House of Holes: A Book of Raunch

With Fifty Shades of Grey giving pornography a bad name, it's time to turn to Nicholson Baker's The House of Holes. Unlike Fifty Shades of Grey, the prose in House of Holes in skillful, inventive, and playful.This book is fun to read; it is fun for the lighthearted and imaginative sex, and its ever-bubbling imagination and use of language. The plot is episodic. There is an overarching story of the character Dave's Arm reuniting with Dave, but basically it is divided into many short chapter-length adventures with intermittently recurring characters. The House of Holes itself is a fantastic resort estate spacious and sunny, and the managers and staff of the resort play deus ex machina to resolve several crises, often with somewhat ritualistic healing powers. The characters are not stereotypes, but they are not deeply drawn. They are, mostly good-looking, unattached 20- or 30-somethings (no one under age) pining for erotic romance. Men and women are equally present, equally thoughtful and randy, equally initiators of action. They have a range of longings, needs, quirks, and oddities that distinguishes them and involves the reader in various ways. The sex is almost all heterosexual, with a few woman and woman bits, and a few gentle touches of S&M. The text is primarily action described from an omniscient third person point of view but the dialogue has what I would call a flirty, mischievous banality.Here's an excerpt, which describes some paintings, but that gives a feel for the characterization:They [five paintings] were all of women sitting on chairs wearing pants but not wearing anything over their breasts. Some sat relaxedly, some seemed tense. It caught something unusual in their expressions, which were sad and human.This dialogue follows:"I like their faces," Jessica said."Thanks, will you excuse me for a moment? My underpants are wet with my come, and I am just going to take them off and throw them out."Bosco went into the back and reemerged in a few minutes..."Do you offer a modeling fee she asked?' in order to preserve her dignity."Name it," he said."When I modeled for the photographer, he paid me $200."He shook his head. "I'll sell the painting for eight thousand, of which the gallery will take fifty percent. So, I will gross four thousand dollars. Nothing that I paint would exist without your beauty. How about 2000 for you, 2000 for me?"She thought. "That's generous. But sure, yes." He nodded. "Good. Now?"She took a moment to reflect. "I'm kind of sweaty from walking," she said.Baker's imagination and verbal inventiveness are ever present in this book. They are present for instance in the way people arrive at the House of Holes."Any hints on where to find a porthole?""Try the fourth dryer from the left of the laundromat on the corner of 18th St. and Grover Avenue," said Jackie she waved. "Bye."Her face began to blur and liquefied, and then she poured herself down into her straw and was gone.Cardell picked up the straw and look through it. There was no blockage. "Jackie?" He said. The bartender stood watching him, holding a glass. "What just happened?" Cardell said."Your lady friend seems to have been sucked into her straw," the bartender said.That's what I think, too," Cardell said.The bartender shrugged. "It happens, man."Note also the meticulous punctuation.It's hard to write well about actual sex, as any of you who have tried know, and Baker does it with apparent graceful ease.Separation of parts from bodies is a common event in this book, which I don't believe appears in most people's erotic fantasies. Besides arms, and penises, of course, vaginas, and separately clitorises, heads, and other parts are painlessly detached, skillfully maintained, and ritually reunited. I'm sure you'll be happy to hear that the person who obsessively snatches clitorises, has a change of heart and returns them to their owners.In his long and thoughtful review of Fifty Shades of Grey in New York Review of Books [...]), the distinguished critic Tim Parks attributes a substantial part of its popularity to the mixture of guilt and pleasure. That is, the characters and actions are so constructed that people can enjoy mildly S&M sex and at the same time feel bad about what they're doing. Thus, they satisfy themselves in forbidden pleasures while maintaining the moral structure they believe in that sustains their self-image. The House of Holes gets a similar effect in a different way. In the House of Holes, it's all innocent fun.This sense of fun made me puzzle a little about Baker's lengthy and public admiration for John Updike. I have never been comfortable with Updike's attitude towards sex, which seems to me to be squeamish and guilty in a way that denigrates pleasure. I remember two characters talking in his novel Couples, where among some suburban neighbors most of the heterosexual combinations have been guiltily realized. At one point, a mopey woman is dancing with a man who has not shown interest in her, and she asks why he doesn't want to bed her. I answered in my mind: 'because, in Updike, sex is no fun'. Quite the contrary in the House of Holes.

I will begin by saying that this review was twice refused because Amazon's software (or some moron who vets reviews?) believes it runs afoul of their guidelines. Each time I have censored it, because Amazon won't even let me use normal biological terms for a male [thingie] or what a female ["down there"]. Nor does Amazon permit mention of the reproductive act. Thus, here is my review, censored further. Misspellings and euphemisms are intentional.--------House of Holes is a humorous but not particularly erotic send-up of the standards of heterosexual pr*nogr4phy, which is to say that its characters (who exist as mere sketches on which to hang a series of anecdotes about the House of Holes and its, um, inner workings) celebrate and revel in a pr*ntopia where s3x is a purely physical phenomenon which has nothing to do with reproduction (or human biology), few emotional attachments and no real-life negative consequences whatsoever.Here, as in standard heterosexual pr*n, everyone is straight, with some girl-on-girl just as in standard hetero pr*n. Almost all the men have good-looking faces, buff bodies and [big you-know-whats], and almost all the women have large (if not humongous) breasts. [Org4sms] are long and loud; bodily fluids are copious. Everyone wants s3x all the time and conversations quickly devolve into "dirty" talk, some of it rather funny. (Who else but Nicholson Baker would use "Malcolm Gladwell" as a euphemism for a [man's you-know-what]?)Having availed himself of these conventions, however, Baker veers into science fiction. Characters enter and leave the House of Holes by portals to what are clearly different dimensions. S3x in the House of Holes is also bizarre. One character switches [parts] with a woman and lets himself be p3n3trated (in his new [Lady Jane]) by his own [John Thomas]. (He draws the line at going down on his own [Malcolm Gladwell].) Another man gives up his arm for a period of time so that he can temporarily switch his [John Thomas] for a bigger one. A woman shrinks to tiny size and gets stuck in a man's urethra until she is [ej4cul4ted] out. To all of these things, Baker's characters have a "why not try it?" attitude, but the comment of the woman who has s3x with a headless man (his head is being kept in a room by a headmistress) could well sum up the entire book: "This is pretty impressive but pretty nutty."By the end, it made me want to read some good [pr*n].

I cant even begin to explain how banal, puerile and badly written this novel is. It is not witty, not erotic, not satirical, not controversial. It is just a pathetic and shabbily narrated story from a man who seems obsessed with silly names for genitalia that even Viz comic would reject as being too adolescent. This book did, however, inspire me to do something I have never done before - I threw it away before I reached the end as I just couldn't bear to read any more of it. If any reader disagrees strongly with my review, they are most welcome to retrieve my copy of the book from the rubbish bin to the right of the ticket machines at Windsor and Eton Riverside train station ...

Imagine a cross between a hardcore porno and Alice in Wonderland, then throw in some excellent writing and some of the most imaginative descriptions of a man's penis you're ever going to read and you have Nicholson Baker's latest novel "House of Holes". Baker, if you're new to him, is a fantastically wide ranging writer who has written a novel about the hypothetical assassination of George W Bush, a non-fiction book about library cataloguing, two erotic novels, one of which was made famous by Monica Lewinsky after she handed a copy to Bill Clinton (the rest is history), a stream of consciousness non-fiction fan note to John Updike, and a history book highlighting the Allied leaders support of Hitler in the run up to WW2. In short, this writer's output is surprising to say the least.The novel centres around an otherworldy luxury brothel called House of Holes which is located in some dreamscape where the visitors pay extortionate sums of money to have their wildest dreams fulfilled. How they get there is a variety of ways - through a straw in a drink, a washing machine, via the hole in the end of a penis, through someone's fingers when they make an "O" shape. Couple this with scenes such as the opening chapter where a disembodied arm seduces a young woman followed by a woman in a singles bar who lays a silver egg and you realise this is a novel where you don't know what's going to happen next.Other examples are the ways in which customers are punished. Heads are taken off of bodies and then reattached later, meanwhile the headless bodies wander about as normal. Arms and legs are taken off, while genitalia is removed and replaced with the opposite sex's, and so on. All very trippy, I know.Here's a sample paragraph to give you an idea of the kind of inspired writing you get throughout the book: "Chuck's thundertube of d*ckmeat started sliding in... then he slammed into her train station again. His c*ck train was commuting in and out of her p*ssyhole, filling and emptying it by turns, and she loved it...then he made... a sound like a monster in a Japanese monster movie, and she felt a flowering of deep warmth inside her, and the sense of hot sperm that surrounded the prow of his still thrusting peckerd*ckc*ck." (p.20)Baker's said in recent interviews that he had a great time writing the book and it's really obvious to the reader that there is an exuberance in the writing of the strangest and most challenging scenes that really springs off the page at you. Dialogue like "Do you want this ham steak of a Dr D*ck that's so stuffed with sp*nk that I'm ready to blow this swollen sackload all over you?" "Yes Mr F*ckwizard, we want that fully sp*nkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a d*ck" (p.23)I really laughed at several moments in this book. As bizarre as the book got, and if you're a plot driven reader then you'll be better off not picking this up as it's really a series of bizarre scenes merged with tons of sex rather than a story, I stuck with it just for the language. Some highlights include the various names given to penises - "hot w*nky stick" (p.27), "hunky sp*nk pipes" (p.248), "rogue jacquard" (p.206) and best of all "Dave angled out his Malcolm Gladwell" (p.184).There are a number of characters in the book who go through strange adventures and scenarios, I won't go into them here as you'll want to discover them for yourselves, but I will say that apart from the Madam of the house, Lila, none of them were ever really memorably written. It's the situations they find themselves in that stick with you rather than the people involved. Similarly, because there is no plot, the book does become a bit tiresome by the end. I did finish and enjoyed it while it lasted but in the end I'm not sure I could have read it if it were longer than 262 pages.If you've got a good sense of humour and are feeling adventurous, spend some time with this, possibly the most inventive novel of 2011. Read it for the language which is as spicy as the things the characters in the book get up to. You know every year in the UK they have a bad sex award for books? It's for sex scenes written embarrassingly in a work of fiction. I love that Baker saw that and "just a scene? Why not an entire book?" and that he went ahead and wrote it. Because while I did get tired of the endless sex and madness by the end, I'm thankful that somebody like Baker wrote it. 3 stars for the book and an extra star for the balls on this guy. God bless you sir, I hope your inspired work is read in the spirit in which it was offered - fun!

This is a weird one , probably a parody of the insaner reaches of pornography . Or what ? Lot's of very weird filth where cardboard characters usually say "That was nice" or , rarely "That's very nice but no thank you" As Baker has always seemed autistic it is possible that his tongue is not in his cheek , but might be somewhere else. Even as cheery filth it's so mad it just doesn't fit which is a rarity in a book like this.

This is the book I've been looking for all my adult life - finally a porno that doesn't make me cringe or giggle. It may not be the best book I've read, but it's certainly my favourite. I have now ordered a swanky nice hard back copy for my home and I'm keeping the paperback for dipping into, as a travel Bible, if you will.Certainly more entertaining than a travel Bible.I particularly enjoyed that Baker doesn't shy away from the stranger aspects of human sexuality. Still, it's not just a fun book. Many comment on its magic realism, but I also found it reminiscent of Canterbury Tales. There are references to the format and devices of traditional fairy tales.Aside from Baker's lightness and his way with language, at the heart of these stories is usually a fable about the trade-ff between pleasure and whatever we are willing to give up for it. In real life, you might lose a friend or suffer heartbreak. In House of Holes, your bollocks will get lopped off and live in a jam jar before being reattached several weeks later. Puts perspective on things.

This book offers the reader an enjoyable read. The author has adeptly written a humorous novel which is very readable and at times hilarious.