Between covers, under the sheets

A FEW WEEKS before Christmas, I was talking to my mother about my new book. I said, "I'll send you a copy, but I've got to tell you that there's a lot of sex in it."

She was silent for a moment, then she said, "Did you do that for the money?"

I was silent for a moment, and then I said, "Yes."

But I didn't mean it. The truth is that I did it so I wouldn't have to write about the Bush administration for 450 pages.

Besides, does sex really sell? Frankly, I don't know. Nor do I know whether she'll even read the sexy parts of my book; we don't talk about that sort of thing.

While I was writing, I did occasionally think about why I was describing so much more sex than I had in previous books. I thought about pornography (and what exactly falls into that category) as well as about embarrassment, my literary reputation and kindred issues, but I didn't really deal with them.

Then, just as the book was about to be published, it was declared by no less than Mr. John Updike (in a review in the New Yorker) to "set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent."

What was I doing? How did I come to write a book that set such a dubious standard? Well, I was just sitting in my office, drinking Diet Coke, cogitating, chortling, plotting and enjoying myself in private.

Imagine the layers of privacy -- me inside my characters' minds, inside their bedrooms, inside their houses, inside my office, inside my house, up on the hill, in my town -- a long way from any public space. No wonder I wasn't really thinking about how I would feel when it came time to read this stuff aloud.

Yes, I was writing the words "penis," "labia," "erection," "moist," "swelling" and "big," but I wasn't speaking them aloud. I wrote them a lot, and then I rewrote them over and over. I sent them off to my editor; she read them over and over.

And guess what? We got used to them. They lost their shock value.

The night after I read the Updike review in which he quoted some (but by no means all) of my explicitness, though, they regained their shock value, because I suddenly woke up thinking of Charles Dickens. Dickens, I knew, would be horrified. He would see me as one of those old ladies like Mrs. Skewton, in "Dombey and Son," who is all too disgustingly sexual and way past her years of desirability. She is an embarrassment to everyone except herself.