CARNAL WEAPON

A femme fatale lures a naïve lawyer into a stock swindle in this jaunty Eisenhower-era caper.

As a hotshot young Wall Street mergers-and acquisitions lawyer with a lovely fiancée, Jack Preston is living the American Dream circa 1954. Alas, something is missing from his life–namely sex. The 27-year-old is still a virgin, and he can’t muster much heat for his frigid bride-to-be, who makes it clear he’ll get no more than a kiss on the cheek until their wedding day, which is a year away. Enter bombshell Alice Mercer, who wears tight sweaters and clingy skirts, has a passion for boxing and baseball, and tears Jack’s clothes off whenever they’re alone. Jack never thinks to question her sexual ferocity, even when she ties him up, subjects him to exquisite erotic torments and forces him to blurt out the confidential details of the corporate mergers he’s working on as the price of relief. It’s only after federal investigators probing stock manipulations surrounding said mergers charge him with insider trading that Jack realizes he’s been bamboozled by a woman whose murky past connects her to industrial espionage, Vietnamese communists and the brothels of Hanoi. Hoffmann’s fizzy plot, which culminates in a crackerjack courtroom duel, makes no more sense than is strictly necessary, but the novel works as a canny, exuberant homage to the ’50s. The characters are energized by a new economy of easy affluence, electronics and advertising (financier Joseph P. Kennedy plays an odd but appropriate presiding role), and they navigate a cultural sea change as propriety and sexual repression give way to a tantalizing new ethos of sexual fulfillment. Hoffmann’s overripe sex scenes–“place my lips where it pleases you most, and I will worship you there”–make one long for a bit more sexual repression, but otherwise the well-tuned prose makes Jack’s wising-up an enjoyable romp.

A funny, energetic tale about the war between primness and hedonism.