Sexus by Henry MillerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
So, in the 1920s Henry Miller documented all the sex he was having through graphic and detailed play-by-plays. Sometimes he meets up with people in NYC, usually a house or an apartment--irrelevant since he is incapable of creating even a modicum of a setting--while drinks and judgment spew in and out of him. Dear Mr. Miller: When you write in stream-of-consciousness, I read in stream-of-consciousness. I ripped through this 600 page nightmare in a week. Tighten it up. You're not Joyce. Hell, Joyce wasn't even Joyce.
Miller has managed to write a whole loose, baggy monster articulating my pet peeve: people you don't care about telling you boring stories about other people you don't know. That's what this felt like: a long-winded anecdote saturated in New Yorkaphilia rubbish.
Here is a crap excerpt suggesting the crappiness of this piece of crap: "she would smile that melancholy, wistful smile of the hypochondriac". I am not familiar with this smile. In fact, this seems like a technique which desperately attaches a descriptor to an otherwise innocuous object in an effort to create an edgy perspective. I've never known a hypochondriac to have any wistfulness cloaked in a smile. Failed metaphor.
Despite this, but without evoking enough pleasure to give more than a two-star rating, I enjoyed some sentences. These barely shining gems cannot save this stagnant quagmire of pedantic and inorganic shock-for-shock's sake 'literature':
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty."
"In ten years of sporadic efforts I had managed to write a million words or so. You might as well say--a million blades of grass. To call attention to this ragged lawn was humiliating."
On the Tao Te Ching: "If I had read it I wouldn't need to ask him any questions--nor in all probability would be sitting in his garden waiting for a woman named Mara. Had I been intelligent enough to have read that most illustrious and most elliptical piece of ancient wisdom I would have been spared a great many woes that befell me and which I am now about to relate"
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