Imagine you've been invited to a dinner party at which one of the guests - a woman, a Parisian intellectual, the editor of Art Press - will be telling tales of cruising the Bois de Boulogne, of sex clubs and orgies, of her years of immersion in anonymous, guilt-free sex. You would be forgiven for assuming that you were in for an interesting evening, writes Molly McCLoskey
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. By Catherine Millet, translated by Adriana Hunter. Serpent's Tail, 186 pp. £12 sterling
What you get in this book, however, is a chronicler more tedious, more self-indulgent, than any dinner party bore you have clapped ears on. What you get is a woman who speaks, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, of her mastery of fellatio, and whose every observation - of anything - is merely a pretext for describing yet another of her bodily secretions. You wonder why she presumes you are interested.
Then, just when you're sure she has run out of scenarios, you realise she has changed the subject: to masturbation. "As I have already begun to disclose the sort of narratives that sustain this activity, it might be interesting if I said something about the modifications they undergo at a given point."
Such is The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the memoir by 54-year-old French art critic Catherine Millet. Published last year in France, the book has sold over 400,000 copies, though it provoked mixed reactions among the French intelligentsia. (Millet's husband has since written his own memoir of their life together - Légendes de Catherine M, which includes, as one journalist put it, "Readers' Wives-style photographs". How wonderful. Perhaps a CD-ROM is on the way.)
The problems with Millet's book are myriad. The incongruity between the tone, a cross between an instruction manual and an academic treatise - "I hope, later in the book, to do justice to the intoxication that overruns me when my mouth is filled by a limp member . . ." - and the intimate subject matter results not in the intellectual clarity Millet is aiming for but rather in something that reads like a pastiche of a genre she has herself just invented. "To recap, I don't like it when a man undresses me with his gaze . . ." To recap?
Second, there's the pseudo-philosophical gloss. An ostensibly theoretical exploration of the Erotics of Space is nothing more than an excuse for Millet to list the places and ways in which she has enjoyed open-air intercourse.
Millet says she used her sexual itinerary to satisfy her intellectual curiosity. But out of that dynamic has come a repetitive and astonishingly one-dimensional account of what is surely - psychologically and sociologically - a fascinating milieu ripe for elucidation.
Millet's book thus represents one of the great missed opportunities of recent publishing, as her "infantile onanism" (which she speaks of as though it were a thing of the past) has prevented her from seeing anything other than herself and the unending procession of "precious appendages" queuing up to penetrate her.
Third problem: the above would not be a problem if it were interestingly rendered. But Millet's brand of narcissism is anything but interesting. One can't but compare her book to Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony. White, a long-time fellow Parisian and a chronicler of gay sex - much of it of the Bois de Boulogne variety - is, like Millet, intensely attentive to his own desires. Unlike Millet, he is equally attentive to what is independent of that desire and he is blessed with a capacity for irony and self-deprecation. Thus, rather than boring readers with lists of his predilections ("Now here is a position I really like . . .", Millet writes), he opens a window on a whole world.
Further, no matter how fleeting the encounter, White manages to render it human. Millet, on the other hand, produces a distinctly deadened prose intended, presumably, to mirror her attitude to sex.
"I am docile not because I like submission . . . but out of indifference to the uses to which we put our bodies." Or, "There was . . . no question of my taking any initiative . . . On the other hand, I was completely available: at all times and in all places, without hesitation or regret, by every one of my bodily orifices and with a totally clear conscience."
BUT this blend of voraciousness and apathy rings false. (Sex isn't something that just happens to you several times a day.) As it turns out, Millet's passivity is mediated. She involves herself with handlers, men who are both her lovers and the procurers of other men for her: "I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man. I would leave it up to the relationship the one had with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them."
Eric, the most inventive "tour operator", organizes convoys, cars of men snaking out into the night towards some secluded spot where Millet will - with her characteristic vacancy and dissociation (her word) from her body - take each man in turn.
"With Eric, I always knew that anyone we met, in whatever circumstances, could, on some imperceptible sign from him, open my thighs and slip in his member . . ."
It is as though Millet, for all her proclaimed freedom - a freedom she defines as that of "not having to choose my own partners" - refuses, ultimately, to assume ownership of her actions. (In a perhaps tellingly postmodern twist, she owns them publicly but not privately.) It's as though she remains caught in that old matrix that permits women to have sex - even lots of it - only if they don't exactly mean to. And it is this attitude of disingenuous passivity that imbues this supposed "manifesto of our times" with a weirdly dated quality.
Millet's book is interesting as a concept; in its execution, it is cringe-inducing. Ever oblivious of the proximity of self-parody, Millet writes: "In the realms of reality . . . the exotic adventures of this speleologist of Parisian car parks can be dealt with in just two paragraphs". She said it.
Molly McCloskey is a fiction writer. Her novella, The Beautiful Changes, was published this year by Lilliput