The Review of Contemporary Fiction

S&M by Jeffrey DeShell
Lance Olsen

Jeffrey DeShell. S&M. FC2, 1997. 231 pp. Paper: $11.95.

In Jeffrey DeShell’s hugely funny, hugely savvy second novel, S&M, a woman photographer named S— has just split with one lesbian lover and shacked up with another, this latter busy composing a novel about an intellectually nebbish narrator, while, in a parallel plot, a male creative-writing grad student named M—, who thinks and reads way too much for his own good, has just split with his heterosexual lover, Monica, a photographer, and begun composing a novel about a pair of lesbian lovers because (outside of what he’s gleaned from dabbling in some gay lit) he knows almost nothing about lesbianism and so is “unencumbered and uninhibited by facts.” All of which is really good plot-stuff in itself, but becomes even better when cast in a series of glistening paragraph-long run-on sentences authored by an extremely self-conscious breathless narrative voice that obsesses over nuance, over trying to say something true about the nature of love, while tending to be able to muster little more than strings of contradictions and logical culs-de-sac, failed thought-forays, like some Beckettian narrator on uppers refracted through a hip urban Barthelmesque sensibility and a good-spiritedly metafictional Federmanian prose. It’s tempting, in fact, to say the real love story here is one between that voice and language itself: its rhythms, its sounds, its spill across the page. Except DeShell’s fiction is more than linguistic rhapsody. It’s also a tender look at the pratfalls, the S&M, called the grammar of human relationships as they transpire in an artsy fin-de-siècle world shot through with an unnerving feeling of sexual fluidity, millennial angst and indecision, and goofy McCarthyesque political correctness that rears its carbuncular head in every chi-chi theme bar and writing workshop where the cynical players already have everything figured out. It’s a world populated, in other words, by a bunch of existential klutzes bent on trying to get on with their lives with a modicum of dignity and, if they’re lucky, maybe some vague sense of who they really are . . . and finding the job virtually impossible. No doubt, S&M asks the reader to do a little work, but the payoff is a rare combination of satiric sparkle, stylistic flair, emotional sweetness, sexual delight, and, finally, an impressively original reading experience. [Lance Olsen]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction S&M by Jeffrey DeShell Lance Olsen Jeffrey DeShell. S&M. FC2, 1997. 231 pp. Paper: $11.95. In Jeffrey DeShell’s hugely funny, hugely savvy second novel, S&M, a woman photographer named S— has just split with one lesbian lover and shacked up with another, this latter busy composing a novel about an intellectually nebbish narrator, while, in a parallel plot, a male creative-writing grad student named M—, who thinks and reads way too much for his own good, has just split with his heterosexual lover, Monica, a photographer, and begun composing a novel about a pair of lesbian lovers because (outside of what he’s gleaned from dabbling in some gay lit) he knows almost nothing about lesbianism and so is “unencumbered and uninhibited by facts.” All of which is really good plot-stuff in itself, but becomes even better when cast in a series of glistening paragraph-long run-on sentences authored by an extremely self-conscious breathless narrative voice that obsesses over nuance, over trying to say something true about the nature of love, while tending to be able to muster little more than strings of contradictions and logical culs-de-sac, failed thought-forays, like some Beckettian narrator on uppers refracted through a hip urban Barthelmesque sensibility and a good-spiritedly metafictional Federmanian prose. It’s tempting, in fact, to say the real love story here is one between that voice and language itself: its rhythms, its sounds, its spill across the page. Except DeShell’s fiction is more than linguistic rhapsody. It’s also a tender look at the pratfalls, the S&M, called the grammar of human relationships as they transpire in an artsy fin-de-siècle world shot through with an unnerving feeling of sexual fluidity, millennial angst and indecision, and goofy McCarthyesque political correctness that rears its carbuncular head in every chi-chi theme bar and writing workshop where the cynical players already have everything figured out. It’s a world populated, in other words, by a bunch of existential klutzes bent on trying to get on with their lives with a modicum of dignity and, if they’re lucky, maybe some vague sense of who they really are . . . and finding the job virtually impossible. No doubt, S&M asks the reader to do a little work, but the payoff is a rare combination of satiric sparkle, stylistic flair, emotional sweetness, sexual delight, and, finally, an impressively original reading experience. [Lance Olsen]

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