Books in Brief: Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things

Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things, by Dotson Rader (McKay, 242 pp., $5.95). In his I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore (1969), Mr. Rader wrote: “The experience of violence, at least for me, creates sexual hunger.” Now he reverses the equation and spills out one of those gee but ain’t life a rotten triptype books, lovingly detailing the squalor in everyone’s sex bag—straight, gay, group, mixed, matched, solo—and the inevitable, toujours inevitable, decline from sexual hunger into violence. Rader is of the City of Night-Last Exit to Brooklyn school, but he’s less nauseating than Selby and a better storyteller than Rechy. That’s something, at least. Meat is part novel, part—surprise, surprise—Social Protest. Lots of blather about whites craving sex with Negroes to expiate guilt; an underlying assumption that only a violent shakeup of society can save us from America’s hideousness; original stuff like that. RAT magazine labeled Rader a “sexist pig.” True enough; every woman in Meat is an object. Rader has evidently passed through his male hustling and SDS posturing days and is now settling comfortably into the role of just-sub-thirty grey eminence of the S&M Left. Meat displays considerable talent; but the talent is wasted by and large in a novel genre with which we’ve already been surfeited. One cannot copulate one’s way to Salvation.

DB

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D. J. C. Brudnoy

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Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things, by Dotson Rader (McKay, 242 pp., $5.95). In his I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore (1969), Mr. Rader wrote: “The experience of violence, at least for me, creates sexual hunger.” Now he reverses the equation and spills out one of those gee but ain’t life a rotten triptype books, lovingly detailing the squalor in everyone’s sex bag—straight, gay, group, mixed, matched, solo—and the inevitable, toujours inevitable, decline from sexual hunger into violence. Rader is of the City of Night-Last Exit to Brooklyn school, but he’s less nauseating than Selby and a better storyteller than Rechy. That’s something, at least. Meat is part novel, part—surprise, surprise—Social Protest. Lots of blather about whites craving sex with Negroes to expiate guilt; an underlying assumption that only a violent shakeup of society can save us from America’s hideousness; original stuff like that. RAT magazine labeled Rader a “sexist pig.” True enough; every woman in Meat is an object. Rader has evidently passed through his male hustling and SDS posturing days and is now settling comfortably into the role of just-sub-thirty grey eminence of the S&M Left. Meat displays considerable talent; but the talent is wasted by and large in a novel genre with which we’ve already been surfeited. One cannot copulate one’s way to Salvation.