Book Review

Cunt

by Stewart Home

     This novel is called Cunt. The title itself should prevent at least a few people from reading it. In one passage the author, Stewart Home has the narrator fucking a woman in an airplane bathroom on a flight from London to Helsinki. “Then she dropped her jeans and got me to lick her funky twat. It tasted a hell of a lot better than the pre-packaged in-flight meal I’d just eaten. The girl sat down on the toilet bowl and I licked her clit while she took a shit.” If writing like that offends you, then you are an uptight bore and should stay clear away from this wonderful story. If it doesn’t bother you then you are a pervert. Such are the dilemmas presented by Home in this book.

     The plot is simple. David Kelso, a successful author in his mid-thirties travels around, re-fucking every woman he has ever fucked and keeping a journal about his adventures which he will eventually publish as a novel. Along the way, he comments on how he exaggerates the accounts when he writes, taking poetic license and altering details to make it all more readable. He does not just re-fuck all his past women though; he fucks just about every other woman he meets along the way. Without any effort, he gets them all to perform whatever he wishes without any strings attached and not one single STD gets transmitted either. In fact, his sexual partners often seem to just magically appear out of nowhere, begging to suck and fuck his dick. If it sounds pornographic that’s because it is. A lot of the passages read like they were plagiarized from the filthiest of the filthy magazines you find in any bookstore. In fact, they probably were. The scenarios are ridiculously improbable, emotions are non-existent, descriptions are repetitive and leave nothing to the imagination, and the metaphors are often cliched and usually banal even if they are funny; he continuously calls blow jobs “Bill Clintons” for example. But you never really know if this novel is just about the journal Kelso keeps or if it actually is the journal itself. The meta-narrative suspends your ability to decide and reminds us not to take anything said in this book too seriously.

     Then there is a bit more to this than pulp porn fiction. Several passages address literary theory and comment on the state of the publishing industry. David Kelso attends a writer’s conference where he gets confronted by a confused feminist; unwilling to acknowledge the difference between fantasy and reality, she insists a fictional depiction of sex is the same as real sex. Other published writers are portrayed as boring dolts without any imagination. Some of the women Kelso meets want to fuck him so they can be immortalized as characters in his novels. Sometimes the charcters spontaneously and inexplicably gets into theoretical discussions with his partners that sometimes sound like sincere analyses and at other times sound like typical postmodernist pseudo-intellectual psychobabble. Following the play between narrative and meta-narrative, fiction and non-fiction, is like watching a coin being flipped; it spins in such a way that the distinction between heads and tails is blurred.

     Cunt has several subplots that are as thin as eyelashes and extend about as long; no one ever said Stewart Home was going for depth. The deliberate shallowness is like a British two finger salute to the literary world and he not only waves his two fingers in their faces but he jabs them into their eyes too. A gay journalist and conspiracy theorist who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia stalks David Kelso with his pre-op transsexual partner, for instance and the latter half of the book is partially a travel narrative that leads through Scandinavia, Estonia, and some of the more remote regions of northern Scotland. That travel narrative almost reads like serious fiction and we get a blend of highbrow and lowbrow literature, even if the bulk of the book does tend to wallow at the lowest end of the scale. One subplot stands out as commentary on the nature of the interplay between fiction and non-fiction; David Kelso and his sleazy publisher come up with a scheme to invent a fake poet from the punk scene of the late 1970s. Kelso writes poetry and self-publishes it in chapbooks which he clandestinely drops off on the shelves of used book stores and thrift shops. He creates a literary buzz about the poet by buying up all the books with the intention of having his publisher release an anthology of the non-existent poet’s work, all for the sake of making money. By the end of the novel, the poet’s legend has grown so that people claim to know more about him than David Kelso who invented the whole myth to begin with.

     So why is it called Cunt? The title might be a description of the amoral protagonist’s personality. A lot of other characters in the book could just as well be labeled as that. Maybe it refers to Kelso’s prurient preoccupation with dirty, meaningless sex. Or maybe it is directed at you, the reader. After all, what kind of person would see a book called Cunt and think “Now there’s something I really ought to read.” It forces you to consider the relationship between the reader and the text before you even open the cover.

     If there really is any reason to read this unique story, the final chapter is what it is all about. The closing pages take this sickly odyssey to a whole other level of hilarity. 

Home, Stewart. Cunt. The Do-Not Press Limited, London: 1999.