BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Smutty meanderings from French porn diva Reyes (The Butcher, 1995), who here badly overestimates the literary freight her train can pull. This time, the ostensible gimmick at hand is that we are given two novels for the price of one, each relating sometimes identical (and always similar) events, one from the male and one from the female point of view. The action begins at a circus sideshow called the Kingdom of Eros, where a man and a woman meet and begin their tryst—which is itself the center and entirety of the plot. At the end of each chapter, the protagonist is left facing several doors, each corresponding to a subsequent chapter in the narrative, and the reader is thus allowed to alter the direction of the story by choosing which door to enter. Despite such an elaborate—and quickly annoying—narrative device, it is evident from the start that there is no story here to be told, apart from the various hydraulics involved in human coupling. Although we are given some vague rhetoric about ``the Shadow of Myself'' and ``the Ghost of Lost Love,'' no person or event seems to bear the least relation to anyone or anything outside herself, himself, or itself, and what we ultimately seem to find are simply random (if vivid) depictions of people having sex, with nothing to unite them thematically. Erotic vignettes, some quite extraordinary, but not a book in any more rewardingly imaginable sense: raw material thrown haphazardly on the page.