GIRLS

Power-mad men explain why they thank heaven for little girls.

Plying the choppy waters between Lolita and Penthouse Forum, Kelman’s debut concerns older men with money who like younger women—girls, essentially. He gives us these men’s perspectives in monologues from inside their Master-of-the-Universe minds, and what a grim trip it is. There’s the banker who flies to South Korea on business and orders up a young teenaged hooker for an unexpectedly wonderful time: “You wish you felt terrible, in fact. But you don’t. Instead you feel fucking fantastic. Reborn.” There’s the very important older man driving the expensive sports car and wearing $1,000 pants who picks up a college girl and has sex with her in her dorm room because she’s not his wife. In the most disturbing storyline here, another, very similar, guy who’s staying with his wife at the vacation house of another wealthy couple, starts sleeping with that couple’s teenaged daughter and becomes obsessed with her. Kelman relates all this in archly blank, percussive prose that strives to balance the level of its pornographic detail with the light of ugly reality that occasionally glares through, keeping the whole becoming just a well-written fantasy text for dirty old men. If only there were a good reason for all those quotes from the Iliad that pop up like pretentious speed bumps every few pages. Kelman isn’t writing stories so much here as, it seems, trying to limn the personality of a certain type of power-hungry male. In this context, the expensive clothing and toys, the dominated wife, and the general amoral attitude are as emblematic as the need to posses the young nymphet. Perhaps the author feels a need to toss other material into the mix. So we get not only the Iliad but passages on warfare, etymology, and the battle between the sexes—none of them nearly as illuminating as Kelman seems to think.

Troublesome erotica much less meaningful than it makes itself out to be.