THE SHOEMAKER'S PURSUIT

In this steamy set of interconnected erotic tales, a pair of high heels passes from one woman to another, catalyzing wild sexual adventures.

The story begins in 1952, as Italian footwear designer Paolo DeLuca crafts a pair of superlatively sexy pumps, dubbed la Rampa, for the express purpose of inducing more wiggle in his new girlfriend’s walk. She’s offended when he presents them to her in church, but her mother, Maria Fallarino, finds them fetching and takes Paolo up to the bell tower for oral sex. Paolo’s shoe line conquers the world, but the original pair of shoes embarks on a picaresque journey across decades and continents, provoking each new owner into scandalous misbehavior. Hollywood actor Temple Holliday wears them in an iconic 1960s film scene and then to the Oscar ceremony, where she performs oral sex on a male nominee when the lights go down. Subsequent owners include a North Carolina restaurant worker who, in 1976, has an encounter with a handsome drifter; a lesbian punk rocker in the 1980s who wears them during a session of noisy oral sex that’s recorded and turned into a hit single; and a lap dancer in the 1990s who uses them to stimulate a customer who turns out to be a private detective hired by Paolo to recover the shoes. Most of the book tells the story of Andie Warner, a New York City architect who buys the shoes from a vintage clothing store in 2019 for a Temple Holliday party costume. The 49-year-old is so compelling in the shoes that she attracts the amorous attention of 20-something Trey Maas; their flirting sparks an affair that goes way beyond oral sex, encouraged by her husband.

Beauchamp’s episodic yarns master the classic erotica recipe for success, deftly combining a sense of artiness with tawdriness: “Maria’s ass in black lace slowly rose into view like the harvest moon climbing above Superga, wrapped in ornate vines and whorls of ebony silk.” Some readers will like the tales’ smoldering, well-paced narrative buildups, flirty banter, and obsessive attention to fashion, although the latter occasionally gets a bit too obsessive, and it has a tendency to get a bit bogged down in technical details: “Then the stockings would be glass ironed, dyed, and finally stretched over a leg form and then set with steam by a Heliot steamer.” Others will enjoy the shamelessly lascivious characters, graphic sexual descriptions, and foot fetishism. Over the course of the book, Beauchamp’s richly textured prose is punchy and evocative (“She emerges, swinging open wide the door with a swerve from her hip, and rounds the counter like a MiG-21 banking around the Mây Tào Mountains”), and it’s fully stocked with sharply etched characters that feel like actual people and don’t come across as simply glossy pinups. The end result is a work of crackerjack couples erotica with writing so good that readers won’t be in a hurry to skim along to the next big sex scene.

Entertaining, energized accounts of sex romps with real literary flair.