Order NOIR CITY here
(also reviewed)
Order APOSTLE RISING here
Order MR. GLAMOUR here
Order PIQUANT: TALES OF THE MUSTARD MAN here
Order ONE LOST SUMMER here
Order MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS here
He let them become other women in the rooms and the apartments he used to seduce them. He would watch them shake off the roles they played as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and display passions and needs they didn't know existed within them. And he knew how dangerous his gift was, since what he unleashed in his women were all the things the contracts of their marriages held at bay.
I'm a romantic. Not one of these hopeless dudes buying flowers, cooking dinners and spending their paychecks on presents (all right, sometimes I am. But that's beside the point), but I'm one of these guys who see sex as some kind of ultimate adventure. Something I've gotta earn, conquer. I honor it with the same sanctity than other honor Bushido. Therefore, I don't read erotica. At all. Since I'm a long-time Richard Godwin fan though, I've picked up his novel NOIR CITY, which I believed to be a bleak thriller about a love triangle from the title. Ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong. In fact, I might've never been so wrong in my entire life. If there's an obscure genre at the confluence of noir, erotica, historical fiction and sexual tourism, it's on these shelves that you'd find NOIR CITY in a book store.
Paris Tongue is the fortunate child of tragedy. Fathered by a killer and left to fend for himself, Paris inherited money from a rich relative and decided to make a living using his good looks to pleasure young housewives and offer them the chance to feel beautiful and desires for a moment. He drifts from a woman to another and from a city to another trying not to get mixed up in anybody's life, but it's a question of time before Paris' lascivious habits catch up to him and force him to precipitate the short and tumultuous relationship he takes so much pleasure and pride in crafting like objects of art. Keeping the delicate and flowing balance of Paris' life will cause other existences to spin out of control and eventually threaten our lovely protagonist.
The writings of Richard Godwin are often tormented and beautifully problematic. I understand what he tried to do with NOIR CITY though: it's a modern, slightly porn-y spin off the myth of Don Juan. The idea here is striking, yet quite simple: sex in the language of the absolute. People never truly feel at ease with one another, except in the midst of sexual ecstasy. It's the secret of like that Paris stumbled upon, reveals to his conquests in order to forever change them and intoxicate them with his memory, and that nobody else seem to understand. Paris is a bleak, existential Don Juan in his own way.
So yeah, NOIR CITY is conceptually sound. It's the execution that bugged me. When I tell you that it's a borderline erotica novel, I'm not kidding. There are several lascivious and quite graphic sex scenes in the novel. Richard Godwin uses repetition a lot in order to show that all women blur out to Paris and that this selfless need to give women pleasure really is about affirming his identity as a sexual drifter, but it really is like Godwin wrote the same sex scene in different settings over and over again. The woman all tell Paris the same thing, the same sentences are used sometimes. If I was looking to make myself horny, it would've been great, but I thought that it was narratively it became a drag to read after a while.
I don't know what to make of NOIR CITY. I thought it was a clever retelling, but the sheer conceptuality (and the multiplying of the penetration scenes) wore me out. Richard Godwin had been experimenting with sexual themes for a couple years now (since the publication of MR.GLAMOUR, as far as I know), and NOIR CITY felt a little bit like the end of that road, to me. Where can you possibly go after writing something so blunt and yet so evocative? I don't have the answer to that riddle, but Richard Godwin's a talented and fearless author and I'm looking forward to how he'll expand his horizons to new themes and obsessions.
So yeah, NOIR CITY is conceptually sound. It's the execution that bugged me. When I tell you that it's a borderline erotica novel, I'm not kidding. There are several lascivious and quite graphic sex scenes in the novel. Richard Godwin uses repetition a lot in order to show that all women blur out to Paris and that this selfless need to give women pleasure really is about affirming his identity as a sexual drifter, but it really is like Godwin wrote the same sex scene in different settings over and over again. The woman all tell Paris the same thing, the same sentences are used sometimes. If I was looking to make myself horny, it would've been great, but I thought that it was narratively it became a drag to read after a while.
I don't know what to make of NOIR CITY. I thought it was a clever retelling, but the sheer conceptuality (and the multiplying of the penetration scenes) wore me out. Richard Godwin had been experimenting with sexual themes for a couple years now (since the publication of MR.GLAMOUR, as far as I know), and NOIR CITY felt a little bit like the end of that road, to me. Where can you possibly go after writing something so blunt and yet so evocative? I don't have the answer to that riddle, but Richard Godwin's a talented and fearless author and I'm looking forward to how he'll expand his horizons to new themes and obsessions.