June 3, 2007
Quivering
Sex, With Consequences
By RANDY KENNEDY
AT least since Ovid, sex has been the theme music in much of Western literature, played at variable volume in all its many keys: sex as fate, as fun, as tedium and emotional torture, as stand-in for religious devotion and, until not that many decades ago, as the fastest way in fiction to lose honor, home and head.

Lately, though, it seems that a slight virginal breeze has been blowing through the worlds of publishing, theater and Hollywood.

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “On Chesil Beach,” a best seller in Britain that will be published here this week, spins the coital clock back to 1962, dissecting in almost clinical detail the wedding night of Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, two English virgins who not only have no idea what they’re doing but cannot even pillow-talk about it, living “in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible,” as the first sentence says. In the fall, Tom Perrotta, the author of “Little Children,” which was made into the popular movie last year, will publish “The Abstinence Teacher,” a novel with almost as much heavy breathing as his previous one, but whose plot turns on a suburb’s battles over the chastity of its youth, with conservative Christianity as the backdrop.

Add to this “Spring Awakening,” the dark, unlikely Broadway musical hit about sexual ignorance and repression in late-19th-century Germany, nominated recently for 11 Tony awards, and it means there’s a lot of imaginary non-sex happening. Or at least a lot of waiting and wondering, longing and thinking, before sex happens on more consequential, even fateful, terms than has been the case in fiction or theater for quite a while.

Many reviewers of Mr. McEwan’s book have noted that to put sex back in its old perch among literature’s most momentous plot elements (alongside truth, money, family, honor and God) the author set his story in 1962. Of course this is the year just before the one that the poet Philip Larkin established sarcastically (but with some reason) in his often-quoted “Annus Mirabilis” as the all-important dividing line:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

In Edward and Florence’s world, Mr. McEwan writes: “The Pill was a rumor in the newspapers, a ridiculous promise, another of those tall tales about America.” They move awkwardly and painfully toward consummation in an “era — it would end later in that famous decade — when to be young was a social encumbrance,” one “for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”

There is something quintessentially British in their troubles. (It’s almost laughable, for example, to imagine a French couple in their place, even in 1962.) And of course, sex with consequences didn’t go away with the pill, in life or in novels, even those peopled with sexual-revolution partisans like the ones created by John Cheever, John Updike and Joan Didion. Then came AIDS, which united sex and death in a more real way than the Victorians ever did, providing the playwright Tony Kushner and others with a powerful metaphor.

But there is a sense that these recent artistic creations are partly a response, maybe partly unconscious, to the current state of sex in our society, where it can often feel like just another form of the cheap entertainment and distraction that now pushes in from all sides. That impression is fed by proliferating cable channels and the Internet, where the leak of the latest celebrity sex video already seems like a weary ritual, not more much momentous than the latest short-lived reality series.

In “The Abstinence Teacher,” Mr. Perrotta pokes a lot of fun at the cadre of Christian hardliners who go after an honest-talking high school sex-ed teacher, Ruth Ramsey. But behind the humor, you can sense the writer’s sympathy with their desire to create more meaning in human relations, even if he disagrees with their methods and ends. And in the person of the abstinence teacher, one JoAnn Marlow — who describes herself as 28, a competitive ballroom dancer who likes Coldplay and riding on her boyfriend’s Harley — he creates a character whose gray constantly peeks out from behind the black-and-white. She has probably had a breast job. But she is a virgin, who tells a student assembly that when she finally has sex, “mark my words, people — it’s going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.”

The same yearning to drag sex back into the foreground in a more meaningful way — if only as a great storytelling device, particularly for its comedic value — is also at work in the movies of Judd Apatow, the creator of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and the new “Knocked Up,” about post-pregnancy reality. The movies’ sexual-references-per-line-of-screenplay ratio easily matches that of the “American Pie” series, but the intentions are worlds apart. As the Times film critic A. O. Scott noted of “Knocked Up,” in a rare observation for any comedy: “The film’s ethical sincerity is rarely in doubt.”

The sociologist Alan Wolfe, who has conducted hundreds of interviews over the last two decades for books about the country’s beliefs and politics, said he saw a reflection in such works of the way people seem to struggle now for a greater sense of societal structure. “They do want to go back to a more conventional sexuality, morality, whatever,” said Mr. Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “But they do not want to go back to an era of repression. So a kind of muddled, middle position is where it seems to me that most Americans are these days.”

Mr. McEwan’s novel, set back in that earlier era, uses the period and its stifling mores not for humorous purposes but for ironic ones, it seems, showing us from the vantage point of the present a kind of loss of innocence impossible in fiction set in the here and now — while at the same time reminding us what that “innocence” really meant.

“There’s always an attraction, I think more for the English novelist than the American, in the opportunities offered by repression: what can’t be said, what won’t be said, what characters can’t even say to themselves,” he said in a recent podcast with The Times Book Review.

It’s certainly not attractive to everyone, especially those who remember well enough what the era felt like. Jane Smiley’s most recent novel, “Ten Days in the Hills,” is also about sex — a whole lot of it, generally the casual kind, described as graphically as Mr. McEwan’s non-sex is described. She said she felt a different impulse as a novelist in today’s society. She wanted to create a group of contemporary characters for whom sex was not meaningless but also not meaningful in an exaggerated, fetishistic way — just another of the ways humans communicate, trying to say those things that can’t be said.

“All the things they do in the book are examples of relating to each other in a more or less loving way,” said Ms. Smiley, 59, born a year after Mr. McEwan. “All of the interactions are equalized.”

“By the time the book was published I’d actually sort of forgotten that there was a lot of sex in it,” she said, laughing. She said she planned to read Mr. McEwan’s book, but added that his was a journey she wanted to take only in fiction: “I wouldn’t go back to 1962 for a hundred million dollars.”