Books |
The Mirror in the Well
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Fiction
In 2004, her first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation for first fiction. This was the only prize that Micheline Aharonian Marcom missed that year — Three Apples Fell from Heaven was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and won her a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a signal that she was an extremely promising writer.
In 2005, Micheline Aharonian Marcom won a PEN/USA Award for her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy.
And now here she is with The Mirror in the Well — the most sexually explicit novel I have ever read.
Will awards follow? Only if the judges are fearless.
Oh, I have read more sex in books that are clearly and proudly pornography. But in what’s known as “literary” fiction? No way. Ever.
Because readers of all ages can access this site, I will not quote the book’s language as fully as I’d like. And as for the descriptions of sex — let’s just say no serious female writer I’ve read has ever dared to go this raw, this dirty.
So this is, right on the surface, a disturbing book.
It’s also addictive, like a dream that returns nightly or a wine that tastes so good you can’t stop — or, as in these pages, an affair that reduces your life to what happens in bed with him/her.
If you understand what I’m talking about here — if extreme experience is part of your secret history — this book may seem as if Marcom has somehow gained access to your memory bank.
If you don’t understand — if you have orderly relationships and dreams that hurt no one — this 137-page novel will blow your mind in a different way.
No matter who you are, this is strong adult fare. Consider yourself warned.
The story is simple. An unnamed woman — near 40, with a husband and two young sons — meets a never-to-be-named man. He too is married, also unhappily. Something draws them together; they arrange an encounter.
In the cheap motel, he holds her, nearly naked, against a mottled mirror. She is beautiful in this light, but she doesn’t recognize herself: “something out of a circle of ideas, a blurred picture of eros, and you behind her…”
One sentence later, and we know how it is 18 months later: Her husband has learned about the affair and moved out. But right now Marcom returns us to that first encounter. The woman doesn’t want to do it, and the man is fine with that — he just wants to service her.
She’s been making love since she was 18. But as the minutes go by, each one dedicated solely to her pleasure, “she is aroused beyond the point of return.’ The man and woman will, in time, explore “whips and small pains in bed”, but this — this is the way they seal their bond, each and every time, with him pleasuring her “so that the circuit is completed.”
This sex is rapture, and that opens her up. “Pleasure is the reason to live.” Pleasure destroys time. Pleasure tells her “for what she was born.”
And pleasure unhinges her, because she wants to live there all the time and that’s not possible. She craves a divorce; she wants her husband back. She wants her lover; she wants the blond man at the office, she wants — she doesn’t know what she wants.
The woman is shattered, her dreams twist like kites. On the other hand, she felt something deep and wild in herself — she felt herself as a goddess.
Was it worth the pain?
If you’re not too freaked out by the last sex scene to think, it’s yours to decide.
To buy “The Mirror in the Well” from Amazon.com, click here.
