Free In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe Page A

walk a fine, difficult line between darkness, humor, and lust, and somehow the male hero emerges from all the comic clauses breathless, glorified. There is in these scenes rage, revenge, and some garden-variety sexism, but they are—in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence—charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful, eloquent, and repugnant all at once. One does not have to like Roth, or Zuckerman, or Portnoy, to admire the intensely narrated spectacle of their sexual adventures. Part of the suspense of a Roth passage, the tautness, the brilliance, the bravado, in the sentences themselves, the high-wire performance of his prose, is how infuriating and ugly and vain he can be without losing his readers (and then every now and then he actually goes ahead and loses them).
    In 1960, the twenty-eight-year-old Updike solidified his emerging reputation as the author of eerily beautiful stories with his novel
Rabbit, Run
, about a lanky former basketball player turned kitchen utensil salesman, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, who runs off from his family, has sex with a plump and promiscuous mistress, and comes home to a wife who has drunkenly drowned their newborn baby. A few years later, Norman Mailer told Updike he should get back to the whorehouse and stop worryingabout his prose style. But that was Updike’s unnerving gift: to be frank and aestheticizing all at once, to do poetry
and
whorehouse. In
Couples
, a graphic description of oral sex includes “the floral surfaces of her mouth.” In
Rabbit, Run
, we read of “lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between. Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva.” The hallmark of Updike’s sex scenes is the mingling of his usual brutal realism with a stepped-up rapture, a harsh scrutiny combined with prettiness. Everything is rose, milky, lilac, and then suddenly it is not.
    For Rabbit, as for many Updike characters, sex offers an escape, an alternate life—a reprieve, even, in its finest moments, from mortality. In the
Time
cover story, Updike describes adultery as an “imaginative quest.” In
Marry Me
, among other books, he expands on the theme that leaving one marriage for another doesn’t resolve our deeper malaise, but he is interested in the motion, in the fantasy, in the impulse toward renewal: it is Rabbit running that he loves. As one of the characters in
Couples
puts it, adultery “is a way of giving yourself adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.”
    Saul Bellow shared Updike’s interest in sexual adventuring, in a great, splashy, colorful comic-book war between men and women. Moses Herzog, he writes, “will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.” Bellow’s novels are populated with dark, voluptuous, generous, maybe foreign Renatas and Ramonas, who are mistresses; and then there are the wives, shrewish, smart, treacherous, angular. While his sex scenes are generally more gentlemanly than those of Roth et al., he manages to get across something of his tussle with these big, fleshy, larger-than-life ladies: “Ramona had not learned those erotic monkey-shines in amanual, but in adventure, in confusion, and at times probably with a sinking heart, in brutal and often alien embraces.”
    In his disordered, sprawling novels, Mailer takes a hopped-up, quasi-religious view of sex, with flights of D. H. Lawrence–inspired mysticism and a special interest in sodomy. In
An American Dream
, he describes a woman’s genitals: “It was no graveyard now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.”
    Mailer’s most controversial obsession is the violence in sex, the urge toward domination in its extreme. A sampling: “I wounded her, I knew it,