It's hard not to judge Melanie Abrams' recently published debut novel by its cover.
Against a background of sensually rumpled burgundy satin sheets is a head of sensually rumpled blond curls, looking downward, eyes in shadow, betraying no expression. Two pale arms stretch upward, spotlighted so they're nearly white, fists clenched, wrists tied with a dark green sash. To the left, the title swoons in matte gold script: "Playing."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, April 26, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Melanie Abrams: An article in Wednesday's Calendar section about author Melanie Abrams identified the blog written by Susannah Breslin as ReverseCowgirl.com, suggesting that was the Web address. The correct URL is reverse cowgirlblog.blogspot.com/.
Abrams, 35, loves the cover. At her reading at Book Soup earlier this month, she flashed the book suggestively, like a trench-coated peddler of dirty magazines, and it won a titter from the crowd.
"For a first novel, what do you have other than the cover? No one has heard of me," she said two days later over coffee at a shop near her childhood home in Woodland Hills. Eight months pregnant, Abrams wore a demure wrap dress and thick-knit sweater and donned a soft brown bob, looking nothing like the writer of a bondage-spiked book.
As Abrams is first to admit, anyone who expects titillation on every page will be dispirited. Part erotica, part chick or mommy lit, part memoir-mimicking confession of childhood sexuality and trauma, "Playing" may be the perfect storm of marketable genres, written by a woman with literary-fiction ambitions.
"Playing" explores the dark sexual compulsions of Josie, a grad student and live-in nanny who falls for the man her boss has a crush on. By day she's picking up her charge at school and buying groceries, but by night, Josie's bound and beaten by Divesh, a brutish surgeon. Abrams describes their first encounter: "He whipped her with even, steady strokes, a thousand pinpricks caressing her, a million razor-sharp kisses, and she arched her back. . . ." With each session, Josie comes closer to understanding why she wants the whip and what it has to do with the punishments she hungrily imagined suffering as a young girl.
Abrams joins a long line of writers who have tried to satisfy their readers' literary and sexual tastes with graphic detail of not-so-vanilla sex acts. The list includes the men who gave their names to the practices found in "Playing" (the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) and, perhaps most famously, the pseudonymous Pauline Reage, who wrote the 1950s sadomasochistic fairy tale "Story of O."
Crowded field
