The Search for Stories Neuter and Neutral

A few months ago, Ruth Lerner of Pacific Palisades asked me to recommend 10 works of American fiction for her son, who is sojourning in China.

Because he was allowed only 44 pounds of luggage, he took only Chinese-English dictionaries, reference works and guidebooks.

He asked his mother to send him one paperback American novel a month--books that he could leave behind. He said he wanted the best in American fiction. There was one caveat: The books must not be highly sexual or political. Her son was afraid they might be confiscated.

The reason I have been so long in responding to Mrs. Lerner is that I can’t think of any good American novels that aren’t loaded with sex and politics. What other subjects are there?

My first thought was to recommend books that made me laugh. But most of them were full of sex. Nothing is funnier.

For example, any list of 10 good American novels should include “Comfort Me With Apples” or any other book by Peter De Vries. That most of his sex scenes turn out disastrous doesn’t make them any the less funny.

I thought of recommending “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” by Ernest Hemingway. Every young man ought to read Hemingway. But of course it is loaded with politics, and there’s that scene where Robert Jordan and Maria make love in a sleeping bag.

I thought of “Unknown Man No. 89,” by Elmore Leonard. It’s about two alcoholics who rehabilitate each other, fall in love, and skin a con man who is trying to skin her. No politics, but some very good sex. Out it goes.

I wanted to recommend “The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper,” or any other of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series; but McGee can’t get through a book without bringing about the recovery of some sexually frustrated young woman by personal therapy, applied in bed. Much too sexy for China.

“Gorky Park,” by Martin Cruz Smith, is a gripper, but I’m afraid it won’t do, either. It’s about nothing else but sex and politics. The two seem to be related, in some sinister way.

“Looking for Rachel Wallace,” by Robert B. Parker, is an excellent novel, disguised as a private-eye yarn. It’s full of gratifying dialogue between Spenser, the private eye, and Rachel Wallace, a lesbian-feminist advocate. But the subject matter is sexual politics, which I suppose would be a double whammy in China.

He might get away with “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler. There is a ding-a-ling female in it who tends to take her clothes off at unpropitious moments, but there is no explicit sex. Chandler had a guilt complex about sex. Consequently, his hero, Philip Marlow, almost never gets into bed with the numerous femmes fatales in Chandler’s novels. The politics is strictly local--mostly about corrupt cops.

If he hasn’t read it already, I think the young man ought to read “The New Centurions,” or anything else by Joseph Wambaugh; but, alas, Wambaugh’s books reek of kinky sex, and degeneracy of other kinds. Not for any nation that doesn’t want its people to know what its problems are.

Mrs. Lerner asked her son about Mark Twain, and he told her he had already read “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Well, that leaves “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” which I thought was hilarious when I read it at the age of 12. On the other hand, there is a lot of subtle political satire in “Connecticut Yankee,” although, as I remember, it is free of explicit sex.

It seems to me that Mrs. Lerner’s son has laid down restrictions that eliminate almost every good book. I really don’t know of a good adult novel that isn’t concerned with politics or sex, and usually both.

I thought of recommending “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, which is thought of as a children’s classic. But few books are as loaded with sexual frustrations as “Wizard.” We have a cowardly lion, a tin man and a scarecrow, all symbols of the sexually-dysfunctional male. All, obviously, are pedophiles in love with the adolescent heroine. Hollywood has exploited few more depraved themes than “The Wizard of Oz.”

In good conscience, I’m afraid I can recommend only the Horatio Alger books and the Rover Boys.