Sex in the Desert

Reading Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (375 pp., New York: Putnam, $4), I kept thinking, somewhat incongruously, of The Kentons, by William Dean Howells. The latter is a mild little novel, by no means Howells’ best, in which the word “love” is first mentioned seriously as between man and woman on page 305. The Kentons were a Midwestern family who lived around the turn of the century, and the plot of the story hinges on the efforts of the old judge and his wife to get their oldest daughter away from the attentions of a boorish newspaperman who insists upon pursuing his prey to New York. The girl is flustered by the boor’s attentions, drawn by the creature and repelled by him at the same moment, but all ends well with a therapeutic trip to Europe and the magical intervention of a shipboard love affair with a clergyman that proves to be the real thing.

The notable thing about Howells’ inoffensive and even prudish little story is that it tells more, basically, about love than Mr. Mailer’s long story of love among the cinema stars in Palm Springs, California—or Desert D’Or, as Mr. Mailer renames the place. What Howells captures is something that has to do with overtone, or aura, or ambiance—all it what you will. The feelings of love are in his story. Mailer, on the other hand, has written the true novel of the Kinseyan outlet. The machinery of sex—and I mean the machinery—is omnipresent in every page. Everybody sleeps with everybody else, and orgasms are as plentiful as blackberries. But nobody really cares for his partner of the month, the week or the moment, even though the to-do and the hoopla of mating is pretty terrific.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Reading Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (375 pp., New York: Putnam, $4), I kept thinking, somewhat incongruously, of The Kentons, by William Dean Howells. The latter is a mild little novel, by no means Howells’ best, in which the word “love” is first mentioned seriously as between man and woman on page 305. The Kentons were a Midwestern family who lived around the turn of the century, and the plot of the story hinges on the efforts of the old judge and his wife to get their oldest daughter away from the attentions of a boorish newspaperman who insists upon pursuing his prey to New York. The girl is flustered by the boor’s attentions, drawn by the creature and repelled by him at the same moment, but all ends well with a therapeutic trip to Europe and the magical intervention of a shipboard love affair with a clergyman that proves to be the real thing.

The notable thing about Howells’ inoffensive and even prudish little story is that it tells more, basically, about love than Mr. Mailer’s long story of love among the cinema stars in Palm Springs, California—or Desert D’Or, as Mr. Mailer renames the place. What Howells captures is something that has to do with overtone, or aura, or ambiance—all it what you will. The feelings of love are in his story. Mailer, on the other hand, has written the true novel of the Kinseyan outlet. The machinery of sex—and I mean the machinery—is omnipresent in every page. Everybody sleeps with everybody else, and orgasms are as plentiful as blackberries. But nobody really cares for his partner of the month, the week or the moment, even though the to-do and the hoopla of mating is pretty terrific.