In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

uncomfortable when faced with a sexual situation. In
Infinite Jest
, David Foster Wallace writes: “He had never once had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her.” With another love interest, “his shame at what she might on the other hand perceive as his slimy phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him to avoid her, as well.” Gone the familiar swagger, the straightforward artistic reveling in the sexual act itself. In Kunkel’s version: “Maybe I was going to get lucky, something which, I reminded myself, following her up the stairs to our room and giving her ass a good review, wasn’t always a piece of unmixed luck, and shouldn’t automatically be hoped for any more than feared.”
    Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. Compare Kunkel’s tentative and guilt-ridden masturbation scene in
Indecision
with Roth’s famous onanistic exuberance with apple cores, liver, and candy wrappers in
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Kunkel: “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.” Roth also writes about guilt, of course, but a guilt overridden and swept away, joyously subsumed in the sheer energy of taboo smashing: “How insane whipping out my joint like that! Imagine what would have been had I been caught red-handed! Imagine if I had gone ahead.” In other words, one rarely gets the sense in Roth that he would throw away his penis if he could.
    The literary possibilities of their own ambivalence are what beguile this new generation, rather than anything that takes place in the bedroom. In Michael Chabon’s
Mysteries of Pittsburgh
, a woman in a green leather miniskirt and no underwear reads aloud from
Story of O
, and the protagonist says primly, “I refuse to flog you.” In Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel
The Marriage Plot
, his protagonist revises and corrects his own fantasy to make it less exploitative: “Mitchell felt guilty for fantasizing about his friend’s girlfriend but not guilty enough to stop fantasizing. He didn’t like what this fantasy of Claire on her knees in front of him said about him, so next he imagined himself generously going down on her.”
    For another exploration of guilt and ambivalence, take the following descriptions from Jonathan Franzen’s novel
The Corrections:
“As a seducer, he was hampered by ambivalence.” “He had, of course, been a lousy, anxious lover.” “He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing andpawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using.” And then the entire plot of Franzen’s next novel,
Freedom
, is propelled by the extreme sensitivity of Patty’s husband, Walter, whose relevant flaw is that he is too nice and decent and progressive to be compelling in bed. When Patty met him in college he called himself a feminist, and denounced misogynistic professors and said to her before they slept together, “I know essentially nothing about sex.” In adult life, he blushes when embarrassed, and entertains thoughts like this: “Gender equality, as expressed in the pressure of Lalitha’s neat foot on the gas pedal, made him glad to be alive in the twenty-first century.” Patty marries him even though she is not sexually enthralled by him, and the events of the novel unfold from there. (And then, of course, there are writers like Jonathan Safran Foer who avoid the corruptions of adult sexuality by choosing children and virgins as their protagonists.)
    The same crusading feminist critics who objected to Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual