In a word:  accurate.

In three words:  dirty, dirty, dirty!

But accurately so, and very well done.

I’m not very good at keeping up with quality non-famous fiction writers.  I have my small stock of quality non-famous fiction writers whose new work I will read.  And occasionally someone will recommend a quality non-famous fiction writer, and maybe I’ll give it a shot.  I should make more of a disciplined effort to broaden my horizons, but it’s such a big, scary world.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to keep up with what’s really good since there’s so much mediocre stuff to wade through to find it.

But I’m trying.  I placed myself in St. Mark’s Bookshop.  I told myself I was going to purchase a work of fiction published by an independent publisher.  Before my eyes was a novel published by an independent publisher (do university presses count as “independent”?) with a naked lady on the cover.  I like naked ladies.  Done.

The beautifully named Micheline Aharonian Marcom has won significant awards and fellowships and has been praised by significant publications, but I had never read her work or heard of her before.  My failing.  My loss.  (But will you look at the size of the author’s last name in relation to the novel’s title?  Is Marcom pulling a Lars von Trier there?)

The Mirror in the Well goes a little somethin’ like this: a sex-starved middle-aged wife and mother begins an affair with a married man she does not find attractive, experiences a transformative sexual awakening and is miserable.  We never learn their names and we learn little of their lives outside of their sexual relationship.  Why does she do it?  Forget the cliche-riddled psychological rationales for female infidelity:  simply put, this woman has a hungry c*nt (Marcom uses the word roughly 183 times throughout the course of he novel).  Her sex life is her real life.  Everything else is peripheral, the way time is filled until she is once again eagerly spreading her legs on the floor of her lover’s workshop.  “Pleasure is the reason to live.”  Her actions are simultaneously self-liberating and self-destructive.  By normal middle-class standards, she has ruined her life and she wouldn’t want it any other way.

Porn?  No.  There’s plenty of graphic sex, but the novel is more focused on the raw emotions that lead to and result from all that sex.

The novel is self-referential at times (”135 pages ago, the lover will remove her clothes and she will lie back on the motel bed on L Street and spread her legs and breathe live for this interlude”).  If there was some original significance to the novel’s self-awareness, something other than pointing out the obvious fact that the reader is reading a work of fiction, the significance escaped me.  But this monkey business was not terribly prevalent or intrusive, so there’s not much to complain about.

The male lover is often addressed in the second-person by the narrator, though not always, creating an interesting effect (though I wonder how this effect might work on a female reader).  The language in general is playful enough to be interesting but not so much as to render it meaningless.

Did I eagerly anticipate my next subway ride so that I might return to this woman’s sexual world?  No, not really.  There’s not a story here to call you back, though the reading experience is a fulfilling one.

Did I feel that reading this novel was worth my time?  Yes.  Here is a writer bravely attempting to use language to capture a narrow slice of reality and succeeding.  That is a rare feat, and I am grateful for it.

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