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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Susan Minot's new book, "Rapture," may put many women off the idea of giving the next blow job.
Feb 25, 2002 | Susan Minot thinks too much.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter ("Evening," 1998; Bertolucci's 1996 film "Stealing Beauty"). But it can get in the way when it comes to the subject of her latest book, "Rapture." The 116-page novella documents a 12-minute blow job, in Manhattan, between two on-again/off-again lovers.
In oral-sex prose circles, "Rapture" is matched only by Harold Brodkey's epic short story "Innocence," wherein a young male protagonist gives an account of his struggles to bring a so-called frigid girl to orgasm using his yap.
"But mostly Brodkey's narrator is just thinking about the girl," Minot says over the phone from her home on an island off the coast of Maine. "Him trying to get her to have an orgasm. What's going on in his mind? I don't know if we're really getting the story." Then she adds, "Men never write about themselves when they describe sex. Why didn't James Joyce write Molly Bloom's soliloquy from a man's point of view? I don't think men really want to explain themselves."
So Minot threw down the gauntlet, and examined both the male and female reactions to getting and giving head. We'll start with Minot's blowee, Benjamin, an indie film producer in his 20s who is having an afternoon suck by his former production designer, Kay. He sits back on Kay's bed and tries to enjoy the "pleasant sensation" of her wet mouth, but the sensations are not "making it up to his head." He's thinking about other times when he was thinking about other women. He's thinking about how often he has sexually and emotionally betrayed Kay. He's thinking about his well-heeled fiancée, Vanessa. He hears a distant plane and considers that one seldom notices planes flying over Manhattan. ("Rapture" was written pre-Sept. 11.) "I couldn't have written that now," Minot says. "It would be a whole different thing."
Benjamin also remembers a Lou Reed song about "playing football for the coach." He pictures other women giving him blow jobs in other situations. (He's just remembering these encounters. He doesn't do something as crude as fantasize that the woman bobbing her head below him is someone else, like say Rosanna Arquette with her delicious pouty lips.) Not that Benjamin doesn't think about movie stars while Kay is going down. He pictures Monica Vitti's high heels in "L'Avventura." He pictures a grimacing male head from some old Ed Wood movie.
OK, let's go with that for a moment. Let's say it is possible for a healthy man to consider an Ed Wood movie during a heterosexual blow job. How did Susan Minot come up with that image? What research did she do to get into a man's head?
"I asked around," Minot says. "You try to pick details up here and there. The sexes have different attitudes toward sex. The sexes have different anatomies -- that's no big surprise -- there's going to be differences. But what exactly are they?"
Well, Ben does seem to do an awful lot of daydreaming for a man in his position, I venture. "That's where you suspend your disbelief a little," Minot says. "There is a lot popped into those 12 minutes. Hopefully eight of them were without thought. I tried to convey the way he tries to empty his mind or the oddness of the way things pop in."
