With Work by Robert Gluck, Nicholson Baker, Sheila Heti and More
Sex is an integral part of a person’s life, but when it appears in fiction it can sometimes feel hesitant or awkward on the one hand, or risky or provocative, deployed as a demand for attention, on the other. Sex doesn’t often emerge as an extended set-piece, but understanding a character’s desires is usually crucial in understanding who they really are. Not necessarily because the sexual world maps directly onto the social one, but because the similarities, differences or distortions can offer an opportunity to articulate something unexpected. In A Sense of Occasion, I wanted to treat the erotic worlds of each character with the same pragmatism, realism and degree of observation as any other part of their lives, and to do so I returned to the writers whose depictions of sex had most closely held my attention.
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Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck
Gluck’s incarnation of Margery Kempe loves too much and is in total denial about the depth and scale of her relationship with God’s son. But that, at least in part, is what gives her crush such a devout and visionary tenor. Jesus messes her around; he teases her, taunts her, and then has Satan touch her on his behalf, forcing her to come with hellish flames engulfing her thighs. Margery’s story takes place in the fifteenth century, but the novel also follow’s Gluck’s own infatuation with L. in 1990s San Francisco, which has a similar sense of desperation. Gluck writes that “Heaven is the total presence at once of my self and my body,” and it might be that Gluck and Margery’s willingness to really embody their desires—dignity be damned—is what allows them both to access such heightened, even religious, experiences of sex. A book that should be read by anyone looking to find the silver lining in their one-sided affair.
