Don Juan in the Village
by Jane DeLynn
Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
First of all, the title is misleading. Although *Don Juan in the Village* is in fact about a lesbian protagonist who has many brief, one-time sexual encounters with many women over the course of what I suppose you could call a picaresque novel since it does involve a lot of traveling, the protagonist (who is never named) is no Don Juan. She's a neurotic, self-absorbed, self-loathing yet paradoxically at the same time self-aggrandizing snob who is incapable of enjoying most of the sex she has because she's too obsessed with herself to connect with another human being. I read one review that painted her as a charming antihero. She's certainly an antihero, but I found her utterly charmless. While she does manage occasionally to display a sense of humor about something--the chapter about the S&M scene in Los Angeles is probably the most successful in this regard--she does not appear to have any sense of humor about herself. She is capable of noticing and commenting on her own shortcomings, but she takes herself too seriously to laugh at them, or even to really critique them. She indicts herself by reporting her own unbelievable behavior, and by giving us access to her running internal monologue, but at the end of the day you get the sense that she's still convinced that it's all the world's fault for not understanding how truly special and gifted she is.
There's a quote on the back jacket from Bret Easton Ellis praising this book to the skies and talking about how it includes "some of the most nakedly honest writing about lust" he's ever come across. My comment on that was, "I think for Bret Easton Ellis, if a book makes life look like a bag of shit that nobody would ever want to open, that's 'nakedly honest.' " And that's about what *Don Juan in the Village* does. All of the narrator's encounters are empty, and most are pretty sordid--which you could forgive to some extent if they were at least vivid and engrossing. Unfortunately, this book contains some of the worst writing about sex that I have ever seen in printed form, largely because the narrator never gets over her obvious discomfort with the female body. She refers to the secretions of her own and her partner's bodies as "gunk" and "goo," for instance, and in the middle of what ought to be a pretty intense description of being fisted by a stranger at a party she introduces phrases like "kind of thing" and "and so on" to describe what the woman is doing to her. There's no description of her own responses to these activities apart from letting us know when she's "wet," when something hurts, and when she's worrying about the risk of infection. The one exception is the time she goes to an S&M bar on ladies' night and allows her friend the dominatrix to talk her into being blindfolded and flogged in front of the other women. In that story, she finally does allow herself to feel something and to describe it in an effective way, and you think, great, she's finally found something that really works for her...and at the end of the story she decides she can never go back because it's just too embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassment, the narrator's obsession with her self-image--and with what other people will think of her--is probably the single most annoying thing about this book; in addition to pretty much killing the narrator's sex life it just makes the reader (this reader, anyway) want to throttle her. In the abovementioned fisting story, for instance, the narrator is lying on the bed with some other women at a party with her eyes closed and feels someone caressing the back of her neck. She's turned on by this until she sneaks a peek at the woman and notices that she's fat. The narrator continues to be turned on by this fat woman, but she is mortified at the thought that anyone else at the party would think that she was the kidn of person who was attracted to fat women, so she decides to pretend that she's asleep through the whole thing. That way, you see, she gets to be aroused but she never has to admit that she allowed this unattractive fat woman to have sex with her. This is what eventually leads to the fisting, which the narrator isn't really sure she wants, but which she can't object to because that would mean admitting that she's conscious.
In an even more pukeworthy story, the narrator is down in Key West on vacation and becomes fixated on a stereotypically attractive blonde bimbo named (I'm not kidding) Cherry, and tries to impress her by telling her she's a writer. Cherry is skeptical when they can't find the narrator's book in the stores--so the narrator gets her partner back home to FedEx a copy of her out-of-print novel to Key West so she can use it to impress this blonde chick (the partner thinks she's giving it to a Hollywood producer). When the blonde chick does finally go home with her the narrator is so wrapped up with the little fantasies she has concocted about nobly sacrificing her life as an intellectual in New York for her beautiful white trash princess (she really does use the term "trash") that she can't do a halfway decent job of making love to Cherry, who eventually walks out in medias res. In the last story, the narrator brings home a butch from the bar but makes her go up the steps to her apartment ahead of her so that nobody will see them and think they're together--because the butch is tremendously unattractive, despite the fact that the narrator is totally turned on by her. It apparently never occurs to this woman that the fact that she's attracted to someone might be an indication that the person is attractive. For her, "attractive" apparently means "someone who other people will think better of you for being able to sleep with."
I haven't even gotten to the parts where she goes traveling to distant countries and trolls the streets looking for, and this is her word, "natives" to have sex with--or the fact that she's got absolutely no problem with paying women to have sex with her as long as they come cheap. Instead, let me say that if you have ever wondered what the opposite of erotica is, *Don Juan in the Village* is the answer. Even if you are feeling frisky when you open this book, a couple chapters will be enough to put you off the whole idea for days. If you're feeling a little tomcatty and you need something to keep you out of trouble, this book will have you too disgusted and depressed to mess around in no time. That is, as far as I can see, the only possible way it could have any redeeming value. Otherwise, it's just an intensely unpleasant voyage to a world full of postmodern nihilistic nastiness.
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