Tag: Fiction

Review: Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote a novel called Pamela. It was about an exceptionally chaste, modest, and stunning young woman of fifteen, and a man, her pursuer, rich, handsome, persistent, and ten years older, the squire Mr. B____. It is what you think, but it doesn’t exactly end the way a modern reader would expect. I’ve reviewed it here, but what happened after Pamela is my subject today.

About a year after Pamela was published, Henry Fielding published his first novel (really a novella, only 55 pages long). Called Shamela, it is a very crude parody of Pamela, and Richardson was not amused. It is also reviewed via the link above.

The next year, 1742, Fielding published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fans of Pamela would have immediately recognized that Joseph and Pamela happen to share the same surname! We learn early on in the novel that Joseph and Pamela are indeed sister and brother (Richardson never mentions a brother). Since born to low family (though when Joseph Andrews takes place Pamela is married to the squire), as Pamela was originally servant to the squire’s mother, Joseph is servant to the sister, who is the squire’s aunt. Welcome to the Booby family. Richardson never alludes to the squire as other than Mr. B____, and he never mentions a brother of his now-bride Pamela, nor an aunt. Fielding makes use of a family invented by Richardson in which to plant his characters. He first calls Mr. B____ Booby in Shamela and brazenly uses it in this novel.

Now, Lady Booby, the aunt employing Joseph, is but recently a widow, said to be a remarkably good-looking woman, about forty. Joseph, at this point, is just over twenty, and Lady Booby has the hots for him, as does Mrs. Slipslop (Fielding’s names can be pretty crude), another of the servants. Joseph is a very handsome and virile-looking young man! If Joseph had been Tom Jones, he might have acceded to both women, but Joseph is as chaste as his sister and rejects them both. They are furious, and the lady fires him, much regretting it throughout the novel.

A good deal of the story is the journey of Joseph and a mentor, Parson Adams, the curate of Joseph’s home parish, from Lady Booby’s summer place to their home parish, along the way meeting up with the one woman Joseph has or will ever love, Fanny, another resident of the parish with whom Joseph grew up. It is also the home parish of Lady Booby (what else could it be?).

Compared to the later Tom Jones (1744), Joseph Andrews is very linear. Things happen along the journey, but each is resolved in turn. There is a big twist near the end, and Lady Booby can taste her conquest of Joseph, who, being brother to Pamela—the squire’s wife—is now an in-law! But the twist untwists through very clever—I can’t believe Fielding came up with all this stuff—manipulation of all the characters, including a pair who otherwise appear only in Richardson’s original novel! In its rather rushed ending, everyone gets what they want, and love triumphs! Even Lady Booby flees to London and meets a dashing officer who makes her forget Joseph—we can only imagine how.

Google tells me that Richardson was “deeply offended” by both Shamela—understandably—and Joseph Andrews—less understandably, writing that it was a “wretched performance,” and that it was only fit “to entertain none but Porters or Watermen.” I’m sure revealing the family name to be Booby was a great part of Richardson’s ire, but come on… Mr. B___? Richardson set himself up for that one! In my view, Joseph Andrews is a very clever take-off from, and not parody of, Pamela. Unlike Shamela, it is not crude (ok, except the name Booby), but clever and very funny.

Book Review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A link to this edition’s real source. Please support her site: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, 1928

Not a novel, but a long essay about women authors, notably novelists, and their historical restrictions. The bottom line is straightforward. Writing takes time. It requires some place, some space, to write in (Jane Austin having the exceptional ability to write in a room often crowded with activity), and also the means (money from one source or another) to sustain oneself while engaged in the process. Historically, Woolf notes, women have had none of these things.

Woolf begins by illustrating the restrictions placed on women’s time and space. While visiting Oxford, she was not allowed into the libraries without a male escort or a letter of recommendation. Late in her essay, she mentions Sappho (a Roman erotic poetess of Lesbos whose work is known today only in fragments) and Shikibu Murasaki, a member of the Japanese Royal Court credited with the world’s first “true novel” (Tale of Genji) in 1050 C.E. We don’t know much about Sappho, but Murasaki’s royal status allowed her the time and space to write an absurdly long novel. But Woolf begins by exploring a few examples of 18th-century female poetry suffused with bitterness about women’s place in the world. 

Moving up, Woolf notes that the 19th century’s four great female novelists, Austin, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, were all childless. Child-rearing, especially when one has more than a couple of them, takes a lot of time unless there is wealth to afford nannies; even then, household management is left mostly to the woman. Why, Woolf asks, did women writers gravitate to novels? Novels were, she surmises, the new form, drama and poetry—including epic poetry—having been worked over by men for a few thousand years, while nonfiction demanded scholarship from which most women were excluded (as in Woolf’s chapter one Oxford story).

Lastly, already in the 20th century’s first quarter, women wrote everything: fiction, nonfiction, stories, drama, and poetry, made possible by fairer property laws, the right to vote, and the ability to work in traditionally male occupations. She wonders whether these changes, while lifting women from the status of chattel, wouldn’t end up thrusting her into a pitiless competition with men across all professional and social spheres? Much of her speculation has come to pass, but Woolf would at least applaud what women writers have achieved. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in each year, there are more published female than male novelists!

A long and delightful literary essay (would Woolf write anything less?) whose lesson can be summarized in two sentences: Writing takes time and requires some space in which to focus. Not until the 20th century did women, beyond a rare few, gain that time and space.

Book Review: Foreign Agent by Matthew Rapaport (2021)

The short version by Wehttam Tropapar

Matthew’s first, rough, and unpolished novel nevertheless delivers all the salacious thrills for which Matthew’s work is known. In addition, this novel, melded into all the pure fiction, contains several “true stories,” however much disguised. The pacing is rapid, slowing only for the sex and, in the novel’s early stage, for descriptions of the narrator’s geopolitical work. The story is utterly implausible. The Chinese will employ and pay the narrator for his geopolitical opinions. In addition, they wish to involve him in certain sex experiments. The reason for the sex is eventually revealed—no, it’s not what you think. The reason for the Chinese interest in his geopolitics is never revealed, despite the narrator repeatedly asking for clarification on that subject.

 All the women in the novel are painted sympathetically with a broad brush, but they are the novel’s rounded characters. About himself, the narrator says a lot in the opening chapters, and his character becomes more fleshed out as we see him react to situations arranged entirely by others. There is no transformation here. He goes along with everything. He is the man who “cannot say no to a woman.” Not until the last chapter does he act independently, and that to protect the women who have put him through this adventure. 

This is not a book of art. There is no deep truth to be discerned, no cogent observations of the human condition to be found, its cunnilingual lessons and observations notwithstanding. Foreign Agent is not a commentary on real life, but something more like a game or rollercoaster ride enjoyed for nothing more than the experience of playing or the thrill of riding.

When Foreign Agent first appeared, I wrote a much longer review to be found here. Matthew told me this was to be his only book, and I thought a chapter-by-chapter summary would stimulate scholarly work. Luckily for the world of pornographic literature, Matthew found a second book—Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter—embedded in the first—my short review linked here.

In 2025 there are four novels. Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter, are closely related. The geopolitical question is answered. The third novel, Cult of Aten, takes up a riff opened in the second book, but is otherwise a story that stands by itself, as does LoveMe Inc., Matthew’s fourth novel. There are links to all their reviews and Amazon connections here in “My Fiction,” a blog page explaining how all of this nonsense came about.

Foreign Agent can be found here on Amazon.

Review: How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding. 

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008) 

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)

Review: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1928 The Kindle edition is only $0.99!!

Woolf is mentioned in so many books on writing fiction that I thought I’d better have a look at her. To the Lighthouse is, I am told, one of her “more approachable” novels. 

So what have we got here? Take any group of ordinary people, a few adults, and children of varying ages. Throw them together in an ordinary scene, say a small neighborhood barbecue on a summer evening. Every one of those people, adults and children, has an “inner life,” observations, thoughts, emotions, sometimes vocalized to others in the group, sometimes only thought. You could write a novel exposing these inner lives over the course of a few hours. James Joyce (Ulysses) does this over the course of a day for one character and then, famously, for his wife at the end of the novel.

In Woolf’s case, the people are the Ramsays: husband, wife, and eight children who own a summer home on the Isle of Wight and, along with a handful of guests (helping to afford the food and a couple of servants), occupy the house summer after summer. The first [almost] two-thirds of the novel takes place over one day, from early afternoon to night. Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life is given the most attention—she is the masterful lynchpin of the whole family—but the mental gyrations of Mr. Ramsay and some of the children and guests, in particular Lily, a wannabe painter, are also explored as they reflect on their own thoughts and interactions with others.

The only “story” here is a planned sail (the Ramsays own a small sailboat) to a lighthouse on a rocky island some distance from their home on the bay. The youngest child, five-year-old James, is very excited about the trip but is traumatized by his father, who cancels it due to an oncoming storm that will make the next day’s sail impossible. They all finally go to sleep.

Turn the page, and ten years have passed. Mrs. Ramsay had died. Presumably natural causes. She was only in her fifties. World War I has come and gone. Andrew, the oldest son, was killed. Rue, the oldest daughter, married and then died in childbirth. The house has been unoccupied for some years.

But people are returning. The first mind Woolf relates is one of the servants charged with cleaning the place up, getting it ready. Mr. Ramsay, his six living children (James is now fifteen), Lily, and Mr. Carmichael, another guest from the old days, and two others arrive. In the novel’s last third, Lily, now in her mid-forties and never married, is the mind most often explored. Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (a daughter), along with two other semi-characters—we never know their real names, only James’ mental meanderings about them—end up sailing to the lighthouse—they make it safely. The mental narratives switch back and forth between Lily on shore trying to paint while watching the boat make its way across the bay, and James and Cam on the sailboat. The boat disappears from Lily’s view, safely reaching the lighthouse island. Lily thinks they must be there by now. Mr. Carmichael vocalizes the same thought. Lily makes one last brushstroke on her painting. The novel ends.

Call me crazy, but aside from Woolf’s masterful word-craft, the novel’s rhythm, her representation of thought’s flow, and the novel’s “realism,” the story is trivial—a “shaggy dog” story. I know, I know. The story is deliberately trivial. The novel is about the characters’ minds and how their occasionally expressed thoughts affect one another. Mrs. Ramsay’s death greatly affects Lily, and likewise—we perceive through Lily—Andrew’s death saddens Mr. Charmichael.  But all the “action” is ordinary, lacking in any drama. Except for Mr. Ramsay—who occasionally shows a temper—the conflicts and contradictions experienced remain locked in mind. 

For my part, reading to experience Woolf’s word-craft—do I dare tackle Ulysses?—is the interesting thing about the novel. It all feels like an exercise. “Class… Write me a sixty-thousand-word study of a handful of characters’ mental ruminations while interacting over ordinary matters that can be anything so long as there is no serious drama acted out between them.” OK, it’s more than a mere exercise. But what is the upshot of it all: people have mental lives that are often full of conflict and emotion, even if what happens between them—behavior—is of little consequence. OK. I concur. Real people are like this. Woolf paints minds with words. In the end, I can appreciate that even if the “story” leaves me flat.

The Novel of Adultery: An Analysis of John Updike’s Couples.

Magic always has a price — (Tag line from “Once Upon a Time” American TV fantasy/adventure 2011-2018)

Couples by John Updike, 1968

I recently learned that “novel of adultery” was a genre unto itself, like “romance,” “horror,” or “fantasy” —terms that might well apply to adultery if we want to be controversial about it. Within the genre are the canonical novels Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence), in which adulterous acts and their consequences are central themes. There is adultery with consequences also in Vanity Fair (Thackeray) and The Age of Innocence (Wharton), but in the former, the real adultery takes place off-stage, and in the latter comes down to nothing more than a kiss. In the nineteenth century, adultery might be nothing more than a married woman (or man) entertaining (even merely walking and talking with) a member of the opposite sex who isn’t her (or his) spouse. 

In our more enlightened times, we are allowed to say much more, and that brings us to Updike, who, in 2008, received a lifetime achievement award “celebrating crude, tasteless, or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature” from Britain’s Bad Sex in Literature committee (Google). Published in 1968, “Couples” takes place in a fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox—a fictional Ipswich, according to Time Magazine—from roughly 1962 to 1965—events are slotted in (the 1963 JFK assassination, for example), orienting us to time’s passage. 

There are ten couples, professionals—a pilot, a dentist, businessmen, scientists, home builders—somewhere between their mid-twenties and early thirties. Most have young children. These are ordinary middle-class American couples. One or another of them hosts parties almost every weekend. They play tennis, three-on-three basketball, golf, ski, and swim together (Tarbox is on the coast) in various combinations. The parties are alcohol fueled (none of these folks appear to be familiar with marijuana or cocaine). Everyone is usually drunk, even the pregnant woman in the group drinks and, like most of the others, smokes cigarettes—this is 1962. 

The novel’s focus is Piet, a builder and husband of Angela, father of two girls, five and about seven years old when the story opens. Updike writes mostly in third-person omniscient, but Piet (and in but one scene, Angela) is the only mind he gets into. The sexual dynamics evolve between the couples, with Piet as the dominant male. With one exception, the only sex narrated (whether in present or past tense) belongs to Piet, who ends up sleeping with five of the women (six counting his wife), three only a few times, two (besides his wife) repeatedly. The exception is a scene late in the novel between Angela and one of the other husbands. All the other sex is communicated through whispered conversations, looks, and behavior observed among the characters. Sometimes what is rumored is not the case (as in real life), but their intuitions are more often accurate.

The group is not a swap club. The affairs are supposed to be secret, but it is impossible to keep such secrets for long among that many drunken people. Shenanigans multiply. Two of the couples begin knowingly swapping partners. One of Piet’s lovers gets pregnant—a big problem in 1963. At least two of the women are bisexual. Jealosies and recriminations erupt. The result, eventually, is the group’s dissolution, Piet’s (and a few others’) divorce, and so on.

Updike writes in the style of 19th-century realists like Flaubert. The novel is 650 pages long. I think easily three hundred and fifty of that are lengthy narrations of scene, dress, homes, decorative tastes, smells, sounds, events (the aforementioned sports), the kids, and so on. Every description comes salted with at least one, and usually more than one, metaphor. Early in the novel, these diversions help to build rounded characters. Later on, they are the “realist fluff.”

The book delivers a good lesson about affairs Updike may not have consciously intended. Where the illicit sex is unencumbered by emotional involvement—other than friendship—the sex has little consequence (not everyone ends up divorcing, and of those who do, most are happier after the fact). Piet, and the women involved, mostly have a good time—read orgasms, though their occurrences are only sometimes noted. But when the sex is encumbered by more serious emotional involvement, there are more serious consequences—even for the sex. One woman never (until a last scene with her near the end of the novel) has an orgasm and yet desperately wants Piet to make love to her whenever it seems to be convenient. Is Piet a bad lover? No. Piet clearly knows his way around a woman’s sex. The problem is all hers. These two, the most “in love,” get into the worst trouble! The lesson: if you’re going to have extra marital sex because your spouse is not delivering in bed, have it for the sake of “good sex” (woman has as many orgasms as she wants and only then does man get his turn) and do not fall in love with your lover.

Is Updike’s realism very real? His characters are varied in psychology and circumstances as real human beings are wont to be. The setting (New England, USA, in the early 1960s) feels pretty real (I am only ten years behind Updike’s characters. I remember the early sixties in suburban New York as a young teenager. My parents had parties!). The “fiction,” if you will, is in the concentration of affairs among this insulated group—albeit always alcohol soused—of ten couples. We hear of no affairs outside the ten but one, late in the novel, when the pilot brags (a second-hand report) of having sex with women at distant ends of international flights. Another good rule for affairs is to have them with people outside your social circle! 

How does Updike’s realism work for the sex? Why the bad sex writing award? Rather than use literal words or conventional metaphors to describe sex objects and actions, Updike extends the technique of excessive metaphorical description to sex: “He thrust upwards, seeking the light.” The upshot is that the metaphors, overly sentimental, cloying, and self-conscious in the service of “scene setting” or “character rounding” realism, become corny in the service of sex. The last thing Updike wants to write is conventional porn, so he casts about for metaphors that aren’t conventional, but remain unambiguous in their context. If his novel, like many generic romances, had one sex scene, he would, I am sure, have been forgiven. But the novel has a half-dozen long sex scenes and a greater number of shorter ones, all cast in unconventional—and corny—metaphors. I believe that is the reason for the award.

Truth be told, it is difficult to write explicit sex without being corny unless the telling is flat. Fifty Shades of Grey, despite critical opprobrium, manages it by being direct without embellishment. Anais Nin (Henry and June) avoids corniness with flat telling and a refusal to repeat herself across numerous sex scenes, often told after the fact. John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first English pornographic masterpiece) uses flat reporting and varies the level of description throughout.

Needing explicitness—adultery is the point of the novel—but eschewing directness—it would clash with the metaphor-laden realism of the rest—Updike sedulously abjures the obvious metaphors and finds others (many others) that are corny because they are so obviously meant to serve explicitness without being obvious. Overt metaphors—turgid tuber, rigid pole, cloying cavern, volcanic orifice—are always corny because they are obvious. There is no irony in them. Updike’s metaphors are rich with literary irony. He was not happy with his award.

Double Review: Richardson’s Pamela vs. Fielding’s Shamela!

Pamela by Samuel Richardson

A 1740 novel credited with being the first fully “character-oriented” novel and the original, English, “novel of manners.” It is an “epistolary novel” told in the form of letters between a daughter and her parents and later, when letters are forbidden her, journal entries. The “point of view” is first person, occasionally slipping into third person, the narrator explaining a few pages on: “so and so told me all of this later…”

Some facts. At the novel’s opening, Pamela is fifteen years old. At its close, she is sixteen. Something less than a year has passed. At twelve, her poor but famously honest and good parents had sent her to work for a wealthy woman who had just passed away when the story opens. A son, twenty-five years old, inherits all the wealth and, being something of a libertine, very much wants a piece of Pamela. Bear in mind the “age of consent” in England in 1740 was twelve!

Pamela is cast as humanity perfected in motive to serve God through her treatment of others—the Christian injunction to love God and his other children on Earth is taken very seriously by her to the point that her only lapse in perspective is fear of not loving God or others well enough. She is the sine qua non of virtue with grace, and also, we are told, exceptionally beautiful. The other point reinforced over and over again is Pamela’s fanatic determination to remain chaste at least until such time (if ever) as she should be married.  

The son (known only as B___ or master throughout) makes several attempts at Pamela, eventually abducting her to a distant property where she is placed in the hands of a cruel housemistress. Her escape attempts are always thwarted. All she wants is to go home to her parents. Mr. B___ cannot believe that she is not being duplicitous for the sake of more and more material wealth that he offers her in exchange for becoming his mistress. Finally, Mr. B___ grows sick of trying and lets her leave. On her way to her parents (we are halfway through the book), Mr. B___ reads her journal (the cruel housemistress, by his orders, having kept the document) and realizes that far from duplicitous, Pamela has been sincere throughout. He sends a fast rider after her with letters begging her to return to him. He loves her (he claims) and will give her everything of his life and wealth, including marriage, which, up to this point, was precluded by her low-born status.

Is this another feint on Mr. B___’s part? Pamela isn’t sure, but she decides to go back to him anyway, and thus begins the second half of the novel in which both she and Mr. B___ become the happiest couple on Earth. The second half of the novel is the perfect complement to the first half. Not only Mr. B___, but the cruel housemistress and all the other servants—who didn’t already love her thanks to her first employment—come to love her. Even the snobish gentry recognize that she might just be the most beautiful and gracious woman in all of England!

Novelists are told to “show, don’t tell.” If you acquire a story by reading a journal, the story might be told, but you, the journal reader, are shown it through the journal’s frame. I think that is the whole point of the length of this novel. We simply could not grasp how extraordinary Pamela is, and the subsequent transformation of everybody (especially Mr. B__) without the detail (and repetition) contained in its inordinate length.

The story’s pacing is consistent throughout. There is no elaborate time management; one day mostly leads to the next. We never lack for detail, and must suspend disbelief that anyone can, by hand with a quill pen, write that much that fast on so little paper (Paper was a luxury item in the eighteenth century) as she is given.

At the beginning, I was intimidated. Did I really want to spend the time reading this? At the end, I was delighted by the story and the portrayal of Pamela (despite her own misgivings, a most spiritual and graceful woman), perhaps the most elaborate—if redundant—single-character portrayal in all of fiction.

So why did I read this? For one thing, I’ve been on a “read the classics” jag for the last year or so, but this novel in particular, because I really wanted to read Henry Fielding’s Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s novel written only a year or so after Pamela’s publication. To best appreciate a spoof, one must know what is being spoofed. But Pamela is seven hundred pages long. Shamela is fifty pages! Oh well.

Shamela by Henry Fielding, 1741

So… Pamela is not the true story! It was commissioned by Mr. B___ (whose real name—revealed by Mr. Fielding—was Booby!) to produce a work complimenting him and his new bride. The real letters and journal were fewer and shorter (which makes more sense, see my comment above) and reveal a young girl, hardly a virgin, professing her innocence to her master for the sole purpose of seducing him into a disadvantageous (for him) marriage so that she might obtain legal access to his wealth! Meanwhile she (her real name being Shamela) has been sleeping with Parson Williams (an important—and. importantly, chaste—main character in Pamela) for some time already, a liaison that continues into her marriage to Booby! 

Fielding’s satire continues the epistolary style even beginning with an exchange of letters between two ministers one of whom lauds the newly published “Pamela” as the epitome of Christian virtue and its just rewards, while his replier tells him that Pamela was ghost written by persons unknown (not wishing to insult Richardson by naming him) and that he, the replier, has the “real” letters and journal!

What I love about Fielding is his bawdy sense of humor, combined with a polished ability to talk about sex (there is a lot of it) through metaphor, innuendo, and double entendre. We learn, for example, that Parson Williams was well endowed, while Booby possessed only a “spindle,” and so on.

Shamela is but a novella, barely fifty pages long. It is funny, but not that funny, and feels rushed (Fielding’s first “novel,” and published barely a year after Pamela). Must one read a seven-hundred-page novel to appreciate the fifty-page farce? Technically, yes, though the two reading tasks are, to be sure, disproportionate. I’m glad, in the end, that I liked Pamela, crazy and perhaps unreal as it may be. 

A year after Fielding published Shamela, he published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, which turns out to be another take-off from Pamela! Less crude, very funny, I review it here.   

Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways: 

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do. 

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working. 

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms! 

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point. 

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!

My Fiction

As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.

Foreign Agent. 2021

Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (our television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. 2022

Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.

Cult of Aten. 2023

Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

LoveMe Inc. 2024

My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!

The Out of Town Buyer (Kindle only)

The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”

The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.

Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.

***

Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.

Book Review: Cult of Aten by Matthew Rapaport

By Wehttam Tropapar, October 2023

Cult of Aten, the highly anticipated capstone novel in the Foreign Agent series is out, and this one is different!

Book one (Foreign Agent) and book two (Foreign Agent the Last Chapter) are closely related. The final setting in the first book (Bangkok), and its characters, carry through the entirety of the second book. The “Cult of Aten” is introduced in the second book where its infrastructure begins to be built, but the novel ends before it is finished and launched.

Book three takes us back to the U.S. where its author, having published the second novel, receives a thumb drive from Bangkok containing the code for an elaborate website along with an image. As with the other novels, Cult of Aten is written in memoir style, this time explicitly as a diary begun in 2028 while Matthew lies in a hospital bed recovering from an assassination attempt–no spoilers here, this fact is noted in the first chapter. The bulk of the novel (everything through Chapter 19 of 22) is Matthew catching the reader up to all that happens from the autumn of 2023 when he launches the Cult of Aten, to his present–in the hospital–in 2028.

Except for five chapters in its middle covering a single [important] week spent in Mexico the pacing of this novel is much faster than the first two. This is necessary because the third novel spans five years compared to two years for the first and only one for the second. It is also consistent with Matthew’s claim (in 2028) that this catching-up was drafted in two weeks from his hospital bed. It is a result of this “catching-up” and explanation that Cult of Aten can be read as a stand-alone novel. Yes, the story is enriched by the first two novels–especially the second–but they aren’t strictly necessary. The reader is not lost without them.

What would a novel from Matthew be without sex? It’s here in plenty, but there is a change, Matthew says a “literary advance” on his part. While still explicit, the sex (with one exception “because it was unusual compared to the rest”) is softened around the edges. The exceptional detail Matthew is otherwise known for is absent, most of the time. Interestingly, this is also consistent with the story’s pacing.

So how does a text written in 2028 come to get published in 2023? Two words: time travel! You’ll just have to read the story!

All in all, in my opinion, this is the best of the three books. I asked Matthew what gave him this idea. What he said was: “The first novel’s insight was ‘what if the Chinese offered to pay me for my opinion.’ The second novel’s was ‘what if there was more than one alien spaceship and the other didn’t crash?’ This novel, the third was ‘what would happen if the Cult of Aten (first invented in novel number two) and the books really took off and became a global phenomenon?’”

What’s left of the real Cult of Aten can be found on Matthew’s WordPress account here: https://ruminations.blog/cult-of-aten