That Eros is a rascal of many guises and incredible mischief no one will dispute, but the scholar robust enough to catalogue anything like an exhaustive account of his banditry and carnage has yet to roll up his sleeves and fall to. Since Zola and Freud, the investigation has attracted to the dedicated corps of poets and ironists every discipline of thought, until the nets are finer meshed, the expeditions farther flung, the reports more than our illusions can withstand. Outlaw the bastard!. We have dosed him with hygiene, logged him out in Victorian frills, tamed him with sophistication. No sooner isheina sack, bound and gagged, than you may perceive him at your elbow, to speak politely, plucky as ever. These three novels question the delinquency of Eros and posit instead his good will and our betrayal of it. Mr. Madison Jones comes to his subject with sincerity and anguish; Mr. John Fowles moves us closer to a nightmare of love’s peculiar shapes; and Mr. John Rechy displays a hell of lust so awful that innocence and chastity have rarely been made so delectable or so attractive in the literature of our time.
A Buried Land, by Madison Jones. Viking, $4.95
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