in this respect, Wetlands is the epitome of the form.
Though it is a literary analogue to "2 Girls, 1 Cup," its shock art might have a sell-by date. On March 19, beneath the headline "A Campaign That Erases a Layer of Euphemisms," the Times reported that "a new campaign for Tampax uses elements that were once unheard-of in ads for tampons and sanitary napkins: candor and even humor." When nothing human is alien to the mass media, this kind of avant-gardism will be revealed to have its head up its own ass.
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