Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. A Review

By Wehttam Tropapar

In September 2022, the anticipated Foreign Agent the Last Chapter arrived on the scene! Sequels are often formulaic and dull compared to first books, but this one is an exception to the rule. By comparison, the original Foreign Agent becomes a prequel –albeit a necessary one. Foreign Agent the Last Chapter is the real story; a masterwork of surreal, absurdist fiction!

I asked Mr. Rapaport how this chef-d’oeuvre came about. I quote his reply in full.

“I hadn’t envisioned any sequel to Foreign Agent, but besides geopolitics, there were two other broad topics I’d always wanted to get into a novel, and for which there was no room in Foreign Agent: religion, specifically the religion of The Urantia Book, and an unusual (I think) take on an alien invasion of Earth.

About four months after the publication of Foreign Agent, while taking a shower (these ideas always seem to hit me in the shower), it suddenly occurred to me that a line in the last chapter of Foreign Agent [Chapter 20 ed], the 1976 crash of an alien ship in Xinjiang (leading twenty years later to the Chinese genetic experiments), along with the fact that the narrator of Foreign Agent is never told, despite his asking several times, exactly why his geopolitical opinions were so valuable to the Chinese, could be the two keys to a new novel.

There remained several problems. How to merge these ideas with all the sex, and how to get the aliens to Earth in a reasonable time. The Urantia Book is not anti-sex, even sex for fun. It is, however, anti-obsession of any kind, including sex, and no one is more obsessed with sex than the novel’s narrator. One of the essays on my blog, Prolegomena to a Future Theology, in which I describe the three pillars of reality, provided the key to solving both problems. Of course, the solution is ridiculous, even absurd from a Urantia Book viewpoint, but other ridiculous ideas have been linked to that book by others so I don’t feel too bad about it.

When I stepped out of that shower, I had the basic idea for the first half of the novel, the buildup to the scene where all the main characters come together. Beyond that, I had no idea what I would do, but I started writing anyway. When I reached that middle, chapter 11, I knew what the end had to be, but still not how to get there. Chapter 12 followed naturally from 11. In chapter 13, I put six words into the mouth of one of my characters (no spoilers). When she spoke those words, I knew how the chasm would be bridged. The rest is history.”

Bearing in mind what Mr. Rapaport says above, there is a shift in the story exactly where he indicates. Chapters 1 through 11 proceed naturally. Beginning in chapter 12, the story becomes a bit unfocused and soon splits into three separate threads. Besides the main line involving the alien invasion (I hope that is not a spoiler, Mr. Rapaport mentions it above), two subthreads appear. Both begin naturally enough rooted in the main thread but end up having little to do with it or with one another except that the narrator must repeatedly traverse all three as the story, memoir-style, moves forward in time. Little is not nothing, however. The effect of each thread on the others is felt through their effect on the narrator, and Mr. Rapaport deftly uses this part of the book to expand on the subject of sex and drugs, in particular opium, introduced in Foreign Agent.

Yet while these chapters are not wasted, indeed they are the novel’s most literary, there is one rather long section, I’ll call it an infrastructure description, that takes up a few pages but ends up not being used anywhere else. I asked Mr. Rapaport about this and he told me those passages begin elevating the significance of two minor characters first introduced in Foreign Agent. He admits he might have done a better (read shorter) job with that section.

I’m not going to do a chapter-by-chapter review as I did with Foreign Agent. That book was a flat story, a single exciting thread from beginning to end. Foreign Agent the Last Chapter is more textured. Even the first eleven chapters describe multiple events occurring in parallel.

This novel, like Foreign Agent, ends with two epilogs, one by Mr. Rapaport and another by two new characters who are instrumental in the main thread. As in the former book, Mr. Rapaport tells me these epilogs are analogous to the photographs displayed at the end of the two movies “Hangover” (2009) and “Hangover 2” (2011). Their purpose is not so much to add comedy, though they are funny, rather to re-highlight comedy already encountered.

I dare not, however, close this review without mentioning the novel’s seminal contribution to literature. Throughout the book, beginning in chapter 1 and in many, though not all, subsequent chapters, Matthew Rapaport himself is discussed in third-person by the narrator and other characters! In short sections of two chapters, Mr. Rapaport speaks to the narrator in the form of replies to emails! Both of these little sections serve to enhance the contrast between Mr. Rapaport’s ideas and what the narrator experiences. There are, Mr. Rapaport keeps reminding me, “no rules in the novel.” I know of no other novelist who embeds him or herself into the novel in this way. In my humble opinion, some significant literary prize, perhaps a Pulitzer, is due Mr. Rapaport for this innovation.

In Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, Mr. Rapaport promised us a more complex and more ridiculous story, exceeding even the absurd limits of Foreign Agent. He has succeeded beyond my expectations on both counts!

The Difference between Erotica and Pornography

From the dictionary.

Erotica: Literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire

Pornography: Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of … activity intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

On various social media platforms I am in touch with writers, many of them, and a not insignificant portion of them (mostly women) write what they call “erotica”. I’ve read a smattering of these books, and what I have found was erotic certainly, but also pornographic. I do not mind pornography though like all other art I think there are better and worse examples of it. I thought it would be interesting to set down what I take to be the difference between the two. Perhaps some interesting discussion will ensue.

There are, of course, many sorts of both erotica and porn divided largely along the lines of who the characters are. I happen to be heterosexual and so my focus throughout will be books of that sort, but there is also some great lesbian erotica (and porn) with which I am familiar, and also male homosexual erotica (and porn) with which I am not. There must be, I assume bisexual, and transsexual variations to be found. The distinction between erotica and porn set out below applies equally to all of these.

Erotica is the broader term. “Erotic literature” is literature in which the story revolves mostly around the characters having sex. This is a general rule, but there are exceptions. Fifty Shades of Grey has a lot of sex in it, but the story is about much more than the characters merely having sex. It is still at least an “erotic novel” because there is enough sex in the tale, the main character dynamics revolve around it, to make it so. Also, like one of my recommendations below, its descriptions here and there touch the pornographic. There are grey areas (no pun intended) in the genre.

Pornographic literature (some would say porn is not literature but I would beg to disagree), like erotica, is mostly about sex. Unlike many stories that qualify as erotic however, pornography is almost always mostly about sex. Sex acts between the characters dominate the story. But what really distinguishes porn from the broader erotica is that the mechanics of the sex act are explicitly described.

In the better pornography I’ve read, the first few sex acts are described in considerable detail, while the description of later acts is shortened up. There is less detail, but also back references (there are various literary approaches to this) to the prior more detailed description with the link between them left to the reader’s imagination. This prevents the reader from getting bored. There are of course many variations in the sex act, but by in large they usually come down to the same core. Literally describing that same core over and over quickly becomes redundant.

That my friends is, in my view, the sum and substance of it. I’ve read many of both types of books, but I will leave you with a few recommendations. On the erotica side “The Education of Don Juan” by Robin Hardy is the greatest purely erotic novel, not pornographic, I’ve ever read. Every part of the story is tuned to sex, but the acts, though very stimulating, are never explicitly described. A close second is not strictly a novel but an autobiography of one very sex-filled year in the life of Anias Ninn. “Henry and June”, pushes the envelope a bit but only here and there briefly, sometimes a single explicit sentence, touches the pornographic.

On the pornographic side, I think much of the better literature was written in the late 19th and early 20th century. “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” (John Cleland), known also as “Fanny Hill” was written in the middle of the 18th century and is considered the first great English pornographic novel. But the best, in my opinion, is “The Black Pearl” by Anonymous (not the other one by Scott O’Dell).

Written in the late 19th or early 20th centuries (its real provenance difficult to determine) it follows many characters who in the beginning have sex (the women) with the main protagonist (Horby, a man) and then go off on adventures all over Europe reporting back to the protagonist on their exploits via letters. Horby of course has his own adventures as well and there is a raft of other characters who were famous artists, play-writes, and others of the English upper classes in the 1880s and 90s. The description of these characters by the protagonist (the story is told in first person) suggests that he was in fact a real person of substance and knew these people intimately.

My favorite line in all pornographic literature comes from this book. One of the women finds herself embroiled in a Satanic cult. Having described (in a letter) in luscious but shortened detail her liaison with the cult’s high priest (witnessed by a circle of initiates, and in which she is a willing participant), she makes perhaps the most pragmatic assessment of Satanism I have ever seen: “Oh Horby!” she declares “This Satanism is just fucking with frills!”

I suppose now you want a few examples? Here are two

Erotica: Clothes shed they embrace. Falling on the mattress, entangled in one another’s bodies, he enters her…

Pornography: … entangled in one another’s bodies the tip of his tumescent gourd finds the moist outer petals of her flower and buries itself to the root in her soaking wet volcanic channel…

You get the idea?

This all leaves me with one further question. Why do women seem, at least in this time of global social media, to be more often successful authors of erotica and pornography than men? But I take leave to address it another time.