House of Holes - Nicholson Baker

House of Holes

Nicholson Baker

Simon & Schuster, $25 hardcover, $15 paperback (released this week), 352 pp. 

We are awash in raunch, or at least it sometimes seems like it these days. Even if you're not looking for it, e-mail spam or an unfortunately worded Google search will bring it flooding onto your computer screen. A late-night trawl through the cable channels fetches up a Skinemax softcore fiesta as often as an old Keanu Reeves flick. And if you are looking for it, it seems almost as easy to find as forming the thought, without even leaving your couch. So the idea of Nicholson Baker subtitling his new novel, House of Holes, as A Book of Raunch seems almost hopelessly quaint.

Whether designed as a warning or a selling point or both, Baker's subtitle is nonetheless apt. A slim volume, House of Holes amounts to a series of short chapters featuring recurring characters and their surreal search for sexual fulfillment in the House of Holes, an extradimensional sexual resort/clinic accessed Wonderland-style via sometimes unbidden passage through random real-world portals. In one case, a male character is sucked into the House of Holes through his own urethra. Yes, you read that right. Once there, women (who get in free) and men (who have to pay exorbitantly unless they're particularly good looking) can find usefulness and pleasure (or both) by working in or passing through the Penis Wash. They can enjoy the bucolic beauty of the Garden of the Wholesome Delightful Fuckers, or, for indoor types, the many-screen media overstimulation of the Porndecahedron. Body identity breaks down in unpredictable ways in the House of Holes as patrons undergo "crotchal transfers" or plump up their rumps with the Cheekpump. A young woman named Shandee experiences one of the more sustained physical and emotional relationships in the book with the disembodied arm of a guy named Dave.

These adventures in the House of Holes are told in short bursts that pivot on a mix of mundane reality and the unpredictable uncanny like that found in dreams, or in, well, sexual fantasies. It's tempting, if not necessarily comfortable, to picture Baker riling himself into a state of arousal, letting the crazy pants-down thoughts fly, and taking it out on his keyboard, as ordinary characters have more or less ordinary conversations that blossom into admissions of every sexual thought and want, at which point the malleable reality of the House of Holes/House of Holes accommodates them. (Or doesn't — transgressors can lose, say, an errant finger.) 

Chapters usually end after a mini-climax, so to speak, leading into a new chapter, with a new adventure for different (though often somewhat interchangeable) characters involving some other aspect of the House of Holes and the sometimes unlikely things that excite us as sexual beings.

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