YEN

Randy teens wallow in depraved sex and poetic epiphanies in this highfalutin pornographic fable.

Eleanor is a smart adolescent farm girl living in a vague rural never-neverland whose wheat fields perpetually undulate in sympathy with her erotic longings. She pines for lumpen farm boy Winchester, but he only has eyes for her friend Jane, the blonde nymphet who is the story's epicenter of perversity. Jane is disdainful of Winchester, but gratifies him sexually, as she does many of the other boys, her teacher, an elderly farmer or two and her dad. The intensely Catholic Eleanor is appalled and fascinated by Jane's exploits, and Jane gradually entices her from voyeurism to participation. The action duly escalates from oral gratification, with frequent vicious biting, to bestiality, necrophilia, sadomasochistic torture and worse. The debaucheries proceed in lurid detail, but wrapped in an ornate verbiage–"The petrified tactility below jabbed just as Jane's golden tendrils softly cascaded the frame of her upturned visage"–that slows down the narrative but doesn’t dispel its tawdriness. Neither are the ruttings much classed-up by being interspersed with murky interludes in which Eleanor and Jane swoonily immerse themselves in nature. ("Her eyes opened for an instant and in the haze, the sky laced with orbs of infinite light, while the grasses twinkled from their aqueous indulgence, their surroundings became as if they were floating in Elysian splendor.") Wells struggles to infuse lush, hallucinatory imagery with a classical prose style, but the self-conscious results–"Lethe's waters gently took from her the association of this reverberating appellative," writes the author, conveying the idea that Eleanor can’t place a name–are overwritten, clunky and pedantic. In the end, the juxtaposition of rank obscenity with dainty diction and learned vocabulary seems less a literary strategy than just another fetish.

A smut-fest that's as pretentious as it is prurient.