But, I’m reading, expecting more. When the first person narrator encounters his friend Phillip Dean, a 24-year-old Yale dropout, and Dean discovers his lover Anne-Marie, the narrative slips between first and third; it’s voyeuristic. We know everything Dean and Anne-Marie do in bed. Except, that it seems we only know what Dean feels. Time after time we get descriptions of what Dean’s orgasm feels like: “…he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull.” Anne-Marie seems an insignificance. She seems merely a “cunt.”
There’s that word. The one that made feminists such as Kate Millet rail against Miller. Woman reduced to body part.
Then I realize, I’m not reading the book. I’m reading my version of the book. The critic in me is feminist, then disliking such an outdated sexist book. What I want to know is: What does the woman feel, not just sexually, physically, but what’s it like for her to be in love? It’s a question I’ve wanted to know for a long time. I’ve even asked it. And now I’m trying read that into Salter’s book.
Something happens though, as I read. There’s not a certain passage, but I find myself submitting to the book. I come to know Dean and Anne-Marie as if somehow, I’m part of the love affair, the feast of love. That’s what Salter wants. For the reader to become part of the book, a part of their lives, because Eros is a part of ours. The book is an erotic masterpiece because it touches on the question that always remains of erotic experiece: What do we really want from it?
Is it what Anne-Marie ends up with after Dean dies: the marriage, the children, the walks “together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them"? She ends up "deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.”
Which of course is ironic. We can end up too "deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired," and lose eros, lose the erotic part of ourselves to commonalities, trivialities, to life full and exuberant.
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