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Bad Sex, Clancy Martin, Tyrant Books, 2015, 182 pp
It is not often that one of the books I receive monthly from my Nervous Breakdown Book Club subscription rubs me the wrong way, but this one did. It was for sure the dud of my May reading.
Brett, a recovering alcoholic, also a writer, breaks out of her happy marriage and her sobriety to embark on a lusty affair with an unsavory man. She know what she is doing is ill-advised and that the man is a cad, but she succumbs to lust and returns to alcohol.
We get to watch her self-destruction. I for one could not look away. Mercifully the book is short. Had it gone on for much longer, I might have thrown it against the wall.
I am always fascinated by descent-into-madness stories, especially if the descending character is female. I don't like to think too hard on what that says about me. Brett, however, was not a convincing female character.
Their affair takes them from one high end resort to another in Latin America. In that regard, it was at about the level of reading several Vanity Fair issues cover to cover. It is supposed to be a novel about adultery but really it is about addiction: to sex, to fear, and to alcohol. The writing is disjointed, not literary in my opinion, and by the end I no longer cared a whit about what happened to Brett.
(Bad Sex is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)
So much for Brett. Too many books, too little time for this one. If one reads too many VFs in a row, they'll need a palate cleanser of a read next!
ReplyDeleteYes! Luckily I got several palate cleansers after this one.
DeleteHmm...guess I won't be adding this one to the old TBR list.
ReplyDeleteNope. I read it for you so you don't have to.
DeleteToo bad this one didn't work out for you, but we get bad ones among the goodies from time to time.
ReplyDeleteI know, right? Still we like to take a chance on a book!
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