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Friends Without Benefits
For The Economist online, I wrote about Ralph Sassone’s debut novel, The Intimates:
By the time we get to know them they’re in their mid-20s: Maize is a reformed “college slut”; Robbie is a romantic idealist. She’s straight and he’s gay. She’s an unpublished writer, he’s an intern at a newspaper. New York is their oyster—picked clean. These are the unsated lives Ralph Sassone has braided into his debut novel, “The Intimates”.
The book is billed as a rare story of a male-female friendship free of sexual tension. Yet “The Intimates” isn’t the dogged exploration of platonic love the book-jacket promises. The plot is too full of sexual misadventures for that. The author spends much of the book describing Abercrombie-like specimens (“muscles ripple”; a “beefy butt” winks; T-shirts invariably cling to the torsos they cover). In Mr Sassone’s rapturous details of still-ripening bodies, there’s something of Tom Wolf’s very sexual 2004 novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons”. The lingering impression is of a story told in a voice we might call “pederast omniscient”.
Read the entire article here.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter
