He Said, She Said
We asked a man and a woman to review a book about romance written by a man and a woman.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU
A Novel in Confessions
  Julianna Baggott (David Scott) |
By Julianna Baggott and Steve Almond
Algonquin. 304 pp. $23.95
If it's true that men think sex leads to love while women think love leads to sex, this novel is most definitely a man.
John and Jane are two single, thirty-something strangers attending the same Philadelphia wedding. For about seven pages. Then, with a striking lack of authorial foreplay, the two are half-undressed on the floor of a coat closet. They're about to close the deal when John changes his mind. He can't indulge because he thinks he might actually like her, and preemptive sex might get in the way of their future (very female of him). She wants to indulge and fears a relationship (very male of her). His proposal: They retreat to their respective East Coast cities and confess their romantic pasts to each other through letters before going any further.
It's a not-too-believable premise, outfitted with some not-too-believable dialogue. Her: "Look . . . My past is littered with regret, and I'd rather not add you to it. I'd rather not have to fit you into an overcrowded memory." Him: "We'll be like the pioneers, waiting by our windows for the Pony Express. In bonnets."
But it works to set up the rest of the novel, which is a series of his-and-hers short stories, some of which originally appeared in magazines such as Glamour and Sixteen. Each letter tells the tale of a former love affair: how they met, why they were attracted, how it ended. Oh, and how the sex was.
It takes a certain kind of gal to want to hear this level of detail. Do we really need to know he and his "hot Latin girlfriend . . . had rough sex with mirrors all around"? Ick. But Jane herself is sexually rapacious. "The home of my youth," she writes, "is the bodies of boys, sprawled out, adoring, that's the place I was raised." By her own admission, she's not the kind of girl to have girlfriends (unless you count the other woman in a three-way).
Which Brings Me to You is a real pastiche: There are some lovely letters/stories, such as the one in which John falls in love with a cinnamon-scented pastry chef and her precocious 6-year-old daughter; some truly interesting descriptions of sex ("It felt like fishing, like there was casting and reeling and a bobber bobbing"); some raunchiness that I can't quote here; and plenty of witty pre-mating repartee.
At first, it's hard to care about these two and their motley sexual pasts. And the book doesn't quite hang together as a novel. But somehow, as the various lovers come and go, all this screwing around starts adding up to something, maybe even to intimacy. (One point for the male team on the sex-leads-to-love debate.)
To appreciate this book, you have to accept Jane's premise that "you are made up of the details that your mind has chosen to keep." "You've explained to me a love life," she writes to John, "and what I got isn't the story. I got your way of seeing, your way of remembering, your way of telling."
And that's what we get from Baggott and Almond as well. ·
Claudia Deane is a Washington Post staff writer.
