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Book of Raunch
A Review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes
By Steven Axelrod
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House of Holes
A Book of Raunch
By Nicholson Baker
262 pages; Simon & Schuster; $25.
House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s new “Book of Raunch,” as he calls it, is an impish, jaunty circus of sex, a porn film directed by Jacques Tati, a Broadway extravaganza devised by Kenneth Tynan and Julia Taymor – with puppets!
In a world where sex is either furtive, tracked along the deleted search histories of internet porn, crudely commodified in the sterile ardor of beer commercials, or simply forbidden and demonized (abstinence education in school), or else lost in the dray horse drudgery of daily life; where even commercials for sex performance drugs show couples in separate bathtubs, or men alone solving other intractable problems (broken sailboats and mud-locked horse trailers), this book has a revolutionary message: sex is fun, sex is funny, sex is the essence of living and we spurn it at our peril.
Slithering through pin holes and the back of industrial washing machines and any other orifice the physical world provides, the characters in Baker’s book travel from the chilly world of dating and day jobs where sex is rarely even discussed to The House of Holes, a bizarre carnival world where no one talks about anything else. Even the tradesmen are sexual: the ass-infused wooden bowl makers and collectors of wet dream memories