It's time for another edition of 'Shelf Pleasuring', in which we revisit the sexiest books we stole off our parents' shelves. Today, Fine Lines proprietrix Lizzie Skurnick writes about 'Kinflicks', Lisa Alther's 1976 spine-teaser.

My family has always been into death. My father, the Major, used to insist on having an ice pick next to his placemat at meals so that he could perform an emergency tracheotomy when one of us strangled on a piece of meat. Even now, by running my index fingers along my collarbones to the indentation where the bones join, I can locate the optimal site for a trachial puncture with the same deftness as a junky a vein.

I am not surprised if you have not heard of Kinflicks. No one I know has heard of Kinflicks. In fact, I think it is entirely likely that 48.2% of sales of Kinflicks in the U.S. are due entirely to my skulking around used bookstores, snatching copies to give to my friends who then read it and don't understand how this horrible travesty could have occurred, them at one time having not heard of Kinflicks.

But why I have heard of Kinflicks, and why possibly all but .03% of you have not, is that I am a sucker for a certain kind of late-70s-to-early-80s narrative that has nothing to do with the floral wreath Molly Ringwald sports when Jake picks her up in his Trans Am in Pretty in Pink and everything to do with the boots Meryl Streep wears while waving goodbye to her son in Kramer versus Kramer. It's an obsession that led me not only to heavy hitters like Nora Ephron (have you read Crazy Salad? Do) and Erica Jong, but to all the works of Rona Jaffe (especially Class Reunion), books like Marilyn French's The Women's Room or Sara Davidson's Loose Change, Alix Kate Shulman's Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen, Larry McMurtry's Moving On, Judy Blume's Wifey, everything, everything, everything by Marge Piercy (I'll take Braided Lives in a pinch) and, of course, all the works from (in my view) the most unjustly unsung author of them all: Lisa Alther.

There's nothing wrong with chick lit (I can often be found reading it) but what I miss when I compare our current mid-list women's fiction compared to this mighty school is scope. Your average chick lit novel manages to cram one or two romances, a few good friends and a day job into some year or two of a story. (One parent or sibling if you're lucky.) But the novels of this period were wont, with Balzacian zest, to take heroines from childhood straight through to a third marriage, with a hefty dose of cheerleading, college, reactionary politicking, dutiful housewifery, conflicted mothering, and adulterous stabs at independence in between. Where the era led, the heroine followed haplessly, gaining little return on the investments in any one identity. So-of course the authors could not limit themselves to one story. If they did-which iteratation of their heroine would they choose?

Kinflick's Ginny Babcock is the ne plus ultra of such shapeshifters, containing, as her college mentor amusedly sniffs, a kind of "protective coloration" that allows her to take on the role required by any group of circumstances. A southern belle, the daughter of a munitions supplier and a genteel SAHW, she rebels first at her upbringing by turning, as a pre-pubescent, to football, then, when she gets her period ("So unprepared was I for this deluge that I assumed I had dislodged some vital organ during football practice the previous afternoon") becomes a flag girl, in service of which she catches the attention of Joe Bob Sparks, the beefy high school football heartthrob.

After a period of madras shirtwaists and class rings, she becomes the paramour of thug Clem Cloyd, drinking rotgut in pencil skirts with a bouffant and eye makeup, until a motorcycle crash gets her sent to the Wellesley-esque Worthley, where she becomes the acolyte of the tweedy Miss Head, discoursing equally dispassionately on Spinoza and cell division. (Keep up! We're not even close!) There, she meets Eddie, a handsome lesbian who strums Dylan in cafes and preaches Power to the People, with whom she winds up first in inner-city Boston, then on a poorly tended commune in Stark's Bog, Vermont, running a family planning clinic while being menaced by snowmobile-driving locals. (Almost done.)

When a tragic accident leads to her being married to one such local, she finds herself thrilled to have a less volatile proscribed role of simply cooking and cleaning ("In short, my married lot was harsh and tediously predictable. I loved it"), then meets a Vietnam deserter, Hawk, whose behavior leads to her getting kicked out of her house at gunpoint and estranged, forever, from her baby daughter, Wendy. As the novel closes, we see her clearing out of her parent's old cabin in a Sisterhood is Powerful T-shirt, a suicide attempt having degenerated "like most of her undertakings...into burlesque" to go, as the author puts it, "where she had no idea."

I've now slotted this as a Shelf Pleasuring, though, as always, on most of my rereads, I realize now that the sex in this novel is the Urkel of tropes, deliberately minor, built for comic relief. (I note the scene in which she loses her virginity in the darkness of her parent's bomb shelter, watching, like St. Theresa, as a lime-green condom descends like a "phosphorescent vision...the size and shape of a small salami" as a prime example.) Ginny in bed, as in life, tends to be divorced from the surroundings though amiably game, ready to jerk a Joe Bob Sparks off into the darkroom sink ("I had hoped to be swept away at a time like this beyond all possible rational objections. It wasn't happening") or hang suspended in her new husband's living room on his quest to make her orgasm ("I don't care what you want. I want you to be happy") with the same morbid forbearance, knowing her half-hearted embrace at controlling her own destiny has likely passed on to her vulva as well.

In Kinflicks, the search for the orgasm is less a holy grail than yet another humiliation visited on a body that is a constant repository for others' desires. Watching her ex-boyfriend's new wife adjust her fake eyelashes and fake breasts in the mirror, Ginny wonders, "What part of her body could she call her own?" Yet she's equally disgusted watching a fellow commune member lick the tears off another woman screaming about her boyfriend in a "Women & Rage" encounter group.

In fact, she's assaulted by the degradation of the human body wherever she looks: her father's missing finger (machine-meets-wedding-ring incident), Clem's destroyed leg (tractor incident), Eddie's missing head (snowmobile incident), a fellow commune members electrocution (vibrator incident), and, worse, her mother's slow death from a blood clotting disorder that leaves her covered with bruises and in a state of constant internal bleeding. What part of any of our bodies can we call our own? she might as well ask. In this novel, the relative inability of the male organ to to have any effect on her at all seems like it might be almost a relief.

Alther constructs the novel in alternating chapters, a first-person Ginny taking us from high school to the present (see above), while the third-person Ginny suffers a visit home to watch her mother die, awash in the detritus of her mainly ignominious past. There's probably no positive way to read that choice: we go through our life convinced we're telling the story, until circumstances force us to admit we've either botched the job or never had it in the first place. And yet, is Ginny any better or worse off than her mother, who grimly observes on her hospital bed that "Her development hadn't mattered since she was a junior at Bryn Mawr"?

Tough to say. Tough to say! Don't ask me! I like chick lit! But, while a complicated relationship with feminism today is often found in the relatively stable form of an online conversation, today, it's nice to know you could once get it with some laughs and lime-green condom, too. More lime-green condom! I'm begging you! Thanks.

• • • • • • 

Fine Lines will return next week! In the meantime, I TALKED about you ladies on C-Span's Book TV when I was discussing Shelf Discovery, a book you should all buy and/or friend on Facebook! I did! Click here to watch. And because it's Shelf Pleasuring, here's where I talk about erections, because of COURSE my first time on TV, that's what I talk about... erections.

Hi all! I was a little burned out—100K words' worth burned, let's say—on YA for a Fine Lines, and my Shelf Pleasuring transmuted itself into a work on the sequel without my doing. But no matter! There is still much more YA to be had. To be updated on the book and to see the cover, you can subscribe to the mailing list, and/or friend me on Facebook as "Shelf Discovery". There will be Plotfinders, there will be vintage scans, there will be giveaways, there will be events and announcements. In a week or two, because setting these things up almost cracked my frail brain.

It is important to begin any conversation about sexism in John Updike's works with the following six words: I did not start this fight.

Okay. Who did? Well, the natural culprit is the author himself, of course, who likely rivals a first-year rotation in Obstetrics & Gynecology in his efforts to comprehensively depict womanity in all our leaking, bloody, flushed, heaving, viscous, gaseous, indolent glory.

But it's not really his fault. The true blame must be placed squarely at the feet of formless claque of literary men of my acquaintance who, after blithely dismissing the bulk of the author's work, nonetheless, CONSISTENTLY, close with the following:

"He does write women really well."

I know. I know. Leaving aside the notion of "writing women" as some singular, definitive Arabesque, How the fuck would they know. (You don't even know the color of my eyes, do you?) Anyway. But I would also, before embarking, like to point out that, unlike these men, I am a huge fan of Updike's work, especially Rabbit is Rich, and appreciate him in all his Biden-like, verbose, dialogue-heavy, be-veined glory.

The Witches of Eastwick, my bedraggled, original copy of which lies before me at this moment, was a book I stole off my parents' shelves and never returned, so bewitched (and bewildered) I was by its odd mixture of cultural commentary and pure sensuality, as if the reader were crunching down on one of the Macadamia nuts Rabbit, to the detriment of his health, liked to let explode in his mouth.

Many books are described as "dreamlike," and this generally refers to a style wherein the author speaks with no affect in the present tense, often asserting some creative interpretation of self. (I am blue. I am broken. I am off-key.) But The Witches of Eastwick, trippy and demented, is actually like a dream. ("So there were these three ladies in this New England town and they became WITCHES, but in this weird way of like, witches NOW. Then there was THE DEVIL and they moved into his house. It was like a mansion. I think his name was Darryl. One of them played the cello...")

In Witches of Eastwick, Updike's position toward his heroines—earthy, observant Alexandra, dreamy, seductive, Sukie, and sharp, intemperate Jane—is basically affectionate, that of a younger sibling who, while awed by the doings of the elder, still maintains embarrassing bits of information that better not be revealed when a certain someone comes to pick her up for the date.

In Widows of Eastwick, that position has dramatically altered. If Updike were an out-of-work drunk, recently ditched bus-stop despot hurling insults at ladies as they passed, I could scarce be more taken aback. Not only is his idea of widow that of someone who suddenly, as Sukie comments, feels "small in the world." But his view of a woman's body seems to have radically altered.

In Witches of Eastwick, Updike's take on the "demimonde of physical intimacy" is sort of amusing, as when Alexandra unsuccessfully tries to get her lover, Joe the Plumber (really!) to finish her off on the last day of her period. ("It's the tail end!" "How about I take a rain check?"). Now, when the women try to raise the cone of power, she is "Fearful, as she bent over, of releasing a gust of rectal smell..." moments later catching "a whiff of her own armpit." Sitting in a circle, three women think about "their nether parts, hairy and odorous and for many Christian centuries unspeakable." Facing a young woman, they are simply "three old ladies, gone brittle and dry in the corruption. They had once been such as she, here in this very town." In Witches, Updike wrote, "The air of Eastwick empowered women." Not anymore.

But okay okay okay. I'm not a 'yoni' person, and, although I submit the "rectal" is taking a bit far, if you're suggesting the great degradation of the human body is an undercurrent of everyone's thoughts, you won't get any argument from me. HOWEVER, unfortunately, this is in stark contrast to the women's reveries about their former lovers (remember, they're lonely, bitter and corrupted, because nobody wants to have sex with widows):

Jane's: "He had a musical touch...under his hands and tongue there was bliss for Jane."

Alexandra's: "Rapturous in lovemaking, he would call her his white cow, mia vacca bianca, taking her from behind...for in that era enlightened women went to some trouble to make themselves always available for sex. She had relished that, the gift of sin and sacrilegious birth control with which she enriched Joe's dull, hard-working, stuck-valve life by crouching passively on her knees and elbows on her creaking bed and letting herself be battered and pumped full from behind."

Sukie's: "...he had introduced her to the body of a young man and a new power relation to sex: she as the instigator, the admirer, the predator, the worshipper. She would crouch naked like a ravenous she-wolf over first Toby's and then Tommy's body, marvelling at the perfect skin, the clean scent, the fat-smoothed interlace of muscles, the beautiful, fresh-furred, unfailingly responsive genitals. They were so beautiful and monstrous, these glossy erect pricks—Toby's circumcised, Tommy's not—that she had to take them into her mouth...pumping out a viscid, ropey, semi-transparent white substance, the ambrosial, eggy-tasting food of a savage goddess, gobs of it, so that it embarrassed the boys to look at her smeared, dazed face as she crouched there, hungry for more."

If I can do anything with this review, it is to raise this question: I am not sure WHAT I or any other woman has ever done to suggest to men that I approach their members with the same reverence and awe I might grant the downy crown of a baby's head. But I hate to break it to Mr. Updike and all of his fine supporters of his "writing women"—it will generally be acknowledged as a truth that in the matter of corruption, ugliness, leaky, hairy, unspeakable emanantions, eruptions, degradations and still more corruption, MEN TAKE THE CAKE. If we have convinced you of anything but, believe me—it's because we were trying to convince ourselves.

I've been wracking my brains to think what item of popular culture has ever acknowledged this, and all I could come up with — heh — is the Sex and the City episode wherein Samantha flees an older lover, repulsed by his flabby white buttocks. (Sorry, young ladies. It awaits you, way sooner than you think.) Sex and the City, of course, is written by a gay man, the only other group with a vested interest in keeping this kind of problem to a minimum. And that brings me to my final point: If Updike REALLY wrote women well, he would know we come in (not on all) fours.

It's time for another edition of 'Shelf Pleasuring', an occasional feature in which we revisit the sexiest books we stole off our parents' shelves when they weren't looking. Today, Fine Lines proprietrix, blogger, NPR book reviewer and filthy-novel-fiend Lizzie Skurnick writes about 'Wifey', Judy Blume's 1978 novel about having your cake...and getting it eaten out, too.

Can someone please explain this five-course, multiple orgasm thing to me? I don't mean this exact second, you can read the review first, but at the end of this exegesis I would like a few people to enter the comments and iterate the exact circumstances under which one would be able to claim one had enjoyed "Breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack." (I myself am not hungry, per se, but, having never been sure if I've personally taken part in the all-day buffet in question, I need to know if I should request a complimentary voucher or something.)

The source of the question in question is one Sandy Schaedal, a housewife in Plainfield, NJ, flush in the middle of late 1960s Jewish suburbia, wherein which the children of hardworking, Depression-era parents are suddenly experiencing all that club memberships, trips to the Bahamas, open marriages, and browned chicken from Elegant but Easy cookbooks can add to the quota of human happiness.

When we encounter Sandy, she's just recovered from a serious bout of classic debilitating housewife hysteria, and is at the end of her rope with her husband, Norm, the upright, uptight owner of a chain of a dry-cleaning stores. Norm is the kind of tidy husband who asks Sandy to keep track of his dog's "sticks" and "wees," likes his (browned) chicken on Wednesdays and his sex on Saturdays, and chooses to retire to his side of their twin beds every night, joined only by one headboard:

One bed for Norman, with cool, crisp sheets, preferably changed twice a week, not that he didn't want fresh ones daily...and one bed for Sandy, where, once a week, on Saturday nights, if she didn't have her period, they did it. A Jewish nyphomaniac. They fucked in her bed, then Norman went to the bedroom to wash his hands and penis, making Sandy feel dirty and ashamed. He'd climb into his own bed then, into his clean, cool sheets, and he'd fall asleep in seconds, never any tossing, turning, sighing. Never any need to cuddle, or laugh quietly with her. Three to five minutes from start to finish. She knew. She's watched the digital bedside clock often enough. Three to five minutes. Then he'd say, "Very nice, did you get your dessert?"

"Yes, thank you, dessert was fine."

....She's learned to come in minutes, seconds if she had to, and she almost always made it twice. No problem there. She almost always got her main course and her dessert. But usually it was a TV dinner and Oreo when she craved scampi and mousse au chocolat.

Conjured up like some priapic avatar of her most unseemly desires, Sandy has of late been haunted by an odd type of ghost, who conforms to his kind only in that he, too, sports a white sheet (hospital variety). Briefly, there is a man who drives up on her lawn with a motorcycle wearing a Stars and Stripes helmet who masturbates on the lawn, then departs with a wave. (Norm's comment after the first incident: "The motorcycle: Did it leave ridges in the lawn?")

Naturally, this cannot stand, but Sandy's life simply as the mother of two children, Jen and Bucky, who are now away at camp, has left room for the kind of whole rampant for over-examination, both mental and physical, that needs to find its outlet somewhere — which it has, in a raging itch that's taken over her nether regions. Asked by her brother-in-law, a gynecologist (no comment), about whether or not it might be psychosomatic, she replies, "I don't think I can discuss it with you, Gordon....I don't think I could discuss the subject at all."

Except, of course, with the reader:

My sex life? Oh, you mean my sex life. Yes. Well. Let's see. Ummmm, if you want to judge it strictly on the basis of orgasms it's fine. Terrific. That is, I masturbate like crazy, Gordon. You wouldn't believe how I masturbate. God, I'm always at it. Driving here, for instance, this morning....driving, get that, in traffic, no less....not, not the Cadillac, Norm took that to work. The Buick...driving the Buick...I hear this song on the radio...from my youth, Gordy, like when I was seventeen or something...Blue velvet, bluer than velvet was the night....it reminds me of Shep....and I get this feeling in my cunt....this really hot feeling....and just a little rubbing with one hand...just a little tickle, tickle on the outside on my clothes...just one-two-three and that's enough...I'm coming and I don't even want to come yet because it feels so good...I want it to last. And guess what, Gordy? I never itch after I come that way. I itch only after Norman. So, you see, it must have something to do with him. Maybe I am allergic to his semen...maybe I'm allergic to his cock...maybe I'm allergic to him!

But Sandy isn't only chafing at Norm, but her good-housewife place in the late-60s culture as a whole, which is erupting into all kind of nasty itchings and burnings, both racial and sexual. Unbeknownst to Norm, a stalwart member of the Young Republicans, Sandy has actually voted for Kennedy, for whom she sits shiveh to Norm's consternation, tossing sheets over the mirrors in the house. ("Jesus Christ, now you're going Orthodox?") When, at the urging of her traditionally good-looking, well-adjusted sister, Myra, the couple joins the area's exclusive Club, Norman immediately joins the Grievance Committee and kills on the tennis court while Sandy struggles through golf lessons, idly fantasizing about Roger, the club's golf pro and only black face on the scene, noting that the only part of the lesson she enjoys is when he stands behind her and wraps his arms around her to show her how to hold the club.

She also has very little in common with Myra's friends, who radiate health and wealth in equal proportions, in contrast with her sickly, uncoordinated, secretly sex-craving self. At one of Myra's parties, meeting her tennis-playing buddies, Sandy gets embroiled in a conversation about moving from increasingly black Plainfield to willfully white Watchung:

Sandy thought she might like Funky, with a bandana tied around her head, loaded down with Indian jewelry, best, until they got into a discussion about Plainfield.

"Plainfield, my God!" Funky said. "I thought Plainfield was all black."

"Not quite."

"You mean not yet! If I were you, I'd get out while the going's good and move up to the Hills....In Watching you could send them to public school. We have only two black families in town and both are professional."

"It's really not a racial thing," Brown said, joining them. "It's more of a socioeconomic thing, don't you think?"

"Yes and no," Funky said. "Yes, in the sense that professional ones tend to think more like us and want what's best for their children. No, in the sense that they're still different no matter how hard you try to pretend they're not. I mean, put one in this room, right now, and suddenly we'd all clam up." She took a cheese puff from the tray offered by Elena, the black maid. "Thank you."

Sandy is no social revolutionary, but she's also not particularly invested in her own upward mobility — and therefore not invested in keeping others down. She's not about to join the Black Panthers — her sense of injustice is far more internal, a mordant irony that she only expresses to herself. (Remembering how the one time Norman tried to give her oral sex he had to gargle with Listerine for a half an hour, she quips to herself, "That's why I douche with vinegar...cunt vinaigrette...to make it more appetizing...you know, like browned chicken.") However, in the days where feminism ("Women's libbers," to Norm, "Dykes who want to be on top") is located only in encounter groups in a Manhattan that may as well be 2000 miles instead of 20 minutes away, Sandy has only her fantasies to rebel with—until they slide, as it were, very easily into reality.

Her first affair is with her brother-in-law, Gordy, and not very much on purpose. At one of Myra's blowout parties, Sandy goes into a room to rest and finds herself assailed by a very drunk Gordy, who is endearingly straightforward: "I've always wanted you, Sandy....always loved your little ass....your cunt....every time I examine you I want it....want to kiss it...to fill it...." Her second is with Shep, the boy she didn't marry because her mother never thought he'd go anywhere. "You can't eat handsome!" Actually, Mother, you can, Sandy thinks, remembering:

Still, she dreamed of Shep. She dreamed of kissing him there and over midwinter vacation had a sudden urge to take him in her mouth. What was she going to do about these disgusting thoughts? Decent people, normal people, didn't do those things...didn't even think about them. Shep was perverted. But she let him do that to her. Just once. And oh, it was so good. Like nothing she had ever experienced. She came over and over, as he licked and kissed and buried his face in her. Until she cried, "Stop...please stop...I can't take any more..."

And then he kissed her face and she tasted herself on him. And she liked it.

Sandy's fantasies—and subsequent affairs—aren't because she's a nymphomaniac, but rather, because she's trying to resolve the two things about Norm she can't reconcile: his liking for the rigid class code of the club, and his liking for an equally rigid sex life, where his irritation with Sandy's needs, his inability to give love, leaves her, appropriately enough, irritated: ("Norman, do you love me?" "I'm here, aren't I?") Gordy, sister-in-law-fucker though he may be, is not a pervert — he's just as depressed with the code of the Club as Sandy is. ("You know something, Sandy, I hate this fucking house, this stupid party.") And though Sandy would like to convince herself that she would have had a very different life with Shep, she finally has to admit that it would have entailed the same things as her life with Norm — the Club, kids, car pools — and their same deadening effects.

The flap copy calls Sandy "a very nice housewife with a very dirty mind," but in fact, she's neither. Sandy, cosseted by a life of leisure that's become a straightjacket, buffeted by fucking on the brain, is very, very normal. "So where did things go wrong, Norm?" she thinks, lying in bed. "So what happened? Comfortable. Safe. We had our babies. We made a life together. But now I'm sick....And I'm so fucking scared!...Oh mother, dammit! Why did you bring me up to think this is what i wanted? And now that I know it's not, what I am I supposed to do about it?"

It would have been very easy to make Norm the enemy here, and, truthfully, the husband who rants about woman's libbers, who tells Sandy she doesn't know how good she has it, then responds to her entreaty that she could get a job with, "Your first duty is to make a home for me and the kids. After that, you want a little part-time job, it's fine with me" is grounds for massive enragement.

But after Sandy gets gonorrhea and has to tell Norman about her affairs, she finds a cache of letters written from an ex-girlfriend in the attic:

She had a sudden desire to call Brenda, to ask her what Norman had really been like way back then. Because she could see now that there must have been another Norman. A Norman who dreamed of becoming a biologist...of saving the world. A Norman who loved intensely. Could that Norman still be locked inside the Norman she knew, just as another Sandy was inside her, struggling to get out?

You bet your ass! In fact, America of 1970 is a nation of Norms, struggling to reconcile their golf shoes with riots in Newark. At age 8, I'd never noticed the epigraph to the book, a quote from Good Times by Peter Joseph. "In terms of affluence," It reads, "America in the 60s reached a stage that other societies can only dream of," it reads. It's no surprise that the mystery masturbator wears a Stars 'n Stripes helmet. Wifey isn't a novel of raunch — it's a novel about two Americas, the old 50s model and the long-haired, 70s edition that suddenly need to resolve Sandy's greatest complaint: "Paying isn't caring, Norman."

But, you know what? Caring is caring, and that's what Norman and Sandy find out they both do. Shattered by Sandy's betrayal, Norm doesn't throw her out but instead makes a surprising offer: "We could get a double bed. I know you've always wanted one." (He also agrees to try oral sex after being told by Sandy "I think you have to develop a taste for it, Norm, like lobster.") Surprisingly, Sandy hasn't gone mad on her bed in a room of yellow wallpaper. She's made several beds, and she's lain — not lied — in every single one. God Bless America.

Wifey [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]
Earlier: The Clan Of The Cave Bear: Where The Wild Things Are

Please, give a warm, wet welcome to Shelf Pleasuring, an occasional feature where we give a looky-loo at the books we stole off your parents' shelves when they weren't looking. For our inaugural column, Fine Lines proprietrix, blogger, NPR book reviewer and filthy-novel-fiend Lizzie Skurnick looks again at Jean M. Auel's 1980 novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, where young Ayla (it's AY-la, not EYE-la, I looked it up) learns that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens do a lot more around the fire than roast aurochs.

Somewhere around my 80th reading of By the Shores of Silver Lake, I halted on a scene that, after waxing rhapsodic on sparkling glass panes wrapped in brown paper and a clean-smelling, yellow pine floor freshly scoured with sand, lingered inordinately on the matter of the new straw ticking for Ma and Pa's bed. The cause of the halt was the revelation that, though it was placed behind a curtain, the bed was crowded in the room with not only the coal stove freshly covered with blacking and the brindle bulldog, Jack, but three daughters all blessed with perfect hearing, crackling on their own straw ticking. By this point in the scene, Ma had sunk, sighing with pleasure, into her new bed and was pronouncing it divine. "Mom," I asked (my Mom was good about stuff like this) "MOM. Do you think they had sex that night?"

"Oh, absolutely!" my mother said. (Told you she was good about stuff like this.)

It's unsurprising that a series that engages so profoundly with the sensual in the ordinary life—butter thickly clotting, fish violently flopping, cotton palpably stiffening—might at some point arouse in the young reader the revelation that its characters were probably clotting, flopping and stiffening along with their visual accoutrement, but obviously, Wilder was unable, for numerous reasons, moral and cultural, to really follow through on this. And that's where authors like Jean M. Auel come in.

The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first of the "Earth's Children" quartet, is the story of Ayla, a four-year-old Homo sapien girl who, after a dreadful earthquake, loses her family and almost dies, until she is rescued by the Neanderthal medicine woman, Iza, one of the Clan of the Cave Bear. On a line-by-line, chapter-by-chapter view, The Clan of the Cave Bear is the pinnacle of dawn-of-mankind porn—leather thongs, bison, chewed roots, cozy fires over the hearth—with a riot of detailed explication that makes the simple butter-churning passages of Wilder look like a phone book. (When you launch with a taxonomy of the different fibers used to absorb baby shit, you win by default immediately.) However, on a large scale, The Clan of the Cave Bear is much more: a novel of a dying breed set up against a new one, but, more important, how gender relations lie at the heart of this changing world.

And Ayla, a gangly, blonde, sky-eyed child stuck with the wrong race, is the avatar for all this tumult. Auel immediately makes us aware of the lowly position of women in the Clan: Iza has to kneel before Brun, the leader—as all women do when approaching a man—to plead her case about keeping the girl. While thinking it over, he ruminates, "But medicine woman or not, she's just a woman. What difference will it make if she's upset?" which pretty much sums up the position of women in the clan, who walk softly and carry sticks to dig roots while the men carry big spears and can beat them, have sex with them or treat them equally, as they choose.

Auel's position on all this is not to condemn entirely, as she explains that the Neanderthals lack of capacity for change, which allows them to retain the memory of the entire race in one person, is also how nature has decided to let them survive. Men hunt because they always hunted, women know roots because they always did, and it's awesome because you don't have to reinvent the wheel — which in fact hasn't been invented at all — every time a new generation is born.

But Ayla upsets this whole apple cart. Apparently, the Others — the Clan's name for the Homo sapiens new on the scene — are different. The Mog-Ur, the great spiritual leader, Iza's brother and eventually recalls how an Other man that lived with them once was different — he liked to talk to men and women, and had great respect for the medicine woman, on par with that for the men. First off, Ayla, mauled by a cave lion, has the totem of that powerful beast, which makes the tribe worry that she can't have children, since "they would fight off the impregnating essence" of a man with a weaker totem. (Plan T!) She quickly surpasses Mog-Ur in simple math when he decides to show her number one day. She sees the men playing with slingshots and learns to hunt, a crime punishable by death to the Clan. And, over and over again, because she has been lucky for the Clan, she is forgiven these crimes and they are incorporated into their lives—to the head-splitting rage of the tribe leader's son, Broud.

BROUD! Omigod, BROUD! There's just no way anyone good is named Broud. Spoiled, swaggering, petulant and, you know, proud, braggart Broud has hated Ayla ever since she stole his thunder at his first hunt ceremony by being given the cave lion totem. The more of a man's rights she is given, the more enraged Broud is — especially as the elders of the Clan respect her increasing worth to the tribe as both a hunter and skilled medicine woman as much as or more as they respect him.

And here's where the sex comes in! I don't have to tell you, all the sexual stuff in The Clan of the Cave Bear is kind of horribs, since Auel, in this first work, hasn't quite yet realized she can have fun with the sex stuff too, as she did in the epic all-Homo sapien 20-page sex scene where Ayla loses her "virginity" (more on that in a sec) to Jondular in Valley of the Horses or all the fur-covered rutting and breast-baring happening in The Mammoth Hunters, where Ayla is torn between Jondular and Ranec, a kind of Paleolithic Obama with ties to both Africa and Asia, insofar as those land-masses were happening. And the ladies with red-tinged feet, who are high slatterns of the temple. ANYWAY!

Most horribly, and most pertinently, Ayla is brought low just as she's reached the crest of her status in the tribe and her sexual development:

The Woman Who Hunts earned the full title during the winter that began her tenth year. Iza felt a private satisfaction and a small sense of relief when she noticed the changes in the girl that heralded the onset of menarche. Ayla's spreading hips and the two bumps swelling her chest, changing the contours of her child's straight body, assured the medicine woman that her unusual daughter was not doomed to a life in permanent childhood after all. Swelling nipples and a light sprinkling of pubic and underarm hair were followed by Ayla's first menstrual flow; the first time the spirit of her totem battled with another.

Ayla understood now that it was unlikely she would ever give birth; her totem was too strong...

Not so fast, Ayla. Unfortunately, babies are not actually made by the battling of random tribe totems, but you're going to figure that out anyway, because you're a Homo sapien and your brain is capable of intuitive leaps based on observable data, but anyway. Broud? You were saying?

He looked around, the down at the woman sitting at his feet, waiting with unruffled composure for him to get on with his rebuke and be on his way. She's worse than ever since she became a Woman, he thought....What can I make her do?....Wait, she's a woman now, isn't she? There's something I can make her do.

Broud gave her a signal, and Ayla's eyes flew open. It was unexpected. Iza told her men only wanted that from women they considered attractive; she knew Broud thought she was ugly....He signaled her again, imperiously, to assume the position so he could relieve his needs, the position for sexual intercourse...

Ayla knew what was expected...Many young girls of the Clan were pierced by pubescent boys who lingered in the limbo of not-yet-men, before their first kill; and occasionally a man, beguiled by a young coquette pleased himself with a not-quite-ripe female...Within a society that indulged in sex as naturally as they breahted, Ayla was still a virgin.

The young woman felt awkward; she knew she must comply, but she was flustered and Broud was enjoying it. He was glad he had thought of it; he had finally broken down her defenses. It excited him to see her so confused and bewildered, and aroused him...

Broud got impatient, pushed her down, and moved aside his wrap exposing his organ, thick and throbbing...She's so ugly, she should be honored, no other man would have her, he thought angrily, grabbing at his wrap to move it out of the way as his need grew....

But as Broud closed in on her, something snapped. She couldn't do it! She just couldn't. Her reason left her. It didn't matter that she was supposed to obey him. She scrambled to her feet and started to run. Broud was too quick for her. He grabbed her, pushed her down, and punched her in the face, cutting her lip with his hard fist. He was beginning to enjoy this. Too many times had he restrained himself when he wanted to beat her, but there was no one to stop him here. And he had justifiable reason—she was disobeying him, actively disobeying him...

She was nearly unconscious when he threw her over on her face, feverishly ripped her wrap aside, and spread her legs. With one hard thrust, he penetrated deeply. She screamed with pain. It added to his pleasure. He lunged again, drawing forth another painful cry, then again, and again. The intensity of his excitement urged him on, rising quickly to unbearable peaks. With a last hard drive that extracted a final agonized scream, he ejected his built up heat.

Well! Smell you, Nancy Drew! That is where Dawn-of-mankind porn slips right into PORN, I guess—which is probably a good 85% of why THIS STUFF IS COMPLETELY ADDICTING. (You don't really get any kinkier than human/Neanderthal sex.) But I do think you can differentiate the books from other fur-wrap-rippers by the fact that The Clan of the Cave Bear is not only about some overheated welter where both the earth and the beings upon it rumble with ecstasy and agony and split on a regular basis. On a fundamental level, it's about sex not for sex's sake but for how it interacts with our lives — how Ayla suffers to keep the baby that results from Broud's raping her and her status as hunter as medicine woman, and how, in the next few novels, she strives to find a partner not only of her own kind, but of her own kind—an equal partner that appreciates Ayla the species and Ayla the woman. As the novel ends, Brun berates Broud for having brought chaos and dishonor to the Clan by his treatment of Ayla: "She was a woman, and she had more courage than you, Broud, more determination, more self-control. She was more man that you are. Ayla should have been the son of my mate." Doesn't quite have the ring of "Like a fish needs a bicycle," but a good Dawn-of-Mankind start nonetheless.

Related: The Clan Of The Cave Bear [Amazon]