Aureole: An Erotic Sequence Book

Mercy -- just choosing a shelf for this magnificent genre- & gender-bender is a task beyond the oversimplifications of agate type! Carole Maso has brought the baroque to American fiction, baroque to break your heart, in a number of splendid fictions, my other favorite among which might be, hmm, THE ART LOVER, perhaps her most Italian. Perhaps. But this may be her most American, in the sense of her most self-inventing & out in the wilds, & anyway who needs a nationality when the subject is sex? "Really f*cking," as she puts it [she doesn't use an asterisk, but I don't want Goodreads to hiccup at my post:]? The syntax works like poetry, & not just because of the broken-line poetry-typography she uses throughout this story sequence, or is it a novella sequence -- or what do you call these episodes, anecdotes, dream-tales we all live w/, as we assemble & reassemble a sex life? Those episodes are Maso's subject in AUREOLE. The title's the penumbra around erectile tissue, yes, like the shards of our orgasms, spiraling away from the shattering pleasure at their center. Each story is a sex story, that is, mostly lesbian but hetero in healthy doses, & all possess some aspect of the chance encounter, the irresistible one-night or -afternoon stand that then rocks out of bounds, just as the form of the prose itself rocks towards poetry, the line-breaks having less to do w/ sentence-structure than w/ rhythm & intensity, w/ the enhancement of image & moment. Not that there's anything precious about this emotion recollected in tranquillity -- that last phrase may be Wordsworth, but the spirit here is more Whitman: urge & urge & urge. I mean that Maso gets down to the glandular tug, including terminology like the one w/ the asterisk above, & the other FCC-forbidden as well (she knows exactly where & when to drop the word "clit"), yet she renders the sighing & heaving & coming through a fine scratch-&-go scrim, she combines indirection & the grind, brilliantly. In the end AUREOLE suggests, what's more, the emotional sweep of sexual sway & its dissolution. By the time we reach its greatest, longest fragment, "Anjou Flying Streamers After," we can, if this literary mind- & body-bending has done its job, experience anew the explosiveness of sexual awakening, & believe again, no matter our age or our distance from virginity. Thanks to literature like this, the next body we brush against may change us for good.