Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Not all the women in Almond's stories are purely interested in having their men go down under. Take Basha in his story "Run Away, My Pale Love":
"Basha wanted nothing to do with clitoral stimulation, tricky positioning, languorous gazes. Put it in, was her agenda. Let the flesh speak. Her face went rubbery. She took on the aspect of a madwoman plucked from one of Hogarth's Bedlam prints, ready to tear her hair, throw shit, which pleased me, as did her internal muscles, which yielded in rings of contraction ..."
When they are done, Almond's character surveys Basha on his bed and thinks, "Her body looked like something tossed ashore."
Women's bodies aren't the only things Almond likes to toss ashore. He also likes to toss metaphors. Throughout his stories, the descriptions of his women are as interesting as the description of the sex his characters have with them.
Ling in "The Body in Extremis" is a perfect example:
"Her features were broad and sort of gummy. Her nose looked like a lump of clay that had been flattened by someone's thumb." Or this: "Her lips were fat but nicely shaped. They sat on her face like rain-puffed blossoms." And: "Her nipples budded out from a chest that was nearly flat. They were keenly sensitive, and slightly larger at the tip than the base, like Frankenstein's bolts."
But my favorite metaphor occurs in a story called "Valentino." Here's how a senior in high school refers to a schoolmate who's saving herself for the right guy: "The whole time she's waiting, see, she's getting more and more lathered up. She's like a bottle of Dom Perignon that's been shaken for months, right? So when she finally gets popped -- kaboom."
Almond's characters range from adolescents to seniors, but the truth about sex never seems to change no matter what generation's voice he speaks with. In his story "Valentino," one of the characters, Holden, does an unforgettable (if a bit Salingeresque) rant on the tyranny of beauty, its lottery-like fraternity:
"You can't get out of your depth aesthetically. You do that and you're done for ... All men and women are divided along aesthetic lines, see. That's just the way it is. There's maybe twenty, twenty-two such strata. At the top you've got the movie stars and models, okay? Tom Cruise and that skinny bitch he's married to, all those fuckers. Then the soap stars and TV anchors. Then commercial actors, then actual nontelevised attractive people, down to the average, sort of ugly and at the bottom the real sad cases, cleft palates and the like ...
"The trick here is that every person recognizes intuitively where they belong on the beauty gradient. This is the first thing you gauge when you walk into a room. Right? It's like: 'Okay, better than him, worse than him, way better than him.' That's how people know who they're supposed to end up with."
When Holden's friend points out the success of a young woman in the middle of the "beauty gradient" hitting on a guy at the top of it, Holden points out that the guy is drunk and the most the woman will get is a one-nighter with him: "He's got a few beers in him ... Beer can blur the picture, but it can't repaint the lines."
Ouch! The truth hurts, babe, as one of Almond's characters might say. And hurt his characters do. Despite the pyrotechnical writing about bedroom gymnastics, each of Almond's stories is suffused with love invited and denied, betrayal inflicted or endured, tenderness given or withheld, and the whole palette smeared with a charcoal of longing that just makes you ache.
There's so little description of sex -- explicit sex -- in literature today. I think that's partly because we're still a little puritanical about it, partly because no writer with artistic ambition wants critics to rub their chins and ask, "Yes, but is it porn?" But also because it's so hard to do without falling into clichés. Like I said, how many ways can you say the fruit was ripe and juicy? Fortunately, in Almond we've found a new linguist.
