Elinor Carucci for The New York Times
Baker in his barn, which sometimes serves as a writing space.
by CHARLES McGRATH, New York Times, Published: August 4, 2011
Baker is tall and a little awkward,with size 14 feet that keep getting in his own way. And he is shy and sweet-natured. Talking about sex makes him turn maroon. Yet he is the author of “Vox,” the 1992 phone-sex novel so steamy that Monica Lewinsky gave it as a gift to Bill Clinton. It ends with a woman on one end of the line crying out: “Oh! Nnnnnnnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn!” and climaxing so powerfully that she sees the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Two years later, Baker published “The Fermata,” a sequel of sorts, about a man who has the ability to stop time and uses it to undress women.
Baker’s new novel, “House of Holes,” which comes out this month, has the apt subtitle “A Book of Raunch” and is dirtier than Vox“” and “The Fermata” combined. It’s a series of loosely linked vignettes set in a sexual theme park where the attractions include Masturboats; the Porndecahedron, a 12-screen planetarium showing nonstop blue movies; and the Velvet Room, where the Russian composers Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov use their genitals to give foot massages. One visitor to the House of Holes temporarily surrenders his right arm in exchange for a larger penis, while the arm enjoys a happy sex life of its own.Another voluntarily submits to head detachment and becomes a walking pair of gonads. The book coins dozens of new terms for the male member, like “thundertube,” “seedstick” and the “Malcolm Gladwell,” and near the end there is a sort of Joycean explosion, an “Atlas-shrug shudderation of arrival” that makes a young woman named Shandee “shiver her way through the seven, eight, nine, twelve seconds of worldwide interplanetary flux of orgasmic strobing happy unmatched tired coughing ebbing thrilled spent ecstasy.”
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