Darling Nikki

In the Cut

Susanna Moore

Vintage

While I wouldn't exactly describe myself as particularly well-read, I will admit that I consciously try to maintain an open mind when it comes to selecting titles. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you'll notice that I prefer fiction to non-fiction, I've got a decidedly unhealthy relationship with fantasy literature, and aside from the occasional memoir, I'm not much for biography.

One of the genres that has been suspiciously absent from my repertoire has been erotica. I'm not sure why it hasn't made the queue (might be the recovering Lutheran in me,) but in the same way that I've never watched a porn flick, smut, as my mother terms it, has never held much appeal. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself quite engaged by In the Cut -- an erotic crime novel set in Giuliani's NYC.

I will not mince words -- the narrator (a cunning linguist) was, at times, quite vulgar. There are no euphemisms for the sex act in this novel -- just raw, dirty words. Maybe it's because the narrator was a woman, but I didn't feel that the female gender was being objectified by the text. In fact, from a characterization perspective, this book is the perfect foil for Chandler's depiction of the sexes. The women in Moore's novel are complicated, well-drawn and curiously detached. The men, on the other hand, are willful creatures controlled by passions and motivated by desire. The inversion of standard sexual convention was quite intriguing and to be candid the ending to this novel was brilliantly done. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this genre any time soon, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself. Three anima/animus out of five.