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May 12, 2006
Celebrating In America: "What does living mean?"
Michael Eigen's new book "Lust," after his "Estacy" and "Rage," is another slim, unsettling commonplace book of the psychological and the literary, much in the style of Adam Philip's slim, epigrammatic expulsions like "Monogamy" and "Going Sane." Late in the book, Eigen has a celebratory passage about Jim Sheridan's last great fillum: "The movie In America has one sex scene, a beautiful sex scene," Eigen writes. "The husband/father, blindfolded, chases his children, two daughters. A game they love. He thinks of his dead son and forces himself to go on, although there is a hole in his being... His wife notes that he does not chase her, he does not find her... 
The play of desire and its lack, making up for its lack... The atmosphere heightens. Sexual arousal hinges on layers of unconscious meaning. Blind chase, energy, a vulnerable desperation running through childhood quickens desire. She sends her daughters to get ice cream at the nearby store called Heaven. They know what she means. Her husband is the last to know. While he blindly chases, she disrobes... [T]he heavens storm. Lightning, pouring rain, thunderous sound... The movie sets the challenge of linking life with death, the impossible with the real. Can one grown into living? Can one survive life—the shock of death? How? ... What does living mean?" ["Lust," Michael Eigen, Wesleyan, $16.]
Posted by Ray Pride at May 12, 2006 01:04 PM
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